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With one month left in office, President Biden’s approval rating is hitting a new low.

Biden stands at 34% approval and 66% disapproval in a Marquette Law School national poll conducted Dec. 2-11 and released on Wednesday.

That is down four percentage points from October and the lowest approval for Biden in Marquette Law School polling since the president took over in the White House four years ago.

The president’s approval stands in the mid-30s to low-40s in the latest national surveys, including the most recent Fox News national poll, where Biden stands at 41% approval.

Biden’s approval rating hovered in the low to mid 50s during his first six months in the White House. However, the president’s numbers started sagging in August 2021 in the wake of Biden’s much-criticized handling of the turbulent U.S. exit from Afghanistan and following a surge in COVID-19 cases that summer, mainly among unvaccinated people.

The plunge in the president’s approval was also fueled by soaring inflation – which started spiking in the summer of 2021 and remains to date a major pocketbook concern with Americans – and the surge of migrants trying to cross into the U.S. along the southern border with Mexico. 

President-elect Donald Trump ended his first term in office at 47% approval, according to Fox News polling from four years ago.

The new Marquette survey indicates that 53% of adults nationwide say they approve of the way Trump handled his job during his first term in the White House (2017-2021), a three point increase from their October poll. 

‘This is Trump’s highest approval rating since March, when this question of retrospective approval was first asked in the Marquette Law School Poll’s national surveys,’ the survey’s release highlights.

The survey also indicates the public’s divided on Trump’s Cabinet appointments for his second administration, some of which have sparked controversy.

Forty-nine percent of respondents approved of Trump’s handling of cabinet appointments, with 51% disapproving.

According to the Fox News poll, which was conducted Dec. 6-9, 47% approved of the job Trump is doing on picking his cabinet, with 50% giving a thumbs down.

Trump’s favorable rating stands at 49% favorable and 50% unfavorable in the Marquette survey, his highest in his post-first administration period.

The president stands at 37% favorable and 62% unfavorable.

Vice President Kamala Harris has a favorable rating of 41% and an unfavorable rating of 57% in the new poll. That is a decline from 45% favorable and 51% unfavorable in the October poll, when Harris was the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee.

Vice President-elect Sen. JD Vance has 35% favorable and 47% unfavorable rating in the new survey.

The Marquette Law School poll has an overall sampling error of plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.

This post appeared first on FOX NEWS

The returning head of the House Republican campaign committee says President-elect Trump’s convincing 2024 White House victory gives the GOP plenty of home field advantage as the party aims to defend its razor-thin majority in the 2026 midterm elections.

‘The battlefield is really laying out to our advantage. There are 14 Democrats who won seats also carried by Donald Trump. There are only three Republicans in seats that were carried by Kamala Harris. So that tells me we’re going to be on offense,’ National Republican Congressional Committee chair Rep. Richard Hudson emphasized in a recent Fox News Digital interview.

Trump carried all seven crucial battleground states and, for the first time in three presidential elections, won the national popular vote as he defeated Vice President Harris last month.

The Republicans also flipped control of the Senate from the Democrats, and even though they had a net loss of two seats in the 435-member House, they’ll hold a fragile 220-215 majority when the new Congress convenes next month.

Eight years ago, when Trump first won the White House and the GOP held onto their House majority, Democrats targeted roughly two-dozen Republicans in the 2018 midterms in districts Trump lost in the 2016 election.

The Democrats, in a blue-wave election, were successful in flipping the House majority. 

Fast-forward eight years, and it’s a different story, as this time Republicans will be defending seats on friendly turf in districts that the president-elect carried.

‘There’s a whole lot more opportunity for us to go on offense,’ Hudson, who’s represented a congressional district in central North Carolina for a dozen years, touted.

Hudson also made the case that House Republicans who will once again be targeted by the Democrats in the upcoming election cycle are ‘really battle tested. I mean, they’re folks who’ve been through the fire before. They’ve gone through several cycles now with millions of dollars spent against them.’

