Seven countries bordering the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden have just crossed a threshold rarely achieved in environmental diplomacy: an operational and financed joint management of their shared marine spaces. The HESBERSGA initiative, launched on July 1, 2026 under the aegis of UNEP and the regional organization PERSGA, with support from the Global Environment Facility, now covers a significant portion of marine protected areas and coastal habitats. The true test will not be the agreement itself, but what it produces for fishing communities and coastal economies that depend on these waters.

The Essentials

  • Seven riparian states jointly manage a substantial set of marine protected areas in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, a rare regional configuration for waters with shared sovereignty.
  • The HESBERSGA initiative, launched on July 1, 2026, is driven by UNEP and PERSGA with financing from the Global Environment Facility (GEF).
  • The targeted habitats—coral reefs, mangroves, seagrass beds—are simultaneously carbon stocks, nursery zones for fisheries, and natural protections against coastal erosion.
  • The main risk is capture: if access rights to the blue economy are absorbed by already organized industrial actors, local communities will remain spectators to a conservation that does not feed them.
  • Continuity beyond the GEF’s initial financing and measurable evolution of biomass in co-managed zones are the two signals that will indicate whether this framework holds.

A Sea That Connects Seven Sovereignties and a Single Ecosystem

The Red Sea is not an ordinary sea. Wedged between the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa, it combines among the highest surface temperatures in the world, extreme salinity, and yet one of the best-preserved coral reef systems on the planet. Red Sea reefs have shown resistance to thermal bleaching superior to those in the Indo-Pacific, a biological singularity that scientists attribute to long-standing genetic adaptation to thermal fluctuations. These reefs are not merely a natural heritage: they are a productive infrastructure for several million people whose subsistence depends on artisanal fishing.

The problem is that this ecosystem crosses seven sovereignties. Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, Djibouti, Somalia, Sudan, and Egypt share waters whose biological dynamics ignore maritime borders. A fish stock respects no exclusive economic zones. A sheet of plastic pollution dumped from a Yemeni port ends up in Saudi waters. A degraded reef on the Sudanese side compromises the nursery for the entire basin.

Isolated national management of these spaces is structurally insufficient, and all riparian states have known this for a long time.

PERSGA, the regional organization created for this purpose and officially established in September 1995 via the Cairo Declaration, exists precisely to fill this coordination deficit. But for three decades, the organization’s capacities remained limited by discontinuous financing and political conflicts that paralyzed any operational ambition. The HESBERSGA initiative represents a change in scale: for the first time, a joint management mechanism has an institutional framework, financing structured by the GEF, and formal commitments from the seven states on specific perimeters.

Co-managed Spaces of Significant Scale: Concrete Scope

The marine protected areas and coastal habitats concerned are not abstract perimeters. They correspond to ecosystems with measurable functions and well-identified human uses.

The mangroves in the zone are primarily concentrated in Eritrea, which holds 41% of total coverage, and Saudi Arabia, which represents approximately 35%, followed by Yemen. Djibouti has only 0.83 km² of mangroves, the smallest extent in the region. These ecosystems play three roles simultaneously. They store carbon at a density several times higher than terrestrial forests. They protect coasts against erosion and storms, a function that increases in value as sea level rise accelerates. They serve as nursery zones for fish species that feed local artisanal fishing.

Their degradation is directly linked to coastal development decisions: industrial aquaculture, port development, coastal urbanization.

Joint management gives states the means to resist, collectively, the development pressures that each struggles to refuse individually.

Seagrass beds, less visible than reefs or mangroves, are perhaps the most underestimated habitats in the zone. They constitute the food base for dugongs, marine mammals of which the Red Sea shelters a significant population, and sea turtles. They filter excess nutrients and contribute to the water transparency required by coral reefs. Their disappearance has accelerated over the past twenty years due to the combined effects of coastal pollution and chaotic anchoring of recreational and commercial vessels.

The joint management framework focuses on shared surveillance protocols, databases accessible to all seven states, and alert mechanisms in case of degrading events—oil spills, coral bleaching episodes, localized overfishing. Operational coordination, if maintained, transforms the diagnosis of a transboundary problem into a collective response, something seven national agencies acting in parallel cannot accomplish.

Coastal Communities, A Sine Qua Non Condition

Marine conservation has a fraught history. In several regions of the world, the creation of protected areas has expelled fishing communities from zones they had exploited for generations, without compensation, without economic alternatives, with the only result being continued degradation by industrial actors better equipped to circumvent rules. This trajectory has a name in academic literature: conservation displacement. It is documented in East Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the Caribbean.

The Red Sea is exposed to this scenario. The coastal communities of the riparian states, Yemenis first and foremost, but also Eritreans, Djiboutians, Somalis, live to a significant extent from artisanal fishing whose sustainability depends precisely on the habitats the program intends to protect. The objective is to make them direct beneficiaries of conservation. Several mechanisms exist to achieve this: preferential use rights in co-managed zones, revenue-sharing from diving tourism and observation, paid community guardianship programs, priority access to restored fisheries.

The HESBERSGA initiative explicitly mentions coastal communities among its intended beneficiaries. But the distance between a mention in a program document and actually distributed revenue is long and marked by institutional obstacles. Industrial actors—distant fishing fleets under flags of convenience, capitalized tourism operators, offshore aquaculture projects—are structurally better equipped to position themselves on access rights once a regulatory framework is established. Their capacity to navigate governance mechanisms exceeds that of local fishing cooperatives. Without explicit revenue-sharing mechanisms, the risk of capture is real.

