When Tubigon launched a Coastal Resource Management Program (CRMP) in 1992, the municipality in the island province of Bohol in central Philippines was starting to show the symptoms of a major ecosystem in crisis.

With the municipal waters of the town, whose name literary means "plenty of water", almost twice Tubigon’s land area, it was natural that about 45 percent of its almost 41,000 population depended directly or indirectly on the resources of the coastal ecosystem for their food and livelihood.

As pointed out in World Resources 2000-2001, a collaborative project of the World Resources Institute, United Nations Development Program, United Nations Environment Program and the World Bank:

"Coastal ecosystems provide a wide array of goods and services; they host the world’s primary ports of commerce; they are the primary producers of fish, shellfish, and seaweed for both human and animal consumption; and they are also a considerable source of fertilizer, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, household products, and construction materials."

Tubigon’s coastal ecosystems performed most of those functions in varying degrees of importance.

Thus, by the time the town council launched the CRMP, the municipality’s fishery resources were overexploited, a sizeable portion of the mangrove forests converted into fishponds and some 50 percent of coral reefs damaged through illegal and unsustainable fishing methods. Siltation threatened the luxuriant sea grass beds.

Moreover, it was not just the locals that threatened to destroy Tubigon’s coastal ecosystem. People coming from other parts of the country were also exploiting Tubigon’s rich fishing grounds, many of them using the same -- or even more destructive – methods the local fishers were using that degraded ecological balance and resulted in a significant decrease in fishery harvest. The use of dynamite, trawl and cyanide were just some of the methods that wrought havoc on the fragile ecosystem. Excessive extraction of other resources like mangroves, corals and white sand hastened the decline of what used to be biodiversity rich coasts.

Tubigon was not alone in its predicament. As the World Resources 2000-2001 reported, in fishery, for instance, more than a quarter of all fish stocks worldwide were already depleted as of 1999. In other parts of the world, small fishermen, like those in Tubigon, were also seeing the steady loss of livelihood or drop in income over the last two decades.

But the Tubigon people were lucky. Unlike other communities that never got to see the error of their ways until it was too late, researchers from the Silliman University in the neighboring island of Negros visited the town and pronounced its coastal and marine resources as either depleted or destroyed because of destructive fishing activities in the area.

The diagnosis was enough to convince then Mayor Eufracio Mascariñas that something drastic was needed to reverse the decline, hence, the CRMP. In the beginning, the program was a mere coastal law enforcement initiative -– sea-borne patrols were fielded to discourage illegal fishing, the forerunner of the present Bantay Dagat (literally sea guardian) teams. Incumbent Mayor Paul Lasco, in a move untypical of Filipino politicians, pursued -– even expanded -– his predecessor’s initiative, giving Tubigon the distinction of being the first coastal town in Bohol -– and one of the very few in the whole Philippines -– to have adopted a coastal resource management code.

The actual municipal ordinance actually goes by the unwieldy title of "A Comprehensive Municipal Code Providing for the