Mantas in Komodo. Photo by Eva Pet, 13 years old

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are part of the management toolbox that can ensure sustainable use of the oceans and provide the world with fish proteins. Yet, even as benefits of MPAs related to food security, ecosystem services, and livelihoods are known, we currently fail on our commitments to protect 10% of the oceans by 2020. Perhaps we need to look at the problem through a new angle: what if you woke up one day and all the oceans were protected? From now on, ocean users would have to make their case to convince governments of their need to have space allocated for their activity.

I like to imagine that I wake up one day and all the Coral Triangle oceans and coastal ecosystems were managed in a large MPA with multiple sustainable use zones and with 30% of the coastal areas and oceans as no-take reserves (the Coral Triangle includes tropical marine waters of Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste). If that were to happen, what would the marine-based economies, livelihoods, and conservation work throughout the Coral Triangle look like?

The many competing users of the marine environment and its resources would need to convince governments of their need to have “space” allocated for their activities, be it fishing, fish farming, shipping, oil & gas exploration, recreation, and conservation, among others. Flipping the burden of proof and inverting resource governance would require people to demonstrate social benefits from extractive activities, above and beyond those already generated, with no impact (or positive impact) on ecosystem structure and function. Conservation would be the default, unless proven otherwise, and default property rights would sit with conservation rather than extraction.

While the benefits of MPAs related to preserving biodiversity, protecting commercially valuable species, replenishing depleted stocks, encouraging sustainable use, and providing a myriad of ecosystem services are well described, we struggle to understand why it seems so difficult for the Coral Triangle governments and countries worldwide to achieve the CBD commitments of having 10% of oceans and marine areas under protection or some form of management by 2020. Perhaps we need to flip the problem and create a new angle to an old debate.

A discussion panel – composed of representative from seafood industries, government representatives, conservation organizations – could reflect on things like:

Would advocates of intensified resource use run campaigns to convince the public and specific decision makers of the need for, and value of, being attributed a portion of the ocean for local and global societies?

Would they need to keep reminding governments of those existing laws and policies that are in support of economic development and responsible use of the oceans’ natural resources at international and national conventions and platforms?

Would multi-lateral economic and trade-related agencies play the role that conservation NGOs and multi-national conservation agencies such as IUCN currently have, and try to make their case at Rio in a small side session for a debate on use of the oceans?

Would ocean users be required to contribute to the “conservation first” approach? Would they need to go through long and inclusive participatory planning and negotiation processes to get access to a certain area for specific use?

Would they need to compensate for the lost conservation area through a variety of mechanisms, such as payment for management of an area of comparative conservation and environmental value of the ecological services provided by that area?

Would communities that live along coastlines and on islands be doing anything differently from what they do today? Would the specific designation of use areas provide additional livelihood and food security benefits that can be measured and evidenced as attribution compared to the provision of food and livelihoods from activities in the multiple-use zones of the Coral Triangle MPA?

Would governments monitor to ensure that users’ regulated activities are allowed, and that they are able to harvest fish in designated areas or can users actually be trusted to manage and ensure their use-rights themselves?

Would financial institutions consider the benefit of environmental restoration (growth) firstly and above the financial profitability of proposals for investment in infrastructure and economic development?

Even though this “30% no-take zone scenario” looks like science-fiction for now (as less than 2% of the oceans are currently protected and we are not even talking about no-take zones), the impact of such measures would go well beyond conservation benefits. Designating the entire Coral Triangle or indeed all our oceans as a well-managed MPA, with 30% no-take reserves and the rest in effectively implemented sustainable use areas would probably provide the global, regional, and local societies with the same (if not more) protein livelihoods and services as today. And if the entire world’s ocean realm was a well-managed MPA, we would not lose bit-by-bit those goods and services every year.

The outcome of such debate or “participatory play” could help identify and generate innovative mechanisms to motivate government, private sector, and civil society to take action for a more sustainable use of the oceans. Do you want to start this debate with me or go back to sleep?

