Adaptive Fishery Management in Indonesia
EDF | 2017
In July and August of 2017, I traveled to Indonesia and delivered trainings to local stakeholders on adaptive fisheries assessment and management to support their ongoing efforts to manage the Lampung Blue Swimming Crab Fishery.
Indonesia, the world’s center of marine biodiversity and its second biggest fishing power, is key to recovering global oceans and fisheries. One of our current focuses in Indonesia is to implement a model of sustainable fisheries management for the blue swimming crab fishery.
EDF and Starling began working on the crab fishery in 2015 with a multi-stakeholder workshop that identified the need for a model of management and spurred creation of a stakeholder collaboration forum called the Crab Community (Komunitas Rajungan). EDF and Starling used this as a starting point to secure formal leadership of the Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries (MMAF) and stakeholder commitment for a “Blue Swimming Crab Sustainable Fishery Management Initiative” (BSC Initiative) focused on the Java Sea.
MMAF has worked with stakeholders to select a pilot in Lampung Province, representing about 10% of national crab production. They have also created representative stakeholder groups that include MMAF sustainable fisheries officials, scientists and economists, crab industry representatives, fishermen, processors, and local NGOs.
I worked with the EDF Indonesia and Starling team to develop two workshops for these stakeholders. The workshops used the goals the stakeholders had defined in a previous workshop and showed them how to use an adaptive management framework - choose initial management strategies based on their goals, collect and analyze data, and revise the management based on the results - so that they could create a fishery management plan for Lampung.
The stakeholders have since drafted a BSC fishery management plan for Lampung and are beginning to implement it.