Right-sizing as a strategy for allocating fishing effort in a defined marine ecosystem: A Philippines case study

Over the last four decades in the Philippines, a range of management tools such as marine protected area (MPA) establishment and coastal resources management (CRM) that includes localized species-specific management, marine habitat rehabilitation, and organizing communities for increased participation in planning and decision-making have led to improvements of marine habitats and fish stocks in areas where such tools were applied. In spite of these management advances, fishers particularly in the municipal fisheries sector continue to observe declines in either the quantity or quality of their catch, and attribute this not only to the continued use of highly efficient and ecologically destructive fishing gears, but also, the unregulated numbers of fishers and gears within municipal waters. Recognizing this as a pivotal challenge, the USAID-funded Ecosystems Improved for Sustainable Fisheries (ECOFISH) Project developed a process for the right-sizing of fishing effort as a potential application of the ecosystems approach to fisheries management (EAFM) to directly address the issue of unregulated fishing effort in Philippine municipal fisheries. The objective is to determine via a participatory process a configuration of fishing effort that can be sustainably supported by the ecosystem, and at the same time, can provide adequate fish catches to support the livelihood needs of fishers in a defined marine key biodiversity area (MKBA). The ecosystem and livelihood tradeoffs are investigated using the Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) modeling and simulation tool. The entire process adopts a multi-stakeholder set-up that featured highly participatory learning activities, consensus-building negotiations between local government units (LGUs), and science-based decision-making workshops. All in all, it consists of strategically tailored yet adaptive sessions to effectively engage stakeholders in understanding the concept of fishing effort right-sizing, to acquaint participants with the basic biological and ecological principles governing the fisheries, and subsequently, to raise the participants' confidence in the decision-making and negotiation processes. The consensus-based MKBA-wide fishing effort targets considered both the system-scale and the diverse localized management priority objectives of the different user representatives. Across the 8 ECOFISH MKBAs, improving equity in the access of fisheries resource benefits emerged as a principal priority objective. Improving the ecosystem structure as evidenced by large, predatory fishes and minimizing fisher displacement outweighed maximizing catch and incomes as overriding priorities in the decision-making. The project envisions that the consensus-based fishing effort allocation will ultimately serve as basis for the regulated issuance of fisheries licenses by the respective LGUs and for the right-sizing process to serve as a model for determining fishing effort allocation options in other municipal fisheries systems in the country.