March 2017Progress Update #8

The Fish Forever Progress Update is a regular communication to supporters and stakeholders on the key advances we are making on the ground, the challenges we are working to surmount, and the learning and adaptive management we are doing along the way.

Small Scale Fisheries a Priority in the 2017-2022 Philippine Development Plan

The Philippine Development Plan (PDP), officially approved on February 20th, 2017, recognizes and prioritizes the important contributions of small-scale fisheries to the country’s national development efforts. Rare is thrilled to note that the PDP contains important language that advances Fish Forever’s programmatic ambition, including concepts of behavior change, managed access for fishers, and the use of marine sanctuaries to support resource recovery. Per the plan: “Networks of MPAs (marine protected areas), fish refuges, sanctuaries and managed access areas will be pursued to improve ecological connectivity and management efficiency.”

The PDP also asserts that “strongly motivating behavioral change at the national, community and individual levels” will be “the most effective strategy” for managing and conserving natural resources. As part of the ecosystems approach to fisheries management, the government plans to scale up community-based strategies that include territorial use rights in fisheries and seasonal closures for selected species. The inclusion of this approach to small-scale fisheries management will help pave the way for prioritizing municipal fishers and fisheries throughout the country and expanding Fish Forever in the Philippines.

Rare is also currently partnering with the National Economic Development Authority (NEDA) to build the economic, social, and ecological case for reforming the Philippines’ municipal fisheries by estimating investment costs and benefits as they compare to a business as usual scenario. Ensuring the prioritization of these fisheries will catalyze the blended finance from public, private and philanthropic sector capital and the policies necessary to improve the lives of over 1.8 million fishers and their families.

To access the full plan, please follow this link: http://pdp.neda.gov.ph/.

The PDP reflects the administration’s priorities, targets and strategies for achieving inclusive growth and poverty reduction over the next five years (2017-2022).

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First Network of TURF+Reserves Declared in Indonesia

On February 21st, 2017, the Maya Tribe Adat (i.e., Customary) Council of Raja Ampat held a public ceremony to celebrate the first network of TURF+Reserves established and adopted in Indonesia. It’s also the first such customary law network. Eleven villages and one sub-village of Teluk Mayalibit (also known as Mayalibit Bay) in West Papua achieved consensus through participatory approaches with the Adat Council Chief, village leaders, village adat chiefs and religious leaders for a network of 12 TURFs in the Mayalibit Bay Marine Protected Area (MPA). Adopting the network is a significant achievement for Indonesia’s traditional communities, especially given the various management challenges that have historically plagued the Bay.

Teluk Mayalibit is one of 15 Fish Forever sites in Indonesia. For the past three years, Rare has worked in partnership with the Tribal Maya Clan, Conservation International (CI), local fishers and government leaders to introduce and design a Territorial Use Rights for Fisheries (TURF) system within the existing MPA, in accordance with West Papua’s community tenurial governance system. Although the MPA already served as a de facto TURF for the indigenous Maya Clan under customary law, the concept of engaging in discussion around the Bay’s management challenges, which include overlapping territorial claims, insecure tenure rights, scarcity of scientific data and frequent disregard of tenurial agreements, has historically produced fear of conflict between and among villages and clans. Rare Pride campaigns have engaged the community in solving for these challenges. Pre-Fish Forever Pride campaigns addressed barriers to reducing fishing pressure and increasing compliance with the prevailing no-take zones. Fish Forever then built on these early campaigns to help villages shift focus from simply settling boundary claims to allocating and accepting the responsibility to manage their marine resources through TURFs.

The participatory mapping process resulted in new, community-managed local reserves (in addition to pre-existing official ones), individual village TURFs, as well as decisions regarding village clan structures and governance, fisheries area boundaries and regulations for each village. Fish Forever will continue to support the new network in advancing critical components needed to sustain the TURF system: collecting data (ecosystem, fisheries and socioeconomic); establishing local fishery management units to manage the TURF area; and developing individualized TURF regulations to complement and augment the current MPA zoning system. Succeeding within a customary law governance system to define the rights and responsibilities of a respective village, and larger network, can serve as a model for future Fish Forever sites. It may also help to encourage demand for the TURF approach in additional small-scale fisheries in Indonesia.