‘They’ve been able to succeed because they work very hard in their districts. They’ve established very strong brands, as you know, people who know how to get things done and how to deliver for their community,’ he emphasized. ‘The Republicans who are in tough seats are our best candidates.’

The three House Republicans who are in districts that Harris carried last month are Reps. Don Bacon of Nebraska, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, and Mike Lawler of New York.

But there will be a big difference in 2026: Trump, who helped drive low propensity voters to the polls this year, won’t be on the ballot in the 2026 midterms. 

‘I certainly would rather have him on the ballot because he turns out voters that don’t come out for other candidates,’ Hudson acknowledged.

But he argued, ‘If you look at the way this race is shaping up, we campaigned on a key set of issues of things that we promised we would deliver. If we deliver those things and have Donald Trump there with us campaigning with our candidates, I believe we can drive out a higher percentage of those voters than we have in midterms in the past.’

Hudson said Trump ‘was a great partner’ with House Republicans this year and will be again in the upcoming election cycle.

‘[Trump] cares deeply about having a House majority because he understands that a Democrat House majority means his agenda comes to a grinding halt. And so he’s been very engaged, was a very good partner for us this last election, and I anticipate that continuing.’

Hudson, who is returning for a second straight cycle chairing the NRCC, said that at the top of his committee to-do list are candidate recruitment and fundraising.

‘I mean, first thing, we’ve got to go out and recruit candidates. You know, candidate quality matters. And then we’ve got to go raise the money. And so I’ll be on the road and be out there helping our incumbents. But I’m looking forward to it,’ he emphasized.

Fox News’ Emma Woodhead contributed to this report

Editors note: Fox News Digital also interviewed Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Rep. Suzan DelBene of Washington. That report will be posted on Friday.

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: Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, the leader of the Senate Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Caucus, is hoping to take on the centralization of the federal workforce in the Washington, D.C., area with a new bill that would relocate nearly a third of workers. 

Ernst is leading a bill, titled the ‘Decentralizing and Re-organizing Agency Infrastructure Nationwide To Harness Efficient Services, Workforce Administration, and Management Practices Act,’ or DRAIN THE SWAMP. 

The measure would authorize the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to relocate 30% of federal agency staff to places other than the metropolitan area surrounding Washington, D.C. 

Additionally, the rest of the federal workers remaining around the capital would be required to work in person 100% of the time. 

Under her bill, the OMB would further be directed to work to sell the unnecessary office space created by the relocations. 

‘My investigations have exposed how bureaucrats have been doing just about everything besides their job during the workday,’ Ernst said in a statement ‘Federal employees have shown they don’t want to work in Washington, and in the Christmas spirit, I am making their wish come true. Instead of keeping them bogged down in the swamp, I’m working to get bureaucrats beyond the D.C. beltway to remind public servants who they work for.’

‘In addition to improving government service for all Americans, we can give taxpayers an extra Christmas gift by selling off unused and expensive office buildings.’

Ernst has long been investigating federal government agencies and programs and what she deems as waste. With Donald Trump’s announcement of DOGE ahead of his second administration, the Iowa Republican appears ready to hit the ground running with specific ideas already laid out for the president-elect. 

Companion legislation is being introduced in the House by Rep. Aaron Bean, R-Fla., who is a co-leader of the lower chamber’s DOGE caucus. 

‘The swamp is thick and deep here in Crazy Town, and I’m here to drain it. It is time to remind Washington that our duty is to serve the American people. I’m proud to join Senator Ernst to ensure the government works for the people, not the other way around,’ he said in a statement. 

In November, Trump announced that billionaire Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy would lead DOGE, a proposed advisory board tasked with eliminating government waste.

‘Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies – Essential to the ‘Save America’ Movement,’ he wrote in a statement at the time. 

