Marine Conservation 2.0 by Steve Rocliffe

Viewpoint Marine Conservation 2.0 By Steve Rocliffe

Stanford Social Innovation Review Spring 2017

Stanford Social Innovation Review www.ssir.org Email: [email protected] Stanford Social Innovation Review / Spring 2017 59

With more than 17,000 sites world- Marine Conservation 2.0 wide, MPAs certainly have scale, but what about their impact? Here the waters become Saving the oceans requires the buy-in of coastal communities muddied. Despite the impressive numbers, directly affected by environmental protections. most MPAs are failing. Existing in name only, By Steve Rocliffe these paper parks lack the financing, management, and enforcement they need to deliver the promised biological and social benefits. All too often, MPAs are imposed upon fishing communities without adequate lder residents of Andavadoaka, conservation initiatives at the University of consultation or compensation. But for a coastal village in southwest York in the United Kingdom. There I learned many of the hundreds of millions of people Madagascar, can recall a time about marine protected areas (MPAs), parts living around tropical coasts who need to Owhen fishing trips would yield of the oceans where potentially damaging fish to feed their families, accessing their boats filled to the brim with the day’s catch. activities such as fishing are limited or fishing grounds is simply too important to Back then, the coral reefs hosted a dizzy- banned. In principle, MPAs are a dazzlingly sacrifice. This often places conservation at ing array of sea creatures. Sharks were so simple and effective idea: You close an area loggerheads with the needs of coastal com- numerous that villagers were forbidden from to fishing, and, a few years later, you have munities, paradoxically the very people who swimming during their feeding times at dawn more, bigger fish, some of which swim out depend most on its success and who could be and dusk. of the closed zone and into fishing nets its champions. Today, this underwater bounty is beyond. Even better, since bigger fish are I found the Vezo’s story so compelling much diminished, and what little remains more fertile, you also have more larvae because they had figured out a solution to faces an increasingly uncertain future. venturing beyond protected boundaries, the broken models of marine conservation. Foreign fishing fleets are steadily emptying replenishing local fishing grounds year With the support of the British social enter- Madagascar’s waters of marine life. Soils after year. For these reasons, MPAs are of- prise Blue Ventures (BV), they introduced loosened by decades of deforestation are ten touted as a win-win approach, benefiting their own form of community-centered running off into the sea, smothering the people and nature alike. They have become fisheries management that both improved vulnerable reefs of an island so rich in especially popular with policymakers rushing their livelihoods and conserved valuable unique plant and animal life that it is known to meet international obligations to protect 10 marine resources for the future. as the eighth continent. And by unleashing percent of the world’s oceans by 2020. After I obtained funding for my doc- a torrent of increasingly extreme weather toral research, I jumped events, climate change is dealing further on a plane to the Western blows to this fragile ecosystem. Indian Ocean in 2011 and Some of the hardest hit by this eco- began working with BV and logical crisis are the Vezo, seminomadic the Vezo. traditional fishers who live along Madagas- car’s arid southwest coast. Among these Under local master mariners, seafood is the sole management source of protein in almost every meal— BV launched its work with and a meal is far from guaranteed. Their Vezo communities in 2003, average income, also provided by the sea, is with an acclaimed conser- less than $2 per day. vation tourism program in But this is not a story of acquiescence. Andavadoaka. The initia- With their very survival under threat, the tive trains paying volunteers Vezo are battling, village by village, to in tropical marine research r Kelly i return their seas to abundance. And their and conservation, collect- la B effort is turning conventional thinking ing much-needed scientific on by on by i about marine conservation on its head. data, while also provid- I first heard about the Vezo’s fight six ing reliable income to the

Illustrat years ago while researching effective marine community. Together with 60 Stanford Social Innovation Review / Spring 2017

Steve Rocliffe is research and learning manager at Blue Ventures, a social enterprise that works with coastal communities to rebuild tropical fisheries.

