TAHITI FADWATCH among the winners of the Rāhui 2026 call for projects

For an association registered in November 2025, this is an important milestone, and a mark of trust that we take seriously.

Rāhui is a call for projects that supports initiatives by associations to preserve the marine environment in French Polynesia. Its 9th edition brings together the Environment Directorate (DIREN), the Marine Resources Directorate (Direction des ressources marines, DRM), Pew Bertarelli Ocean Legacy and the Fédération des associations de protection de l'environnement — Te Ora Naho (FAPE), the federation of environmental protection associations.

The rāhui is a Polynesian practice: an area or a resource is set aside to rest, to give it time to replenish. Marine protected areas (MPAs) pursue the same goal. In both cases, protection rests on a limit that everyone respects.

A drifting fish aggregating device (dFAD), by contrast, knows no limits. It can enter a protected area undetected, drift within it, then strand there.

A study published in June 2026 in the journal Science Advances gives the measure of the problem worldwide. By combining drift trajectories, stranding data and interviews with experts, its authors estimate that drifting FADs have likely interacted with 53% of the global MPA network by area, and that they have stranded in 174 protected areas, which are home to at least 490 at-risk species. The risks identified are wildlife entanglement, plastic pollution and habitat degradation, and the central Pacific is among the documented hotspots. The study is available online: https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.aee6998

French Polynesia is directly concerned. Its entire exclusive economic zone is a managed marine area, Tainui Atea. And we saw it in February, during the survey mission led by the DRM at Makemo and Marutea Nord, in the Tuamotu archipelago: corals caught in the netting of stranded dFADs, on a shoreline where the work carried out two years earlier by the environment ambassadors had become almost invisible.

That is why raising awareness is the first of our four missions, and the condition for the other three. We can only properly protect something if we know what threatens it. A dFAD stranded on an uninhabited motu (islet) remains invisible as long as no one reports it. And we cannot monitor so vast an ocean alone: we need everyone.

We thank the DIREN, the DRM, Pew Bertarelli Ocean Legacy and FAPE — Te Ora Naho for their trust.

Master the drift to better protect the ocean.