In my little research boat, we had Said, a young but fierce looking Makassar boat man, two Dutch students with a throw-away point and shoot camera and a long time friend who just got his dive certificate. I was clearly the expert. I had dived the archipelago, read all papers written over 15 years of research by Dutch and Indonesian scientists, I had been introduced to Said by knowledgeable American PhD student Mark Erdmann and all my two years worth of data was on five floppy disks for serious statistical analyzes so I could conclude some smart findings.

After an initial scare from seeing a huge white spotted blue-ish shark fin cut the water surface next to a bunch of kids hauling in buckets of the schools of anchovies, which had been blasted to catch them easier, the fishers yelled hiu bodok (stupid shark) and we donned our dive gear and swam with the sharks.

Elated when climbing back on the boat, I asked Said, who had been smoking a kretek cigarette throughout the whole excitement, whether he knew how special and amazing this encounter was. He looked at me, raised his eyebrows and said: “well, they have been here for decades ever since I was a kid and they always come here for three months in the year following the juvenile anchovies onto the shallow shelf area.”

Unbelievingly, I stuttered: why, that is so amazing, why did you never tell me? As he started the twin engines, he mumbled: “you never asked.”

Lida measuring daily catches onboard small-scale fishing vessels at sea in SW Sulawesi, Indonesia in 1996

As I finished my thesis 13 years ago, one of the main conclusions was that collaborative management of fisheries resources will not likely be successful if managers and fishers do not agree on there being a problem. They would not really have a common ground to agree on the need of a management intervention that requires them to change their behavior if their expectation on its benefits has not already been proven in the “world” that they know. A fisher who has never left his fishing ground, or who has not been fishing for very long, will have a hard time relating lower or higher levels of total fishing pressure to the long-term sustainability of his catches. Also, a fisheries manager who lumps fish catch and effort statistics together across species and areas and fishing gears to a total catch per year, will not easily see the point of a management intervention that is species or season specific. At the time, Marine Protected Areas seemed the best management recommendation to support safe guarding at least part of the fish stocks in part of the oceans.

Lida interviewing fishing communities in SW Sulawesi Indonesia on trends in catches in 1996

I recall the interviews that I did with hundreds of people, fishers and their wives, processors, other scientists, government officials, and if I would ask how the fishery was today compared to 5 or 10 or 15 years ago, most people would say it was much better now than before. Unless the weather made them stay at home, as then they’d refer to the fishery being at its worst-ever state. Asking further, it became clear that people referred to the good price they got for selling fish that they did not care for to eat themselves, or that now with their motorized small canoes they can go much farther afield. Trends of the intensifying fishing pressure and diversification of species exploitation did not occur to anyone of these stakeholders if I would have simply stuck to the question of how the fishery was doing today. As I asked more questions, all agreed how there were more fishers today, but no one suggested whether that was good or bad, most fishers just pointed to the horizon, shrugged their shoulders, and said something about how it was a big ocean out there.

Since that time, I also have been part of extensive efforts to convince managers and fishers of the need to have more MPAs, using examples and presentations pointing to science and other fisheries in other parts of the world, and in many cases we managed to have them agree to :give MPAs a try,” but today I must conclude two things:

1. - The importance of having some quick and immediate visible or tangible impacts from the management to ensure compliance.
2. - We need to ask the right question: how many fishers can actually be in the fishery catching how much fish?

If we are really serious in aiming to rehabilitate the productivity of the oceans for the most optimum provision of food and jobs, more MPAs need to be designed to PRODUCE fish, and all fisheries in and outside of MPAs need to be registered with licenses to allow management of the amount of fish taken out of the ocean, to get the exploitation levels down to what the oceans can provide.

