UNDP Archipelagic & Island States Forum Joint Research Program
Fishcoin Incentivising Mark Release Recapture
In early 2018, during a trip to Lombok, Indonesia, I was out on a handline fishing vessel with three local fishermen when it occured to me that we may be able to use Fishcoin tokens as an incentive to tag and release juvenile fish instead of landing them (the tokens can be redeemed for mobile air-time top ups). I wrote a Medium post about it then and you can see that and the footage of the trip here. Basically it was about rewarding fishers with tokens to get valuable data on who is fishing, how often, and what they are catching to help us understand the fishing effort and what the population of fish stocks may be. Such an initiative could also help the fishery become more productive and more economical.
A program like this was to be a part of what eventually would become an activity of the Fishcoin Foundation to engage artisanal fishers who are unlikely to receive Fishcoin tokens from local or domestic fish buyers for providing traceability data. A percentage of the Fishcoin token commissions from the more commercial supply chain transactions would fund these programs thus providing Fishcoin token buyers with an additional ESG/CSR element to communicate to their customers, and to provide fisheries scientists and governments with much needed data to better manage fisheries and potentially allocate access rights to these artisanal/small-scale fishers.
Whilst I was lecturing a course at James Cook University, Singapore, I met and discussed the concept with Dr. Neil Hutchinson, a marine ecologist and course coordinator at the Singapore campus. Dr. Hutchinson helped shape the concept, entered the Three Minute Thesis competition, and won!
With the added momentum, we teamed up with Dr. Gustaf Mamangkey, a marine biologist of Sam Ratulangi University (UNSRAT) in Sulawesi, Indonesia, and applied for a grant from the Joint Research Program of the Archipelagic & Island States Forum of the United Nations Development Programme. A program we learned about whilst attending the launch of the AIS Blue Startup Hub.
Thankfully we became recipients of the grant however all the contingencies we had written in about the Covid-19 pandemic were now realities and we had to execute the project without any travel between the teams in Singapore and Indonesia. Indeed, with restrictions in place within those countries, it was looking like no in-person training was going to be possible and training videos were produced. Fortunately, Covid containment measures and contact tracing improved, and the UNSRAT team were able to conduct Train-the-Trainer workshops on fish tagging, and then workshops with fishers on how to tag fish and use the Fishcoin enabled mFish mobile application.
It has been a challenging journey so far but as you can see in the video above, we now have fishers successfully tagging fish at sea and releasing them! We are looking forward to expanding the program with more local fishing communities, and getting data coming in from the capture of tagged fish.
Thank you to Dr. Neil Hutchinson, Dr. Gustaf Mamangkey, and Team UNSRAT! Stay tuned, more to come!
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