Fast Facts – Mayalibit Bay• Size of MPA: 53,100 ha

• Size of the TURF network: 37,301 ha

• Size of Reserve Network: 15,799 ha

• % of Reserve of TURF Network: 42%

• Number of people: 2,630

• Number of fishers: 510

• Key resources: Abundant in blue swimming crab, sea cucumber, mackerel, snapper, grouper and shrimp

Mayalibit Bay

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The Man with the (OurFish) App

“It’s not about the fisheries app at all — the app is just a tool. It’s what we can do with it, that’s the real story.”

Dr. Steve Box joined Rare in December 2016 as Vice President, Global Fisheries Solutions. In this newly-created role, Dr. Box will advance Rare’s global fisheries strategy to focus on new ways of linking science-based design elements with community behavior adoption and effective monitoring. Dr. Box brings a combination of rigorous science and practical field experience to Rare, as well as simple-to-use technologies, such as the OurFish app, that focus on fish catch reporting, fisher licensing, and vessel registration.

“This is an exciting time to be able to link Rare’s [behavior adoption] DNA with advances in technology, such as OurFish, that put information directly into the hands of communities, buyers, and governments. Through Fish Forever, we are setting up local fisheries management units within communities, where the communities are given rights, they’re given tenure, and they’re given responsibility to manage an area – and with advances in technology, they can be given the information they need, in a user-friendly way, to make good decisions to manage their resources.”

Technology advances, such as OurFish, overcome challenges to fisheries management, including the ability to collect and analyze data at appropriate scales. Rare will pilot the use of new technologies in Fish Forever countries as part of the program’s ongoing efforts to increase efficiency and effectiveness and continue reducing the cost to outcome ratio. “Leveraging innovations in technology presents exciting opportunities to transition fishers and fishing communities away from an informal economy and data-poor management towards a formal, information-filled one – which is a fundamental step in sustainable development. If we can achieve that with fisheries, it’s a game-changer.”

Rare’s Raymond Jakub named 2017 Pew Marine FellowRaymond Jakub, Rare Indonesia Program Implementation Manager, has been named a 2017 Pew Marine Fellow. Raymond will use his Fellowship to capitalize on data technology innovations, such as OurFish, and make catch data collection a regular, accessible part of community fisheries management in Indonesia. To this end, he is developing a social marketing campaign to encourage local communities and government officials to support and sustain data collection and use.

- Dr. Steve Box, upon hearing the nickname, “The Man with the App,” bestowed on him by Fish Forever staff and volunteers upon arriving to Rare.

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Steps to Community Management + Tenure: Four key agreements in Indonesia

Over the last few months, fishing communities of four Fish Forever sites in Indonesia have signed important formal agreements with their respective local governing authorities that are critical stepping stones for co-managing and securing tenure rights in their nearshore fisheries. The Guidelines for small-scale fishers, endorsed by the MMAF last July, enabled these agreements, which lay the groundwork for implementing community-managed TURF+Reserve (T+R) systems in each site.

Fisheries co-management is generally defined as the government and local community of fishers sharing responsibility and authority to manage a fishery. Fish Forever Indonesia aims to reach the furthest point in the co-management spectrum, wherein the government devolves the power to manage resources to local natural resource users and secure tenure rights have been established. The graphic below showcases four agreements that each progress a Fish Forever site along Indonesia’s fisheries management governance spectrum. These agreements represent the range of national governance archetypes and agreements made between communities and governing bodies. Each of the examples brings Fish Forever one step closer to realizing community management and tenure in Indonesia’s small-scale fisheries.

Governance ContextGovernance

TypeMinistry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries (MMAF)

Ministry of Environment and Forestry

Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries (MMAF)

District Government and Customary Law

Local Governing Authority

BKKPN (MMAF Technical Management Unit)

Bunaken National Park

LKKPN (MMAF Technical Management Unit)

District Public Service Agency and Maya Tribe Adat Council of Raja Ampat

Summary of Agreemnt

Provides basis for consultation and collaboration in designing a T+R and its management plan; future co-management is conditional upon its success.

