I am trying to create a world in which people interact very differently with the ocean.
In which 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 time 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.
Conservation 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 residents 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, our catch earns us a lot of money.
We can use it to buy 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 approaches 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 Ventures 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 conservationist,
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, within 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 Ventures now works with the communities to create mangrove,
coral and sea grass reserves on thousands of square miles of
ocean along with training workshops and community exchanges
fisheries authorities in Madagascar,
Mauritius and Tanzania have adopted the model, with others in progress.
Blue Ventures has also integrated family planning
and maternal and child health into its work,
impacting tens of thousands of coastal residents.
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 dividends and
gets people behind the movement, and that's what we can do.