Ornamental reef fish fisheries: New indicators of sustainability and human development at a coastal community level

• We designed two new indicators directed to marine ornamental fisheries.
• Human development for the inhabitants linked to ornamental fisheries is medium.
• This particular ornamental reef fish fishery is financially unsustainable.
• This particular ornamental reef fish fishery is ecologically sustainable.
• SWOT matrix provided strategies to optimize the company's sustainable fishing operations.

Ensuring sustainable fisheries and community development requires integrating and harmonizing the environmental, social and economic issues which in turn might lead to effective management plans. This paper describes a new methodology based on the Human Development Index (HDI). We transformed the HDI to adapt it to local and specific purposes and create a new set of indicators for assessing the sustainability of ornamental fish fisheries and the human development at a community level for the inhabitants linked to this activity. We chose a women-owned and operated marine ornamental fish business located along the coast of the Gulf of California as a study case. Socio-economic data, obtained in 2011 from the women associates and the inhabitants of their coastal community, show that monthly income and living conditions were still very modest. Results indicated an intermediate development and financially unsustainable but ecologically sustainable fisheries for the aquarium market. As captures, based on authorized and managed quotas by the Mexican Government, revealed an under-exploitation, a participatory SWOT analysis of the ornamental fish cooperative was carried out in order to provide information about the cooperative's current situation which helped to produce future business strategies to optimize the company's operations in a sustainable way. Our conclusion is that the cooperative is still “young” and needs time to stabilize in order to generate enough profits that would enable its women associates to increase their standard of living while respecting the sustainability of the marine resources. We also noted that such a business activity can be a good employment opportunity in small communities, regardless of gender, and that its sustainability is closely linked to ecological, and socio-economic factors.