Provides legal basis for co-managing the T+R through a 3-month limited-term agreement.

Provides legal basis for co-managing the T+R. The 5-year limited-term agreement provides the village the legal authority to self-manage the TURF.

Established the first network of tenurial (adat) T+R in Indonesia, managed by the Mayalibit Bay villages.

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Join the (Savings) Club: Creating Additional Incentives for Adopting Sustainable Fishing Practices

Savings Club (def): a voluntary group of fishers and fish workers who mobilize savings and collectively invest to improve their livelihoods.

Over the last two years, Fish Forever-Philippines has established over 40 rotating “Savings and Credit” Clubs. This savings approach — a cornerstone of the strategy to link Fish Forever to markets — creates an incentive for fishers to adopt sustainable fishing practices. As a pilot project, with support from the USAID Global Development Alliance, Fish Forever originally planned for 14 clubs in seven sites. Demand for additional clubs grew quickly, and 40 clubs in seven sites have thus far mobilized over 400 fishers and ~30,000 USD (at least P1.5 million) in total deposits.

The clubs’ purpose is threefold: to mobilize equity and social capital from (and for) the fishing community, reduce their dependence on external funding, and help build financial household assets (hypothesized to thereby reduce household vulnerability to external shocks and crises). The clubs are patterned after the simple village savings and loan association (VSLA) model to encourage sustainability and scaling across additional fishing communities. To build capacity, Fish Forever trains local government partners on savings mobilization techniques, and hires project staff to mentor these partners and/or coach the clubs. Together, they organize and train community members to run the clubs. Fish Forever also trains members as Fish Forever Community Educators (Fish ForCE) to build financial literacy and management.

Savings have been used for new/replacement fishing gear, household assets and needs, and pooling resources to collectively invest in fish processing. The savings methodology has a built-in social fund that members can choose to give to community members for unexpected expenditures (e.g., for illness/death/disaster relief). Rare also encourages established clubs to consider an environmental fund for long-term TURF+Reserve management. Demand for replication in additional sites is increasing as fishers and local governing units realize the benefits of better financial management and resiliency for fisher families.

Savings Clubs in the Future Fish Forever is learning from this initial group of clubs, assessing not only how clubs are being used as springboards for building social and human capital, but reviewing their potential to transition to fishing and/or conservation enterprises – where fishers collaborate in undertaking measures to increase catch value (e.g., processing and/or collectively sending catch to better markets). Fish Forever is also exploring collaboration with financial institutions, such as microfinance or banks, to enable savings clubs to leverage additional capital and access supplemental products, such as micro-insurance.

• The clubs’ majority membership is women.

• Rare and a number of local government units (LGUs) have started their own savings clubs to experience the process and benefits themselves.

Creating Markets for Sustainable SeafoodRare recently announced the first investment by the Meloy Fund for Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in Southeast Asia: a $1 million-dollar, five-year investment in the Philippines-based seafood company, Meliomar Inc (a fish aggregator, processor, importer and exporter). This investment will help Meliomar increase the company’s processing capacity and logistics and strengthen internal systems. Meliomar will partner with Fish Forever to source at least ten tons of sustainable seafood annually from local Filipino communities as part of jointly developed fishery improvement projects (FIPs).

In February, Fish Forever hosted three workshops at the 2nd Sustainable Seafood Week in Manila, with the Philippine Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR), Meliomar, and social enterprise “Fishers and Changemakers,” to raise awareness of the importance of small-scale fisheries to sustainable seafood in the Philippines and identify multistakeholder solutions to creating markets for and adding value to small-scale fishing operations.

