Can there be fish forever?

MANILA, Philippines - Facing the West Philippine Sea, Lubang in Occidental Mindoro is vulnerable to encroachment, often by large fishing vessels from neighboring countries. It’s easy to imagine the possibility of violent encounters between those manning the vessels and the local Bantay Dagat, but in Lubang, the worst that has happened is that the big ships threw boxes of instant noodles at the guards as they moved out of Lubang’s area of responsibility.

“I think they were trying a softer approach, although they were still trying to fish illegally in our waters,” says Ray Morales, the municipal planning and development coordinator of Lubang and a Conservation Fellow of Rare Philippines, a nonprofit organization focused on marine conservation. “We’re glad that we’re not met with violence but we have to protect our seas,” he adds.

This is just one of the stories that Morales encounters in his daily work in a municipality that’s serious about sustaining its coastal and marine resources. According to Rare, nearshore fishers used to catch 40 kilograms of fish per unit of effort in 1940. By the year 2000, this number had gone down to 3 kg. This is bad news for the over 1.3 million small-scale fishers in the country’s 873 coastal towns.

Aside from commercial vessels, artisanal fishers from neighboring provinces also invade waters with good fish supply. Illegal fishers in Masinloc, Zambales make it worse by not only disrespecting the boundaries, but also by making use of cyanide and dynamite to increase their catch, says Conservation Fellow Medel Murata, who is with the local government’s Environment and Natural Resource Office.

Then there are also local fishers who know the laws but still do not follow them, often because they are just so used to certain ways of doing things that they reject change. “These are fishers that we need to speak to – both to their hearts and their minds,” says Melvin Maglayon, Conservation Fellow from San Carlos City, Negros Occidental.

Morales, Murata and Maglayon are three of 12 Conservation Fellows who were chosen by Rare to implement Fish Forever, a global initiative to rehabilitate nearshore fisheries. The Fellows will implement the three-year program at their sites while learning new skills and building their own capacity to effect positive behavior change in their communities.

As a conservation organization, Rare has undertaken to change the way fishers behave towards their main source of income and food. Together with its partners, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and the Sustainable Fisheries Group at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Rare formed the Fish Forever partnership to protect and recover nearshore fisheries, curb overfishing and safeguard the food security and economies of thousands of communities in the developing tropics. The partnership brings together EDF’s deep experience in fisheries management, USCB SFG’s science expertise, and Rare’s unique approach to behavior change and working with communities.

Fish Forever’s theory of change states that by aligning the social and economic interests of fishermen with conservation, fishermen become agents of long-term change because they reap direct rewards. This means over 5 million people who depend on fish caught in municipal waters for their income and food could have more and bigger catch. Further down the supply chain, better harvest could improve the supply and quality of food for the 56 percent of Filipinos who get their protein from fish.

Central to Fish Forever’s approach is the system of combining managed access to fishing areas with marine reserves, where fishing is off-limits. Managed access has proven to be successful in aiding the recovery of fisheries in Chile, Japan and some other areas in Asia and the Pacific.

In the Philippine context, this would mean allocating to a community of fishers managed access to fishing areas where there is spillover from fish recovery zones or marine-protected areas (MPAs). This privilege serves as the incentive for fishers to change to more sustainable fishery management practices, so they can reap the benefits of being responsible guardians of their natural resources.

Aside from setting up managed access areas, the Conservation Fellows will also help build their community’s capacity to set up and improve the management of MPAs, where fish stocks can recover unharmed. Fish population, biomass, coral cover and other important indications of progress are monitored and evaluated by scientists and by the community itself. The Fellows will also learn to use proven social marketing techniques to cultivate lasting community support for sustainable fishery management, through Rare’s Pride campaigns.

Pride campaigns are Rare’s signature approach to community engagement. It’s a series of activities that inspire people to take pride in their way of life and the local waters that make their communities unique, while also giving them the tools they need to preserve their fisheries.

It involves surveying the community’s challenges and areas of improvement relevant to fishing, understanding their target audiences and the people around them, creating campaign materials that promote desired behaviors and organizing community-wide activities that get fishers and their families excited and supportive of these behaviors so that they become the social norm.

The combination of fisher empowerment, capacity building and community mobilization make up the full suite of solutions at each Rare project site, not only in the Philippines but all over the world, as it is designed to work across cultures, geographies and political systems.

“The aim is not to teach a community to fish,” says Brett Jenks, CEO of Rare. “It’s to help make sure they can fish forever.”

The Rare Conservation Fellows were selected after a rigorous application process and, through the course of the program, will earn a masters degree in Social Marketing from the University of Texas in El Paso.

Social marketing, or the science of behavior change, is at the heart of each Rare campaign. Social marketing is similar to how commercial businesses attract consumers to buy products for profit – but in Rare’s case, applied to natural resource management for social good.

The campaigns also include what Rare refers to as barrier removal – the back-end work needed to make change easier, such as strengthening enforcement systems, organizing management committees to oversee marine sanctuaries and training local monitoring teams who can report back to the community how their reefs or fish stocks are progressing.

As recently graduated Conservation Fellow Susan Cataylo from Pilar, Camotes describes it: “In the past, we would do posters telling fishers something was illegal. But we never thought about things from their point of view. Social marketing taught me to really understand my audience, and think about what’s in it for them. Now I can convince fishers that doing the right thing is good for them and for their families. In my campaign, we make them proud of doing the right thing – they will be sikat or a star in their community.”

Rare has run over 250 Pride campaigns in almost 60 countries, promoting behaviors as wide ranging as sustainable hunting, watershed protection, use of non-wood burning stoves, etc.

From 2010 to 2012, Rare worked with 12 local governments and non-profit partners in Surigao del Sur, Bohol, Negros Oriental, Davao, Cebu, Southern Leyte and Camarines Sur.

Conservation Fellows successfully implemented Pride campaigns resulting in an average of 47 percent increase in fish abundance inside no-take zones, almost five times the target of 10 percent. The level of knowledge about marine protection also increased by an average of 15.3 percentage points.

The second batch of Rare Conservation Fellows, who were in the program from 2012 to 2014, worked in 13 areas in Zamboanga Sibugay, Surigao del Sur, Davao, Negros Oriental, Cebu, Bohol, Palawan and Camarines Sur. They completed 13 Pride campaigns resulting in an average of 16 percent change from 2012 to 2014 in fish abundance density, and an average of 30.9 percent change from 2012 to 2014 in fish biomass density.

The newest batch of Rare Conservation Fellows from Zambales, Occidental Mindoro, Camarines Norte, Sorsogon, Negros Occidental, Negros Oriental, Antique and Surigao del Norte will conduct campaigns from 2014 to 2017. Together with several alumni from the first and second batches, they will be the pioneering group of leaders that will implement Fish Forever, and hopefully be the first to see their communities reap the benefits for years to come.

For more information, visit www.fishforever.org and www.rare.orgwww.rare.org   or email [email protected].