The mapping of stakeholders in European conservation programs shows that prior identification of local users conditions restoration effectiveness. The Red Sea is not Europe, but the methodological lesson applies: habitats are only restored sustainably if the populations that depend on them have an interest in their maintenance.

An Institutional Architecture Above a Fractured Region

Speaking of coordination between Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Eritrea, Somalia, and Djibouti without naming the region’s political instability would be naive. Yemen has been at war since 2015. Somalia is barely emerging from a decade of institutional deterioration. Eritrea maintains among Africa’s most closed external relations. The cohesion of the seven in a common governance mechanism is a bet on duration, not an achievement.

What gives the PERSGA framework its potential resilience is precisely its anchoring in technical cooperation rather than political cooperation. States that share seagrass surveillance protocols and species databases do not need to agree on their terrestrial borders to do so. Functional coordination on concrete objects—a reef surveillance network, shared alerts on spills, a common registry of fishing vessels operating in protected zones—can survive diplomatic turbulences that high-level political agreements would not cross. The Baltic Sea showed that environmental cooperation can persist between states with strained relations: exchanges of water quality data never ceased, even during periods of friction between riparians.

GEF financing is another structuring factor. It creates an external results constraint that obliges member states to maintain minimum coordination to continue benefiting from resources. The risk is inverted: once initial financing is exhausted, the question of sustainability will arise acutely. Regional maritime cooperation programs that have endured over time, such as OSPAR in the north-east Atlantic, have all developed their own financing mechanisms, disconnected from dependence on a single funder. PERSGA is not yet there.

The Next Ten Years Will Tell If This Bet Holds

The period 2026-2036 will be decisive. Two trajectories are emerging, and intermediate signals will allow us to distinguish them.

In the first, the seven states maintain their coordination beyond the GEF’s initial financing cycle. Data from habitat surveillance, collected and shared jointly, allow observation of biomass reconstitution in zones where fishing pressure has been regulated. Coastal communities access revenues derived from conservation—guardianship, ecotourism, regenerated fisheries—that give them a direct interest in maintaining the framework. In this scenario, the blue economy is not an abstract concept: it is a source of revenue distributed to thousands of households whose alternatives are limited. PERSGA’s institutional cohesion is thus strengthened, because concrete beneficiaries politically defend its continuity.

In the second trajectory, the framework holds on paper but empties of substance in practice. Access rights to protected zones are progressively captured by better-organized operators—industrial fleets under derogatory regimes, tourism consortiums backed by Gulf investors who, as their economic diversification strategy shows, seek to valorize the region’s resources. Local communities, lacking explicit protective mechanisms, find themselves excluded from benefits while suffering usage constraints. Protection remains nominal: habitats do not reconstruct because diffuse pressures—rural pollution, drifting nets, unregulated anchoring—continue without anyone being charged to address them locally.

Both scenarios start from the same point of departure but do not have the same probability. What differentiates them depends on institutional design choices: are revenue-sharing mechanisms defined before or after access rights are granted, are local communities integrated into PERSGA’s operational governance or only mentioned in framework documents, and do habitat surveillance protocols allow artisanal fishers to verify themselves the state of the zones they frequent.

This last point is perhaps the most decisive. Surveillance data, the real state of reefs, the density of seagrass beds, the biomass of fish stocks in co-managed zones, is simultaneously the program’s piloting tool and proof of its results for communities. A surveillance system whose data are accessible to local fishers, coastal associations, and regional academic institutions creates a collective responsibility that an international funder’s annual report cannot replace. Marine conservation programs in Indonesia and the Philippines have shown that community appropriation of surveillance data transforms inhabitants into active guardians of habitats rather than subjects of externally imposed regulation.

Regional Governance as a Bet on Sustainability

The July 2026 agreement leaves open the question of the solidity of a cooperation architecture over waters that also serve as a passage for approximately 12 to 15% of global maritime commerce, with some estimates reaching 17%.

The Red Sea is simultaneously an ecosystem, a commercial thoroughfare, a zone of tension between militaries present in numbers, and a transit space for Gulf hydrocarbons. The pressure on its seabeds and coasts is industrial, not merely local. Accidental oil spills, supertanker anchoring on reefs, and diffuse pollution from commercial ports are permanent risks that marine protected area management cannot absorb alone.

The HESBERSGA framework is a conservation framework, not a maritime commerce regulation framework. The two are distinct in their mandates and instruments. But coastal habitat degradation is partly produced by activities that fall under the International Maritime Organization and national navigation regulations, not PERSGA. Coordination that does not address these sources of external pressure will have limited effects on the most exposed coastal habitats, regardless of the quality of its internal governance.

In the years ahead, PERSGA will need to become a credible interlocutor in the forums that regulate these pressures, establishing itself as a regional voice on the conditions for exploiting a sea on which all riparians and users depend.

Sources

  1. UNEP and PERSGA, HESBERSGA Initiative, press release of July 1, 2026
  2. PERSGA, Regional Organization for the Conservation of the Environment of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden (persga.org)
  3. Global Environment Facility (GEF), Regional Marine Conservation Program
  4. Official UNEP Press Release – HESBERSGA Launch (July 1, 2026)
  5. GEF Project Sheet No. 11050 – HESBERSGA
  6. PERSGA – Official Website (Overall Info)
  7. OECD/ITF – Red Sea Crisis: Impacts on Global Shipping
  8. ScienceDirect – Mangrove Distribution Red Sea (2022)
  9. Frontiers in Marine Science – Red Sea Coral Reef (2020)