Sea Country: Australia’s Indigenous Rangers on the Front Line

While First Nations peoples in Australia have cared for Sea Country for over 60,000 years, communities have long faced barriers to practicing marine stewardship. Sea Country refers to the interconnected marine and coastal environments that hold significance for Indigenous groups.

In 1997, Australia launched the Indigenous Protected Area (IPA) program, enabling Traditional Owners to voluntarily declare and manage their land and sea as protected areas. Today, around 6 million hectares of Australia’s marine environment fall under Sea Country IPAs.

Australia’s investment in traditional custodianship has the potential to serve as a global model for co-managed marine protected areas—an approach that will be critical to achieving the nation’s “30 by 30” conservation target, a commitment to protect and conserve 30% of land and 30% of marine areas by 2030.

Already, Australia’s IPA framework is informing marine management approaches in Canada, Chile, and the United States.

Sea Country IPAs are gaining legitimacy and cultural authority, while actively addressing climate-driven degradation along Australia’s coastline. Yet despite government commitments, many IPAs continue to face systemic underfunding and policy blind spots that risk undermining Australia’s conservation ambitions.

This series of cross-platform features will be produced with SBS (Special Broadcasting Service) Australia's multicultural and multilingual public broadcaster. The series will spotlight the power of combining Indigenous knowledge with contemporary science — often described as the “two-toolbox” approach — in various lPAs across Australia.