[ Coastal management ]

Living with the sea

[ By Martin Foth ]


The fishermen of the small provincial town of Narra, on the Philippines island of Palawan, have a problem: for years, their nets have been catching ever fewer fish. In Bahia de St. Vicente, an industrial suburb of the South Chilean seaport of Concepción, refineries and industrial plants pollute the air and water. Ever since a major fire in a chemicals plant there 10 years ago, the people in its neighbouring residential area have been living in fear. On Providencia, a small Colombian island in the Caribbean sea, the 5,000 inhabitants feel threatened by the tourism industry’s plans. They are anxious that the proposed apartment and hotel developments will not only destroy the quiet life on the island, but also rob the local fishermen and farmers of their livelihoods by importing cheap goods.

Palawan, St. Vicente, Providencia – as different as the three coastal strips are, their problems are typical. More than 1.5 billion people live along the world’s coasts. The impacts of over-fishing, environmental degradation, industrialisation and mass tourism are giving the majority of them a hard time. In many places, the interests of influential business groups and nature conservation and environmental protection, industrialised exploitation of nature and traditional rights of use clash head-on.

Social and political conflicts on the coasts appear almost archetypal. That also presents a big opportunity. Whoever is able to develop concrete ideas for sustainable use of the coastal zones and include as many of the conflicting interest as possible, will have good prospects of actually implementing some of them. This thought was the starting point of the “Coastman” project, which InWEnt is coordinating on behalf of the German Development Ministry (BMZ) and the Bremen State Office for Development Cooperation .


Interdisciplinary cooperation

“Integrated Coastal Zone Management” is the heading under which the various Coastman activities are carried out. At their centre is the eight-months training programme “Sucomar” (Sustainable Use of Coastal and Marine Resources). Some 160 participants from Southeast Asia, Latin America and Southern Africa have completed the course in Bremen over the last eight years. They included staff from environment ministries and national park administrations as well as young marine biologists, economists and social workers. The interdisciplinary cooperation across national, cultural and professional demarcation lines is part of the training concept. The seaport and Hanseatic city of Bremen is an ideal location for it because it enables the theoretical training programme to be combined with insights into the practice of port management, logistics, fish processing and marine research.

Romeo Cabungcal, a graduate of the Sucomar course, now works for the Philippines Agriculture Ministry on Palawan island. Together with the local authorities and fishermen in Narra, he has developed a concept for dealing with the diminishing yields from fishing. The decline in the catches could not be halted even though the fishermen cast their nets illegally in a nearby official nature reserve.

“We began with an environmental study,” says Cabungcal. “We wanted to find out why the fish stocks were declining and what impacts that had.” The findings were discussed in workshops. In the end, all participants largely reached consensus on a package of measures. They included the setting up of further nature reserves in which absolutely no fishing was to be done so that the fish stocks could replenish themselves in the long term. “The police and Coast Guard have committed themselves to controlling the areas,” Cabungcal says.


Lesson in organising

Because that meant the fishermen’s catches would decline further, alternative means for them to earn a living had to be found. A loan from the provincial government has enabled the founding of the first algae farms for producing dried algae for export to Japan. However, money alone was not enough. The fishermen’s families also had to have basic training to learn how to handle algae. “The Sucomar course taught me how to organise such an overall process,” says Cabungcal. True, at the beginning the integrated coastal zone planning didn't work so smoothly in practice as in theory.

Nevertheless, the experiences with the Coastman methods adapted to Philippines conditions have in the meantime been so positive that 22 other municipalities on Palawan have adopted them. That is the Programme’s intention. Right from the start, the Coastman project has seen itself as a multiplier for integrated coastal zone management. That is why besides the eight-month Sucomar course there is also a 14-day train-the-trainer course for participants who already hold leading positions. Course participants who aim to spread the Coastman approach are given the support they need to anchor it in their homelands.

By this means more than 100 staff of the Colombian Environment Ministry from all provinces have got to know the Coastman methods. The driving force was June Marie Mow, of the Colombian Caribbean island of San Andrés. She took part in one of the 14-day train-the-trainer courses in Bremen and now supports the people of the neighbouring small island of Providencia in their struggle to achieve sustainable development of tourism. “The Coastman methods also work well with very simple people who can hardly write,” says Mow.

This means the islanders can stand up for their interests although they would not be able to hand in an opinion in sophisticated legalese, as is usual in Colombia. “The results of the Coastman workshops can also be well presented by international development organisations,” Mow adds. For they want as great a participation of the people as possible. Thus, in the meantime the Inter-American Development Bank and the Netherlands government have together assumed the financing of a cooperative on Providencia which processes locally caught fish and locally grown fruit and vegetables into simple products for the eco-tourism business. A limited number of individual tourists who still spend their money in Providencia's small boarding houses and restaurants will continue to be welcomed by the local people.

The Coastman methods are aimed at solving very explicit problems. However, the programme's participants are told upfront that coastal zones are almost always regions in which varying interests compete with each other. These are farming, fishing, aquaculture, nature conservation, tourism, industry and so on. The challenge is to grasp the conflicts between these areas and develop guidelines appropriate to the prevailing social and natural conditions and political directives. The training gives the participants the tools they need for that task. They learn how to plan such processes, reach decisions and monitor their implementation, and manage coastal regions in a sustainable way.


International network

Coastman has in the meantime developed into an international network. At present, about 60 coastal protection experts in South America and Southeast Asia are cooperating with each other. They meet twice a year at a coastal location. After all, the problems of the coastal areas don't stop at national borders, and some experiences and measures can easily be transferred to another country. Learning from each other plays an important role, meaning that the wheel doesn't have to be reinvented time and again.

The Chilean environmental scientist Adolfo Acuña has focused on the conflict over the industrial area of St. Vicente for the last 10 years. While it is true that the refineries and industrial plants provide jobs, they have also repeatedly been a cause for complaint by the local people. Acuña was able by means of academic studies to describe the dangers in concrete terms, but they had no practical consequences. That situation did not change until the people became active as well. After 18 months of an education campaign and workshops attended by more than 5,000 people, a compromise was reached which included the relocation of a particularly hazardous gas company.

“With Coastman, we get out of the universities and reach the decision-makers in politics, public administrations and industry,” says Acuña. He hopes the Chilean success story will fire up his network colleagues in Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. Due also to their common language the South-South exchange works better in South America than in Southeast Asia. But Romeo Cabungcal of the Philippines island of Palawan also sees the regional context of the environmental problems. “Fish catches are not only declining here,” he says. “Our Coastman colleagues in Indonesia and Vietnam have the same worries.”