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Fish Forever Belize: Lasting Pride

In 2016, Belize became the first country in the world to nationally adopt Managed Access (i.e., TURF). The Belize Fisheries Department (BFD) has since made major advances in rolling out managed access across Belize:

• completed managed access zoning (territorial waters were divided into eight fishing areas) and licensing (98% of fishermen have a license that identifies their two fishing zones);

• trained fishermen on new regulations, and the importance of catch reporting;

• strengthened the seven managed access committees; and

• operationalized a TURF+Reserve compliance and enforcement system (verifying that fishermen are fishing within the zones they selected).

The campaign brand is printed as a watermark in each of the fishing licenses issued, and Langostin (the Rare Pride Campaign mascot) is still featured in the calls and announcements for licensing and outreach activities led by BFD and partners.

Starting in early 2017, Rare, in partnership with the Smithsonian, and with funding from Oceans 5, will support a broad partnership of stakeholders in Belize and neighboring Honduras to adopt OurFish (see page 3), to help fishing communities collect and use fishing data. The governments of Belize and Honduras have committed to rolling out national fisheries data collection efforts at scale using the OurFish app, with a priority on digitally registering fishers and then working with fish buyers, as well as other direct buyers, such as restaurants, to collect data from landing sites. These data will underpin decision-making for small-scale fisheries and provide ongoing fish production monitoring during managed access implementation (in Belize, and using a similar policy of community managed reserves in Honduras). Belize’s new licenses bring together the past and future of Rare’s collaboration in country: they will have a QR code, in addition to a pride-inspired logo, that the app scans to link fisher information to a transaction.

The Belize Fisheries Department has recently adopted the Rare Pride campaign brand as their institutional logo to reflect the new vision for Belize’s fisheries management.

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The Science of Fish Forever

Links to recent scientific publications by Fish Forever and partners:

Chollet, I., L. Garavelli, S. O’Farrell, L. Cherubin, T. R. Matthews, P. J. Mumby, and S.J. Box. 2016. A Genuine win-win: resolving the “conserve or catch” conflict in marine reserve network design. Conservation Letters, 2016, 00(0), 1–9. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/conl.12318/epdf

McDonald, G., B. Harford, A. Arrivillaga, E. A. Babcock, R. Carcamo, J. Foley, R. Fujita, T. Gedamke, J. Gibson, K. Karr, J. Robinson, J. Wilson. 2017. An indicator-based adaptive management framework and its development for data-limited fisheries in Belize. Marine Policy 76 (2017) 28–37. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308597X16307527

Nguyen, C., S. Schilizzi, A. Hailu, and S. Iftekhar. 2017. Territorial Use Rights for Fisheries (TURFs): State of the art and the road ahead. Marine Policy, 75: 41–52. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308597X16303086

Krueck N.C., G.N. Ahmadia, H.P. Possingham, C. Riginos, E.A. Treml, and P.J. Mumby. 2017. Marine Reserve Targets to Sustain and Rebuild Unregulated Fisheries. PLoS Biol 15(1): e2000537. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.2000537. http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2000537

Balaraman, K. 2017. Marine Ecosystems Are Preparing for Climate Change: Coral reefs, kelp forests and other ocean ecosystems may be more resilient than we think. Scientific American, E&E News, Environment. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/marine-ecosystems-are-preparing-for-climate-change/

Arrivillaga, A., and M.E. Arreola. 2016. The Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System. Chapter 14. In: Peter Mackelwort, Ed.: Marine Transboundary Conservation and Protected Areas. Routledge Earthscan Oceans Series. http://www.routledge.com/9781138851139

Fish Forever: A solution to inspire and accelerate community, and then national, adoption of spatial, rights-based management systems, combined with marine reserves, by leveraging Pride - Rare’s proprietary, proven behavior change methodology.

Goals: To demonstrate productive, sustainable and profitable small-scale fisheries by 2024 where:

• 20% of the *relevant sites in each country have adopted community-led spatial, rights-based fisheries management systems (*relevant=sites where small-scale fisheries recovery is possible)

• 20% of this rights-based fisheries management system is fully protected as a reserve

Fish Forever Countries: Philippines, Indonesia, Mozambique, Brazil and Belize

Number of Fish Forever sites: 72

rare.org/fish-forever-progress-update