Community-Led Conservation Makes Waves
By: J Lienau Thompson
Tags: Climate Action, Indigenous Climate Action, Racial Justice, Science, Environment

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.

Bumphead Parrotfish, an important fish to Palauan culture. Image: Tracey Jennings, Coral Reef Image Bank

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.