2 posts tagged with "Community Based"

Marine and coastal biodiversity and ecosystem services are degraded in many areas worldwide due to human interference resulting from fishing, tourism, pollution, and mining. Guidelines for an evidence-based, participatory and community-led management approach ‘Locally Managed Marine Area (LMMA)’ provides a planning and strategic approach to development of coastal cities and implementing Integrated Coastal Zone Management. Here we take note of the existing references of case studies that shows successful implementation in Fiji, Kenya and other countries in Asia and Africa. LMMA approach integrates concerns about the current state of degradation and ensures that ecological services of these resource systems are sustainably managed in the future by community driven efforts; with aspects of food security, resource conservation, local employment and income of local fishers and tourism operators embedded. We focus on an empirical assessment initiated though a collaborative effort to outline and set up guidelines for establishing a LMMA network for Inhambane, Mozambique in discussion with stakeholders (fishermen, tourism operators, private and community actors, and selected government officials). An outcome from the study was disseminated to local authorities to ensure that solutions for managing degradation coastal and marine ecosystems could be placed on priority as planning for implementation of Sustainable Development Goal 14 and for creating coastal cities as sustainable economic hubs and resilient coastal communities.

There is great interest and rapid progress around the world in developing sets of indicators of marine ecosystem integrity for assessment and management. However, the complexity of coastal marine ecosystems can challenge such efforts. To address this challenge, an expert-based, hierarchical, and adaptive approach was developed with the objectives of healthy marine ecosystems and community partnerships in monitoring and management. Small sets of the top-ranked indicators of ecosystem integrity and associated human pressures were derived from expert-rankings of lists of identified candidate indicators of the status of, and pressures on, each of 17 ecosystem features, organized within 8 elements in turn within 3 overlapping aspects of ecosystem health. Over 200 experts played a role in rating the relative value of 1035 candidate indicators. A panel of topic experts was assigned to each of the 17 ecosystem features to apply 21 weighted indicator selection criteria. Selection criteria and candidate indicators were identified through literature reviews, expert panels, and surveys, and they were evaluated in terms of the experts' judgements of importance to the health of Canada's Pacific marine ecosystems. This produced a flexible, robust, and adaptable approach to identifying representative sets of indicators for any scale and for any management unit within Canada's Pacific. At the broadest scale, it produced a top 20 list of ecosystem state and pressure indicators. These top indicators, or other sets selected for smaller regions, can then guide the development of both regional and nested local monitoring programs in a way that maximizes continuity while including locally unique values. This hierarchical expert-based approach was designed to address challenges of complexity and scale and to enable efficient selection of useful and representative sets of indicators of ecosystem integrity while also enabling the participation of broad government and stakeholder communities. Full publication