Afterward, caucuses were formed in both the House and Senate, led by Reps. Aaron Bean, R-Fla., and Pete Sessions, R-Texas, and Ernst and Blake Moore, R-Utah, respectively. 

Republicans in both chambers have already started rolling out a slate of bills aimed at fulfilling the mission of DOGE. 

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House GOP leaders appear to be searching for a backup plan after an initial bipartisan deal to avoid a partial government shutdown on Friday was buried in an avalanche of conservative opposition.

The legislation angered conservatives in both the House and Senate, as well as President-elect Trump’s pick to co-chair his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk.

As Musk called for lawmakers who supported the bill to lose their seats, Trump’s presidential transition team released an official joint statement by Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance opposing the initial iteration of the deal.

The bill was expected to get a vote sometime Wednesday afternoon, but a planned round of late afternoon votes was canceled. Instead, senior Republicans are huddling in the speaker’s office to chart a path forward, less than 24 hours after the legislation was unveiled.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., told reporters while leaving Johnson’s office in the early evening, ‘There will be a new CR likely tomorrow. They are negotiating right now. But there will be no votes this evening.’

Rep. Andy Barr, R-Ky., told reporters a short while later he anticipated a ‘skinny’ CR without disaster aid or agricultural subsidies.

It came after GOP critics of the spending bill spent much of the day attacking Johnson’s handling of the issue.

The 1,547-page bill is a short-term extension of fiscal year (FY) 2024 government funding levels, aimed at giving lawmakers more time to agree on funding the rest of FY 2025 by the Friday deadline.

It’s the second such extension, called a continuing resolution (CR), since FY 2024 ended on Sept. 30.

In addition to funding the government through March 14, the bill includes more than $100 billion in disaster aid to help Americans affected by Hurricanes Milton and Helene. It also includes an $10 billion in economic relief for farmers, as well as health care reform measures and a provision aimed at revitalizing Washington, D.C.’s RFK stadium and its surrounding campus.

Members of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus said they felt blindsided by what they saw as unrelated policy riders being added to the bill in last-minute negotiations.

Several GOP lawmakers granted anonymity to speak freely said Johnson would see challenges to his speakership bid in early January over the matter.

But Johnson defended the deal on ‘Fox & Friends’ Wednesday morning.

‘When we start the new Congress in January, when Republicans are in control … we’re going to be able to scale back the size and scope of government. But before we get to that point, remember right now, we only control one half of one third of the federal government. Remember, Democrats are still in charge of the Senate and the White House. So, what we’ve done is the conservative play call here,’ he said.

Opponents of the legislation include Elon Musk, who posted on X, ‘Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!’

He later called on Republicans to leverage a partial government shutdown. 

”Shutting down’ the government (which doesn’t actually shut down critical functions btw) is infinitely better than passing a horrible bill,’ he suggested.

Trump and Vance called for Republicans to reject the deal and instead opt for a CR paired with an increase in the U.S. debt limit, which was suspended until January 2025.

‘Increasing the debt ceiling is not great but we’d rather do it on Biden’s watch. If Democrats won’t cooperate on the debt ceiling now, what makes anyone think they would do it in June during our administration? Let’s have this debate now. And we should pass a streamlined spending bill that doesn’t give Chuck Schumer and the Democrats everything they want,’ the statement said.

But simply bowing to his right flank may not get Johnson out of the woods, with Democrats warning him to not renege on their deal.

‘House Republicans have been ordered to shut down the government. And hurt the working class Americans they claim to support. You break the bipartisan agreement, you own the consequences that follow,’ House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, R-N.Y., wrote on X.

Johnson was always likely to need Democratic help to pass a CR, given his slim margins in the House and widespread opposition to short-term funding extensions within the GOP.

But it’s not clear if the number of Democrats willing to break ranks will offset that Republican opposition. 

