Community-Led Conservation Makes Waves
Local communities in Micronesia are driving a novel conservation approach for coral reefs.
You may know that coral reefs are in trouble all over the world. But did you know that saving coral reefs means much more than protecting beautiful underwater landscapes?
Coral reefs are important to the entire ocean ecosystem, and really, the whole planet. They support over 25% of biodiversity in the ocean.
Reefs are also important to people.
Many of the fish that we like to eat use reefs as nurseries or hunting grounds. Reefs act as walls that protect vulnerable coastlines from ever-increasing storm surges. Scientists continue to find new medicinal compounds in creatures that live in reefs… the list goes on.
Unfortunately, the list of threats to coral reefs is almost as long. Warming ocean waters can kill corals through a process called bleaching, and carbon dioxide from fossil fuel emissions turns seawater to acid that inhibits shell growth.
But there’s another problem that can’t be blamed entirely on climate change: Coral reef fish populations are on the decline because they are being overfished.
It’s tempting to think that overfishing is an easy problem to fix — we should just take fewer fish, right? But consider that even as reef health declines, over 500 million people around the world rely on fish supported by coral reefs. Demand for healthy fish protein, even in landlocked regions, is on the rise.
Many of the most pristine and productive reefs are located around remote islands and atolls, like those in Micronesia, where local communities depend on healthy reefs for survival. But the human population is small and the surrounding ocean is vast; it’s difficult for a few local people to patrol.
This all adds up to a problem that is not as simple as it seems.
Christopher LaFranchi has a pioneering solution. In 2007 he founded OneReef, an organization that partners with local island communities to protect their reefs. Local people take the lead in this effort and OneReef leverages support from scientists and funders to monitor, study, and protect coral reefs. One novelty of their approach is that OneReef establishes long-term relationships with local communities, unlike other NGOs that tend to infuse a region with money and resources for a short time and then leave.
LaFranchi is a conservation biologist cum economist who has worked in many parts of the world helping local people protect their wild places and natural resources. Just out of graduate school in the late 1990s, he found himself working for a large NGO in Namibia with the Bantu people. They were trying to protect elephants and lions from poachers, who were often people just looking for a way to feed their families and protect their cows and crops.
The idea was to use economic theory to change behavior and limit poaching. One facet of the plan was to pay people for livestock lost to wildlife. But through hundreds of interviews, LaFranchi discovered that the Bantu people revere cows as much more than a means to gain monetary wealth — the cows themselves confer status within the society. Paying a set price per lost cow wasn’t going to cut it.
They would have to come up with a strategy that accounted for much more than a capitalistic exchange. It became clear that understanding of and respect for cultural traditions is critical to conservation success. Now almost 20% of Namibia is protected in conservancies, wildlife populations continue to recover, and local economies are flourishing.
Through his experience with the San, LaFranchi glimpsed the super-power potential of partnering with local communities in conservation. Back stateside, he teamed up with like-minded conservationists and economists to develop a new, truly community-driven model. The innovation lay in establishing agency for local people and sticking around for the duration.
Once they had a solid framework, he and his colleagues posted their idea under the moniker “Natural Equity” and continued working their day jobs. Success of their model would hinge on two factors; community-initiated drive to protect resources and long-term commitment by both local people and LaFranchi’s organization.
In 2006, Sebastian Marino, a community leader from Palau, approached LaFranchi to see if Natural Equity could help his community protect their reefs. It turned out that Palau was the perfect place to launch their new approach. “It’s a partnership where we can help people do what they are already struggling to do, in a place they belong to and technically even own,” he says. “This is the low-hanging fruit. Start here and then we can move the model on to more difficult areas.”
Now, LaFranchi and his organization focus on coral reefs in Micronesia, a scattering of 2,100 mostly tiny islands in the western Pacific Ocean.
Following the model initiated by LaFranchi and Marino in Palau, OneReef partners with people in several island communities to identify conservation priorities and bring appropriate scientists, technology, and funders into their projects.
In areas vulnerable to poaching, OneReef finds funding partners that support efforts to recruit, train, and equip local people as rangers who patrol for illegal activity. The word “remote” barely begins to describe the islands in Micronesia, and patrolling is a major challenge. Not only are the island communities distant from anything resembling a continent, but each island is tiny in size, far from the other islands, and either sparsely populated or not at all. Poachers can fish within protected areas far from shore, so it can be hard to intervene.
But hard is not impossible and necessity is the mother of invention. Deep generational knowledge of their reef and an ingrained drive to protect it led one island community to devise a floating ranger station, so they could more easily patrol the protected area. OneReef recognized the value of this novel idea and helped to fund its construction.
Now rangers can respond to illegal fishing events much more quickly. In what may be the first documented case of viral conservation, several other communities are building floating ranger stations in their own protected areas with support from OneReef.
Still, surveillance over such vast areas of open water is supremely challenging for the small communities in Micronesia. Working with the community in Northern Palau, OneReef brought ProtectedSeas into the partnership for a win-win arrangement. ProtectedSeas designs and develops powerful low-cost radar equipment designed to monitor marine protected areas. They go to test and pilot their M2 (Marine Monitor) radar in a remote region while local rangers got “eyes-in-the-sky’’ to help them patrol for poachers.
Requiring only electricity (one model is powered by solar panels) and internet access (admittedly a challenge in parts of Micronesia), the M2 system can monitor as far as five miles off-shore — even in darkness or inclement weather. Rangers can operate the system remotely and receive text alerts when vessels enter no-take zones.
While these improvements in patrolling are encouraging, monitoring reef health over time is critical to understanding how the ecosystem responds to conservation practices and informing modifications for best results.
Island communities have a long history of collecting and analyzing this kind of data — it is essential for survival on their remote islands. OneReef acknowledges and respects the deep local connection to and understanding of the habitat, which is the basis of their conservation model. In this, they have “found a really powerful way of combining traditional stewardship with modern science and technology solutions that are simple enough, cheap enough, and replicable enough to begin to significantly address a big problem.”
The partnership also serves as a boon to western conservation science. In OneReef partner communities, community members work alongside conventionally trained scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography to gather data using state-of-the-art photographic equipment and methods to survey specific reef sites every few years.
Scientists in San Diego assemble the thousands of photos from each study and render them into 3-D photomosaics — essentially building virtual reefs that they can “dive” into and study. Scientists examine the high-resolution images of the reef from their labs on the mainland and determine whether conservation strategies are working or not. The ability to dive into the reefs remotely reduces the need for expensive travel and allows the scientific teams to invest more heavily in conservation and restoration strategies.
Community scientists can share the virtual reef images directly with their neighbors, many of whom have never seen the reefs farther out than they can swim. Local people learn about the health of their reefs from neighbors who have personally gathered the data, and they can see the images with their own eyes, giving home-grown credibility to the process and management plan.
Since 2009, OneReef’s cooperative model has protected over 500,000 acres of reef in Micronesia at a fraction of the cost one might expect. Based on interest from other island communities, LaFranchi sees this as the beginning of a rapidly growing network of protected areas.
Each new agreement with island communities throughout the region increases OneReef’s credibility and fuels more interest in the program. They expect to have 1,000,000 acres under protection by 2022.
Because it is a long-term commitment to conservation driven by local people who stand on equal footing with scientists and funders, this novel approach can be applied to any habitat anywhere in the world. If LaFranchi has anything to say about it, OneReef’s work in Micronesia is just the first ripple in an ever-widening wave of significant, sustainable, community-driven habitat protection.
