June 10, 2026
Oceanographic Magazine
Written by Muturi Kamau, National Network Coordinator for the Kenya Oil and Gas Working Group and Tyson Miller, Executive Director, Earth Insight.
Kenya's coastal contradiction ahead of Ocean Conference
As Kenya hosts the world's leading ocean conference, new data reveals a damning contradiction: every marine protected area and coral reef on its coast sits within a proposed offshore drilling zone.
On Kenya’s northern coast, the streets are too narrow for cars. You walk everywhere, guided by the sound of the ocean a few steps away, past stone buildings that have stood since the 14th century, past fishermen heading out to the same grounds their families have worked for generations.
Sea turtles hatch on these beaches. Mangrove forests line the channels between islands. The Swahili culture that has shaped this archipelago for centuries is inseparable from the water around it.
This is what is at stake as Kenya prepares to host the Our Ocean Conference, one of the most significant gatherings of ocean leaders in the world, while simultaneously moving forward with a licensing round that would open 50 offshore oil and gas blocks along its coast, many of them in the very ecosystems that make Kenya’s ocean extraordinary.
Kenya deserves credit for stepping forward as a host. At the same time, coastal communities and international observers will be asking whether their leadership commitment extends to decisions being made behind closed doors.
New spatial analysis by Earth Insight and global partners shines a spotlight on what is at stake. The data shows that all coral reef and mangrove ecosystems along Kenya’s coast falls within the footprint of the proposed offshore blocks. Every Marine Protected Area. Every Key Biodiversity Area. One hundred percent overlap, across the full length of the coastal belt.
Coral reefs sustain fisheries that feed and employ tens of thousands of Kenyan households. Mangroves buffer coastlines from storms and provide nesting and nursery habitat for fish species that coastal communities depend on entirely. Once lost, these ecosystems do not recover on any timescale meaningful to the people who need them now.
Kenya is not alone in this contradiction.
In Australia, the government ended a four-year pause on offshore petroleum releases in 2025, opening acreage in the Otway Basin where 46% of Marine and Coastal Protected Areas and 67% of Important Marine Mammal Areas now fall within oil and gas risk zones, including critical feeding habitat for the pygmy blue whale. In Indonesia’s West and Southwest Papua, two new offshore blocks were recently awarded in the Coral Triangle, the world’s most biodiverse marine region, placing 15% of its Marine and Coastal Protected Areas within oil and gas risk zones. And in Baja, Mexico, the Gulf of California, a vital ecosystem home to 39% of all marine mammals, there are both signs of risk and promise as a proposed LNG export terminal was recently cancelled, while the Saguaro LNG project still represents a looming risk. The tension between conservation commitments and extraction ambitions is a global problem, and it falls on each nation to choose where it will land.
Kenya is unusually well-positioned to lead the way toward ocean protection. Nearly 90% of its electricity already comes from renewable sources, including geothermal, hydropower, and wind, making it one of the frontrunners in the continent’s clean energy transition. The argument that fossil fuel expansion is an economic necessity is harder to make in Nairobi than almost anywhere else.