Blue Ventures Conservation

I am trying to create a world in which people interact very differently with the ocean. In wich
people understand that taking less out of the sea. Actually gives everybody a huge amount more.
There is no asset class in the world that recovers as quickly as fisheries can. If we just give them
and we know this. But we are stuck on how we get there. The decline of fish stocks worldwide is
a critical problem for livelihoods and for food security. About 97% of the world’s fishes live in
the developing world. These fish stocks are collapsing because of over-exploitation and with
climate change, these problems are only becoming much more severe. I recognized, increasingly,
that conservation wasn’t just about me, a biologist, counting species. Conservastion needed new
tools. It needed entrepreneurship, it needed social marketing, it needed new ways to engage
people. I decided to hang up my diving fins and really try to develop business-based solutions to
the problems i’ve seen. So I was a reluctant social entrepreneur. Our work as an organization
addresses the pressing problem by working with people that depend on the sea more than anyone
else on the planet, some of the poorest coastal communities in Africa. And listening to them and
understanding what the barriers are that they face when we talk about conservation. We have
come up with approaches, we have come up with new models, new ways of designing marine
protected areas whose goal isn’t necessarily conserving by diversity but recovering fisheries.

In 2004, Blue Ventures encouraged resident of coastal Madagascar to try cordoning off a small
section of their octopus fishing area for a designated period of time. When the area re-opened the
community was surprised to discover what had happened. We did this trial, first in 2004, and the
result was good, production was very significant. As the production increased, all the other
villages became interested in setting up reserves. They saw the benefits. By targeting the
fisheries that are important to people first, using this closure model, here in Madagascar, the
octopus recovered with a monthly internal rate of return of 92%. Doubling your money in a
month. So we use these very fast reproducing species that are important for local markets to
demonstrate to communities, recovering fisheries can be the best investment opportunity out
there. Because the products in the reserve are so abundant, out catch earns us a lot of money. We
can use it to but clothes and food. And there is even more money left over, which we can save.
We employ community members that we train to collect fisheries data on the catches that they
bring out of the water from one day to the next. We use a number of approaching including data
books on beaches and mobile phones and all kinds of apps that we are developing to streamline
the process to improve it’s efficiency and we can track the effectiveness of those protected areas.
For the mangrove reserve, you can now take any products from it, crabs, seashells, everything.
But cutting its trees is forbidden. When Blue Vantures works with the communities it gives them
full responsibility about the establishment of the protected area. For example, it’s the
communities who are responsible for mapping out the boundaries of the reserve. Most excitingly
as a conservasionist, what we have seen is that this approach catalyzes interest at a local level in
conservation writ large in creating marine parks, permanent marine reserves, whitin which all
forms of fishing are prohibited to enable other stocks to recover. The first time you heard about
the idea of doing a reserve what was your first thought? Crazy foreigners.

Blue Vantures now works with the communities to create mangrove, coral and sea grass on
thousands of square miles of ocean along with workshops and community exchanges fisheries
authorities in Madagascar, Mauritius and Tanzania have adopted the model, with other in
progress. Blue Vantures has also integrated family planning and maternal and child health into
its work impacting tens of thousands of coastal resident. We need a whole new approach to the
way that we get people talking about conservation by demonstrating in a very visible, immediate
and tangible way that conservation reaps dividens and gets people behind the movement, and
that’s what we can do.