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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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The stakeholders have since drafted a BSC fishery management plan for Lampung and are beginning to implement it.