East Indonesian coastline

Yes, I am lucky. I have been able to sail the waters of Eastern Indonesia over nearly 20 years, and I have dipped underwater, swimming around some incredible lagoons, reefs, and seamounts. When people ask me where to see some remote coasts I say, go anywhere east. Staring at a coastline from a boat anywhere east from Jakarta gives you that explorer feeling: you see the same impressive volcanoes stringing together that famous ring of fire that was described to the world by the Blair brothers in their films in the early ‘90s. Lower on the volcanic slopes, you will see some small smokey plumes circling up to the sky, where someone is frying some ubi (bread fruit) for breakfast, and near the water line you will see small villages, some cows, goats, and a bunch of boats on the beach. I have taken many supporters of our fisheries and conservation work along on such trips and it usually does not take long before I get the question: Where are the fishers?

When we plunge in any one of the reefs along the way, my fellow divers and I are overtaken by the colors and variety of underwater plants and animals, but before the dive is over, one cannot escape the feeling that something is missing. Where are the big fish? The reefs are mostly devoid of large fish and many publications by renowned Indonesian and international scientists reflect how most of Indonesia’s fish stocks are overfished or at their maximum level of exploitation. Yet, to the occasional observer, it may look like not much is happening at sea.

Lida free diving on sea mount eastern Indonesia

Looking deeper

Indonesia is at the center of the Coral Triangle, one of the most biologically diverse areas in the world with over 76% of the world’s coral species and 37% of the world’s reef fish species within its boundaries. Global trends for this region demonstrate that fishing effort has been and is increasing at a faster rate than any other region of the world’s oceans. Fishery management is failing to reach sustainability. Recent studies have shown that the increase of fishing pressure is threatening the health of fish stocks, impacting coral health, and resulting in underperforming fisheries. This is significant considering that 50% of the protein intake by thousands of coastal communities comes from fish and that hundreds of thousands of people – including many women – have a job direct or indirectly related to Indonesian fisheries.

To date, the challenges of enforcing, monitoring, and controlling catch and effort regulation in Indonesia’s multi-species, multi-gear fisheries have been considered too high. The culprits were considered to be foreign fleets, legal or illegally operating inside Indonesian waters. Also, local fishers would point to roaming groups of dynamite and cyanide fishers as a major problem. Until now, not much thought has been given to how local coastal fishers contribute to overfishing. Since the transmigration programs and programs that provide subsidized technology, today and every day, an armada of hundreds of thousands of small and medium scale fishers put their fishing gears in waters inside the 4-nautical mile zone, along all coasts of the Indonesian archipelago.

Taking coastal fishers into account

Fish catch data inside this zone—arguably of the highest significance for sustained livelihoods and food security for Indonesian coastal communities—are mostly unreported. This may not have mattered much, decades ago when the pressure on seafood was not as high, and when Indonesia was not exporting so much of its marine products around the globe. Today, however, with recent knowledge on the significance of coastal waters on fish stock replenishment, and considering the challenges of determining the real time status of fish stocks in the ocean, information on all catch taken out of the waters–by large and small fishing operations—is a pre-requisite for any form of management. We should push aside the often-used argument of “protecting” small operations from taxes and fees related to license and registration. Taking away all subsidies, which often merely keep non-viable fisheries alive, will also reduce the needs of raising taxes.

Short-term sacrifices for long-term gains

Adding registration of coastal fishers to fisheries management and regulating the level of fishing in the coastal zone, not only allows for better estimates on the significance of this important part of the ocean for food security and livelihoods, it also allows the government and coastal communities to share stewardship and it can form the foundation for rights-based management (RBM) for reducing of inefficient and unsustainable fishing overcapacity and minimizing conflicts created by open access regimes. This may hurt some fishers in some areas in the short-term, but it helps avoid broad scale collapse of thousands of livelihoods in the mid-term, and contributes to safeguard an important part of the food security of millions of people across the archipelago in the long-term.

All it takes as a first step, is for decision makers to acknowledge that an occasional visit to a single fish landing site or across a lagoon near some village, presents just the tip of the ice berg (or an underwater volcano in this case). Adding up thousands of such occasional observations along the more than 80,000 km of this country’s coastline, will show how deceptive the word “small-scale” is for this huge coastal inshore fishery management challenge. The thousands of communities providing tons of seafood to the world today in fact need increased regulation and management. Their livelihoods, food and future depend on it.