House leaders will also have to decide whether to put the bill through regular order, which will include a House Rules Committee vote followed by a House-wide procedural vote before lawmakers can weigh in on the measure itself. Or they could bypass that and rush the bill onto the House floor in exchange for raising the threshold for passage to two-thirds rather than a simple majority.

All the while, the clock is ticking until the partial government shutdown deadline at the end of Friday.

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Starbucks Workers United said Tuesday that 98% of union baristas have voted to authorize a strike as they seek a contract with the coffee giant.

Bargaining delegates are set to return to negotiations with Starbucks on Tuesday in the last scheduled session of the year with the goal of agreeing on a “foundational framework.” Starbucks and Workers United have spent hundreds of hours this year at the bargaining table, and both sides have put forward dozens of tentative agreements, the union said in a press release.

However, hundreds of unfair labor practice cases still have not been settled, and the union said Starbucks has not yet proposed a comprehensive package that would address barista pay and other benefits.

In a statement to CNBC, Starbucks disputed the union’s characterization and said the company remains committed to reaching a final framework agreement.

“It is disappointing that the union is considering a strike rather than focusing on what have been extremely productive negotiations. Since April we’ve scheduled and attended more than eight multi-day bargaining sessions where we’ve reached thirty meaningful agreements on dozens of topics Workers United delegates told us were important to them, including many economic issues,” the company said in the statement.

The strike authorization shows that relations between the two sides may again be cooling, after thawing in late February when both parties said they found a “constructive path forward” though mediation. Prior to that point, Starbucks had fought the union boom that swept across its company-owned locations for more than two years. The company’s attempts to curb the union movement led to backlash from some consumers and lawmakers, culminating with former CEO Howard Schultz testifying on Capitol Hill.

Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol, who joined the company in September, committed to bargaining in good faith in a letter addressed to the union in his first weeks on the job.

Niccol announced on Monday that the company would double its paid parental leave, starting in March. However, baristas will reportedly receive a smaller annual pay hike next year than they have in previous years, following a sales slump at its U.S. locations.

More than 500 company-owned Starbucks cafes have voted to unionize under Workers United since the first elections that took place in Buffalo three years ago.

This post appeared first on NBC NEWS

McKinsey & Company agreed to pay $650 million in a deferred prosecution agreement that will resolve a federal criminal probe into the company’s consulting work advising Purdue Pharma on how to increase sales of its opioid painkiller OxyContin, a court filing said Friday.

A former top partner at McKinsey, Martin Elling, also agreed to plead guilty to obstruction of justice next month in the probe by the U.S. Department of Justice, according to a filing in U.S. District Court in Abingdon, Virginia.

The criminal charging document that McKinsey agreed to have filed by prosecutors alleges the consulting giant “knowingly and intentionally” conspired with Purdue Pharma “and others to aid and abet the misbranding of prescription drugs.”

The document also said McKinsey is accused, through the acts of its then-partner Elling, of “knowingly destroying and concealing records and documents with the intent” to impede the investigation by the Department of Justice.

McKinsey, which previously agreed to pay almost $1 billion to settle lawsuits by states, local governments and others related to its opioid consulting, accepted responsibility for the conduct alleged by federal prosecutors, according to the deferred prosecution agreement.

As part of the deal, McKinsey will not work on any marketing, sale, promotion or distribution of controlled substances.

In a statement to CNBC, McKinsey said, “We are deeply sorry for our past client service to Purdue Pharma and the actions of a former partner who deleted documents related to his work for that client.”

“We should have appreciated the harm opioids were causing in our society and we should not have undertaken sales and marketing work for Purdue Pharma,” the firm said. “This terrible public health crisis and our past work for opioid manufacturers will always be a source of profound regret for our firm has requested comment from McKinsey.”

The company said that in addition to its deferred prosecution agreement with the DOJ, it “has agreed to settle a related civil False Claims Act investigation and to enter into a Corporate Integrity Agreement with the Office of Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services.”

