The Climate, Society and Environment Research Centre at UTS and partners have recently been awarded $2.2 million from the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research for the research project “Enhancing Marine Environmental Governance in Indonesia and the Philippines.”
Enhancing marine environmental governance in Southeast Asia
A fishing boat in Palawan Province, Philippines. Photo: Katherine Jack
UTS project lead Dr Nick McClean, a social scientist who specialises in marine conservation and fisheries management, said that the project’s focus will be on working with local scientists, decision makers and communities to support their management of coral reefs and fisheries.
Fisheries as social-ecological systems
“To put it simply, a fishery involves fish, and the people who harvest them. If we expand out a little, there is also the wider habitat and ecosystem that the fish are a part of,” Nick said.
“On the human side, there are fisheries scientists and governments who must implement good management practices. Then there are the wider communities that depend on these fish for income and food.”
Nick said the job of fisheries scientists and ecologists involves focusing on reef health and fish stocks, monitoring coral and fish abundance, as well as size, weight, age, sex and distribution, and then figuring out what this means for the health of the stock and of the wider ecosystem.
“This is the core evidence that is used to determine whether management intervention is needed, and what form that needs to take.”
While the field of reef and fisheries management is largely built around implementing the implications of marine science and ecology assessments, there is a growing interest in extending the field to include the study of fishers, their communities, and broader societal systems connected to these fisheries.
“This is particularly so in Southeast Asia, where many coastal communities have long depended on fish as a basic source of income and nutrition.”
In this new project, the team will work across Indonesia and the Philippines, with local managers, scientists and communities, to explore how these issues play out. Despite geographical and cultural differences between these nations, the team has identified some common challenges.
This project provides an opportunity to extend our work on these important social equity issues, to enhance efforts by governments to improve the science and sustainability of both reefs and fisheries.
“In both countries, we are working with vulnerable communities that are dependent on fisheries,” Nick said.
“A large proportion of the fishermen in both Indonesia and the Philippines live scattered across these two archipelagic countries in remote villages on coasts and islands, and they are fishing for all sorts of species. When their fish are being exported, they're making good money out of it. But for many it's for direct subsistence or to sell into lower-value local markets, and these people are often among the most vulnerable to poverty and food insecurity,” Nick explained.
In Indonesia, the team is working to help fisheries management agencies to improve their capacity to consider these issues in their decision-making, given Indonesia is one of the world’s largest fishing nations and governments have made strong commitments over many years to improving the welfare and nutrition status of its people.
In the Philippines, the team will be working to support better management of coral reefs, with a focus on Palawan Province, a region with high dependence on reefs and fisheries, yet also considered likely to form an important refuge for coral reefs under climate change conditions, and a focus of many existing efforts to conserve reefs.
Nick said that understanding whether decisions about how to manage reefs and fisheries impact on people who are in a vulnerable position and may have no viable alternatives for income or food is important to collect data on and be considered explicitly in decision-making.
“This project provides an opportunity to extend our work on these important social equity issues, to enhance efforts by governments to improve the science and sustainability of both reefs and fisheries,” Nick said.
The multi-disciplinary team will be working with governments who are responsible for reef and fisheries management, while also working with communities to ensure that their interests and wellbeing are at the heart of decision-making about issues that affect them.
Adaptive management
In both fisheries and reef management, the best practice approach to decision-making is referred to as adaptive management.
“Adaptive management involves developing a clear and regular process for decision-making, utilising an agreed upon evidence-base that is viewed as scientifically robust, and informing management actions that are achievable in the context of the reef or fishery being managed,” Nick explained.
“With an adaptive management cycle, periodically, every year or two years or five years, you'll come back and look at what you are doing, and you'll update the process or adjust decisions based on regular monitoring data.”
Nick said that an important principle to consider in these decision-making cycles, in SE Asia in particular, is to ensure that vulnerable communities already experiencing poverty or food insecurity are not pushed into further disadvantage.
With an adaptive management cycle, periodically, every year or two years or five years, you'll come back and look at what you are doing, and you'll update the process or adjust decisions based on regular monitoring data.
Among questions the team will consider with partners over the course of the research are:
- What will implementing various possible reef or fisheries management approaches mean for vulnerable communities at risk of poverty or food insecurity, as well as the sustainability of the resource?
- Can we avoid impacts on these people when management needs to step in to protect the health of reefs or stocks? If not, how can we support them to move into other livelihoods? And what data do we need to inform these decisions?
With many established relationships in place, the longer-term outcomes of this collaborative project are anticipated to have relevance to reef and fisheries management throughout Southeast Asia.
About the research project
With the goal of developing a governance framework for making decisions that contribute to sustainable, equitable and productive marine environments in Southeast Asia, the “Enhancing Marine Environmental Governance in Indonesia and the Philippines” project is a collaboration between UTS, University of the Philippines, Western Philippines University, Macquarie University, IPB University Indonesia, National Agency for Research and Innovation Indonesia and the Indonesian Union of Traditional Fishers.