donor funding, profits from the ecotourism not only for octopus but also for other to boost catches and incomes and, hopefully, operations are used to fund conservation community-harvested species such as mud to inspire and sustain community-led marine efforts. crab and spiny lobster. The result: In the conservation initiatives. The tourism model also gives BV some- month after closures were lifted at 36 sites, What have we learned so far on this thing that most conservation organizations villagers caught more than 700 percent more journey? Three things stand out. lack: a sustained, long-term presence within octopus than in the month before the clo- First, seeing is believing. Many of the a community. The trust and understanding sures were imposed. LMMAs—and the fishery closures that pre- that this permanence built enabled us to see The growth in LMMAs has been no less ceded them—have been kick-started by peer- that many villagers saw conservation as a impressive. Velondriake’s success has in- to-peer learning exchanges, in which men threat, a way of preventing them from fish- spired coastal communities across Mada- and women from different communities are ing. To overcome this perception, we real- gascar to establish their own initiatives. This brought together to share knowledge and ized that we needed a clear demonstration emergent network of more than 65 LMMAs experience in community-based fisheries of the potential benefits of conservation. now covers more than 11 percent of Mada- management. As conservationists, we are For this, we turned to an unlikely eight- gascar’s seabed, and in 2014 President Hery merely facilitating this dialogue; the real legged ally. In this region of Madagascar, Rajaonarimampiesona pledged to triple his change happens on the beaches and landing octopuses provide vital food and income country’s MPA coverage with a focus on sites of the communities we support. for local communities. With the majority of community-centered approaches. In little Second, the formation of grassroots catches sold for export to Europe, octopuses more than a decade, this movement has learning networks that share experience and offer one of the region’s only sources of cash become a dominant force in the country’s best practices can drive and sustain massive income. Yet octopus stocks were struggling. conservation, and it is continuing to expand improvement. Once each community returns As concern mounted, we staged a radical with a scale and ambition that’s unparalleled home and implements new approaches, it intervention, joining forces with villagers to among countries abutting the Indian Ocean. can call on a broad network of like-minded build support for a temporary community- communities and organizations for support. enforced ban on octopus fishing in a small Scaling and sustaining Together they can amplify their voices in reef. Because octopuses grow fast and are conservation ways they could not on their own. We are more fertile the larger they get, a closure for This simple, replicable, grassroots model is now seeing a new wave of policy efforts to just a few months promised to boost stocks. at the heart of BV’s mission. By anchoring improve and streamline legal processes and The plan worked. When the ban was efforts in meaningful economic incentives, mechanisms for securing access rights for lifted, fishers harvested far larger octopuses, it engages rather than alienates coastal com- artisanal fisheries in the Indian Ocean. in far greater numbers. Catches improved so munities, catalyzing the development of Third, keep it simple. International dramatically that nearby villages began to more ambitious, durable marine conserva- replication has a checkered history in con- follow suit with their own closures. Spurred tion initiatives. It builds trust and engage- servation and development, and things only on by these successes, Andavadoaka and ment at the local level, and underpins other get more difficult as the complexity of the two dozen neighboring communities ral- work in aquaculture, community health, and intervention increases. Initially at least, lied together to establish an ambitious new coastal carbon markets. we have found that targeting new partners conservation initiative: a locally managed Having demonstrated the model’s working in similar contexts to ours is more marine area (LMMA) of 640 square kilome- effectiveness in Madagascar, BV is now striv- successful. For this reason, our near-term ters in which destructive fishing techniques ing for impact at scale, aiming to reach three focus is on species that we know, primarily such as poisoning and beach seining have million people across the world’s tropical in the Indian Ocean. Once we have dem- been banned, and reserves permanently off- coastal regions by 2020. With core support onstrated replicability across international limits to all fishing have been established. from the Skoll Foundation, which awarded borders, we will be better placed to expand They called this new area Velondriake, a BV its prize for social entrepreneurship our horizons to other fisheries and regions. Vezo word meaning “to live with the sea.” in 2015, and partners such as the Mulago Marine conservation efforts can fail Velondriake was Madagascar’s first LMMA— Foundation, we are working to take this when local fishers lack incentives for a novel creation managed entirely by com- model to new communities, new countries, embracing them. By prioritizing the needs r Kelly munities, for communities, that incorporated and new waters. At this early stage, we are of coastal communities, we stand a chance i la measures rejected as unworkable by these already collaborating with nearly 20 part- of mobilizing the hundreds of millions of B on by on by same communities a few years previously. ners in nine countries. In each case, we are people who work in and around fishing i By 2016, more than 250 of these short- working to establish temporary closures on worldwide to support conservation, rather

term fishery closures had taken place, the harvesting of certain fast-growing species than see it as a threat. n Illustrat