This post appeared first on NBC NEWS

Grubhub will pay $25 million to settle charges it misled customers about the cost of their delivery and drivers about how much they could earn on the food-delivery platform.

The Federal Trade Commission and the attorney general for the state of Illinois accused Chicago-based Grubhub of engaging ‘in an array of unlawful practices’ designed to ‘deceive’ diners and workers alike about the cost of doing business on the platform.

The agencies said they had uncovered messages that demonstrated Grubhub’s allegedly illicit tactics, including an internal message from a former executive stating that the tactic of adding service fees in a way that was “misleading, eroding trust,” and “truly more expensive” for consumers.

The upshot was often a final price sometimes more than double what it originally advertised to a platform user, the agencies said.

Grubhub also allegedly engaged in false advertising to attract drivers, citing hourly pay rates ‘well above what drivers could realistically expect to earn,’ according to a release accompanying the civil complaint.

Finally, Grubhub falsely advertised restaurants on its platform that had not signed up with it. According to the complaint, Grubhub has, over the course of its existence, as many as 325,000 unaffiliated restaurants on its platform, the agencies said.

In addition to the settlement payment, Grubhub must also make changes to its platform that include telling consumers the full cost of delivery, honestly advertising pay for drivers, and only listing restaurants that have given their consent.

“Our investigation found that Grubhub tricked its customers, deceived its drivers, and unfairly damaged the reputation and revenues of restaurants that did not partner with Grubhub — all in order to drive scale and accelerate growth,” FTC Chair Lina M. Khan said in a statement.

“Today’s action holds Grubhub to account, putting an end to these illegal practices and securing nearly $25 million for the people cheated by Grubhub’s tactics. There is no ‘gig platform’ exemption to the laws on the books.”

In a statement, Grubhub acknowledged the settlement and said it would make changes to its operations, but denied the charges.

‘While we categorically deny the allegations made by the FTC, many of which are wrong, misleading or no longer applicable to our business, we believe settling this matter is in the best interest of Grubhub and allows us to move forward,’ it said.

The agencies had sought a $140 million judgment against the company, but reduced it to what Grubhub is able to pay, the agencies said. If Grubhub is found to have misrepresented its financial position, the full penalty will apply, they said.

Grubhub is set to be sold to Wonder Group, a food delivery and takeout service headed by Marc Lore, the former head of Walmart’s eCommerce unit.

This post appeared first on NBC NEWS

Syrians are starting to uncover mass graves across the country, shedding light on the magnitude of atrocities committed during the brutal rule of ousted dictator Bashar al-Assad.

More than two weeks after Assad fled Syria and his regime collapsed, scores of Syrian families still have no answer about what happened to their loved ones following their detention by Assad’s secret police.

Hundreds of thousands of bodies of people “tortured to death by the Assad regime” could be buried in a mass grave east of Damascus, according to Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of the US-based Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), an anti-Assad advocacy group.

The alleged mass grave site in the city of Qutayfah, about 45 kilometers (28 miles) from Damascus, is marked by trenches 6-7 meters (19-23 feet) deep, 3-4 meters wide, and 50-150 meters long, according to SETF.

“The bulldozer excavator driver described how intelligence officers forced workers to use the bulldozer to flatten and compress the bodies to make them fit and easier to bury before digging the next line/trench,” Moustafa said.

On Monday, reports emerged of more than 20 bodies found in a mass grave north of Izraa in Daraa governorate, southern Syria.

Videos from the Agence France-Presse news agency show men digging and pulling bones from the dirt. Another shows two rows of covered bodies lying on the ground and a bulldozer gently trying to dig the top layer of the soil.

Bodies identified by numbers

In 2020, a man known as “the Gravedigger” told a German court he was recruited by the Assad regime to bury hundreds of bodies in mass graves, according to the ICMP.

