In this episode, we sit down with Francesca Trotman, Founder and Managing Director of Love The Oceans, a grassroots marine conservation charity working in Jangamo Bay, Mozambique.
Francesca traces the path from receiving a shark tooth at the London Aquarium on her eighth birthday to witnessing sharks being killed in Mozambican fisheries at nineteen and founding Love The Oceans at twenty-one. That experience forced her to reconsider the simplified conservation narrative she had grown up with, in which fishers are cast as the villains and conservationists as the heroes. The fishers she met were receiving only a tiny fraction of the value generated by the international shark-fin trade. The people and the sharks, she realized, were being exploited by the same system.
That insight became the foundation of Love The Oceansā holistic approach to conservation. More than a decade later, the organizationās work brings together long-term fisheries and coral reef research, megafauna monitoring, turtle protection, ocean literacy, swimming lessons, sustainable fishing, and gender equity. Francesca explains why ecological and human wellbeing cannot be treated as separate problems, and why science only becomes meaningful when it is connected to the lives, knowledge, and leadership of the people who depend on the ocean.
Some topics we cover:
How Francescaās early fascination with sharks became a lifelong commitment to marine conservation
Moving beyond the āconservationists versus fishersā narrative
Love The Oceansā evidence-based, holistic conservation model
Building local capacity through ocean literacy, swimming, and sustainable fishing
Why menstrual health and bodily autonomy are ocean-governance issues
What actually drives long-term behavior change
The challenges of funding grassroots conservation and long-term research
Using drones, bioacoustics, underwater video, and DIVEVOLK smartphone housings
Why conservation success should eventually make an outside NGO unnecessary
Advice for people hoping to build careers or organizations in ocean conservation
Mentioned in This Episode:
Francesca Trotman on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/francesca-trotman-39b143ab/
Love The Oceans:
https://lovetheoceans.org/
Love The Oceans on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/lovetheoceans/
Pascoal, an award-winning short film:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e85GEgFon2s
Peixinho, the story of Bento Armando:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i72QGMyjbMc
Love The Oceansā DIVEVOLK coral-monitoring work:
https://www.divevolkdiving.com/blogs/user-story/love-the-oceans-divevolk-coral-conservation-mozambique
Period. End of Sentence.:
https://media.netflix.com/en/only-on-netflix/81074663
The Outlaw Ocean by Ian Urbina:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/538736/the-outlaw-ocean-by-ian-urbina/
Ocean Anatomy by Julia Rothman, with John Niekrasz:
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/julia-rothman/ocean-anatomy/9781635861600/
Support Love The Oceans:
https://lovetheoceans.org/donate/
If you want to support the podcast or learn what more you can do to help the ocean, visit:
https://www.reef-scuba.org/take-action
Thanks as always to our Producer, Emily Pokou.
A production of REEF Scuba:
https://www.reef-scuba.org/