The bodies were those of Syrians from various detention centers, the witness told a trial of former Syrian intelligence officers. The man said that, along with others, he would escort multiple trucks, “loaded with anywhere between 300-700 corpses to mass graves in Qatayfah north of Damascus and al-Najha to the south four times a week. The bodies could only be identified by the numbers etched on their chests or foreheads and exhibited severe signs of torture and mutilation,” according to ICMP.

SETF’s Moustafa said he is aware of at least eight mass grave sites in Syria. He also urged international experts to come to the country to help with the process of exhuming and identifying bodies.

Jenifer Fenton, the spokesperson for the United Nations’ special envoy to Syria, said last week that related documentation to detention site and mass graves “must be secured to aid families in their search for justice and accountability.”

“We must prioritize accounting for the missing, ensuring the families receive the clarity and recognition they desperately need,” she said in a press briefing.

One of those family members is Hazem Dakel from Idlib, who now lives in Sweden.

Dakel said his uncle Najeeb was arrested in 2012 and it was later confirmed by the family as having been killed. His brother Amer was detained the following year, he said. Former detainees at the notorious Saydnaya prison near Damascus said Amer had disappeared in mid-April 2015 after being tortured there. But the regime never acknowledged his death.

The family is now “certain” Amer died under torture in Saydnaya, Dakel posted on Facebook.

Amid the celebrations of Assad’s fall there’s also been great sadness among families of those who went missing.

“They are mourning their children,” Dakel said. “Yes, the regime fell after resistance and struggle, but there was sorrow – like, where are our children?”

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Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex have shared a rare photo of their children on their Christmas card this year.

Released on Monday, the card features a collage of images taken throughout the year.

In one casual family photo, Harry and Meghan crouch down with their arms outstretched while Prince Archie, 5, and Princess Lilibet, 3, run towards them, their faces hidden from the camera.

Five other images appear on the card, all depicting engagements from the year.

“On behalf of the office of Prince Harry & Meghan, the Duke & Duchess of Sussex, Archewell Productions and Archewell Foundation, we wish you a very Happy Holiday Season and a joyful New Year,” the card reads.

This year marks the first time since 2021 that Harry and Meghan have released a Christmas card featuring their children, whose privacy they fiercely guard.

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    The seasonal greeting is for professional use and the couple will send a separate card to their close family and friends that won’t be shared publicly, the UK’s PA Media news agency reported.

    Other members of the royal family have released their Christmas cards too.

    King Charles and Queen Camilla selected a relatively informal photo for their card this year, choosing one snapped in April in the garden at Buckingham Palace.

    Meanwhile, Princess Anne chose a photo of her and her husband Vice-Adm. Tim Laurence waving from a carriage during a ceremonial procession in June.

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    The world’s oceans are under threat from rising sea temperatures, marine pollution and overfishing.

    The effects are visible in shallow ecosystems suffering from coral bleaching, but less is known about the impact on deeper areas of the ocean such as the mesophotic or “twilight” zone, which lies between 30 and 150 meters (100 and 490 feet) below the surface.

    This is the area that Ghislain Bardout and Emmanuelle Périé-Bardout, a husband-and-wife team of ocean explorers from France, are focused on. They founded Under the Pole, an organization that carries out diving expeditions to gather scientific knowledge on these extreme, uncharted environments, as part of the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative.

    They have witnessed firsthand the impact of bottom trawling, a fishing method that involves dragging nets along the seabed to catch species that live close to the seafloor, such as cod, hake and shrimp. Around a quarter of all wild-caught seafood is caught via this method each year.

    As the heavy nets scrape along the seafloor, they can collect unwanted bycatch and harm reefs and seagrasses, leading to the destruction of precious ecosystems. Despite this, the practice is permitted widely across the world, including in some marine protected areas (MPAs), such as in the French Mediterranean.

    The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

    Emmanuelle Périé-Bardout: Bottom trawling is (a method of) fishing that you could compare to a bulldozer in a forest. If you imagine a forest which is being clear cut by a bulldozer, you can picture the danger for the biodiversity and the life inside the forest, and the same (happens) in the water with bottom trawling. But the problem of the ocean in general is that we don’t see it. You have bottom trawling everywhere, every day, and it’s a massive damage to biodiversity, but we just don’t see it.

    Ghislain Bardout: It can take hundreds of years to recover the ecosystem. It depends on the species, but most of them have very slow growth. For example, black corals, which are like underwater trees and can grow up to a meter and a half high, can be 200, 300, 400, 500, 600 years old. They can be destroyed in just a few seconds by a trawler. When they are destroyed, you lose the entire ecosystem very quickly – all the fish, all the shells, all the different species that create this ecosystem.

    Emmanuelle: The first time we dived to the marine animal forest we found in Fourni we saw the tracks of the bottom trawler just close to the forest.

    Ghislain: This rich ecosystem is on some rocks with sand plains all around it. When trawling, the fishermen try to be as close as possible to this rich ecosystem, but they try not to go on it, because the rocks could damage the nets. But indirectly, fishing so close to those rich ecosystems is very damaging, because it’s not only physical destruction, it’s generating mud clouds that then fall on the ecosystem, and little by little, it destroys life. This is where the question of science is essential. It’s not only the fact that there are regulations banning trawling, but you also need to know where to do it, and this needs exploration, science and knowledge.

    Ghislain: With regulations, if you don’t know what to protect and where to protect it, they have no value. You have to know where to apply those regulations. You need to have knowledge of those ecosystems: where are they, what species are living in this ecosystem, what are the conditions of those ecosystems, what are the threats to those ecosystems? If you have a good understanding of that, you can adapt the conservation issues to it. For instance, some species are very fragile and are highly threatened and need a very strong and total conservation, whereas other locations could be partially fished some of the year, but not during the spawning or reproduction period.

    Emmanuelle: Without science-based information, you cannot change the regulation and the conservation policies. So it’s a tool, I would say. But also, we cannot wait to have all the science information to act and ask for better protected areas, because it can take years – and we don’t have years.

    Emmanuelle: This year, Greece was the first European country to say that they will ban bottom trawling in their protected areas by 2030. It’s kind of a joke, to say “we will protect a marine protected area,” but it’s better than nothing. It was a first step, and England followed, saying they will ban bottom trawling in most of their marine protected areas. So it’s going in a good direction, but we are waiting for the United Nations Ocean Conference, which will take place in Nice, France, next June. I hope that more countries, including France, will move forward to ban bottom trawling in MPAs. I think we should quickly transition to a fishing technique that is more selective – and it exists, it’s small fishermen.

    Ghislain: Local, selective, low-scale fishing with many small boats makes sense, and it also distributes the resource and the economy much better. Whereas industrial fishing is very concentrated on a few companies which are making a lot of profit based on the global resources of the oceans.

    Ghislain: There is global warming, plastic pollution. The impact of global warming in the ocean can be huge, especially in shallow waters. As you may know, this year was a huge bleaching year. But where we worked in French Polynesia (in the South Pacific), our studies revealed that at a depth below 30 or 40 meters (98 or 131 feet) in the mesophotic zone, there was just a little bit of bleaching. The same occurs in the Mediterranean Sea with the gorgonias (sea fan corals): they have been destroyed in shallow waters by heatwaves in the last few years, whereas in the mesophotic, in Greece, or in France, they are sheltered.

    That might change in the future, due to global warming, but for now they are protected, and that’s a huge hope. That should encourage us to act now, as the mesophotic could have a role as a refuge and be a regenerative ecosystem.

    Emmanuelle: We are often asked about solutions and technology. I think it’s interesting to work on solutions. But if you have a fire in the forest, you won’t put seeds in until you’ve put the fire out. That’s what marine protected areas are for – they give us the time we need to stop the fire.

    This post appeared first on cnn.com