WRI Stories Feed: Demystifying Fisheries

Immigration Linked to Degraded Ecosystem

Karen Bennett — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 12:12:19 -0500

Border security is not typically recognized as being tied to environmental changes, but in this recent article by The New York Times, the links are clear. It details how declining fish catches in northwest Africa are fueling immigration to Europe.

With fish populations in northwest Africa collapsing, regional economies are struggling and local populations are finding themselves without one of their staple foods. That means more people are willing to take greater risks by migrating for a fresh beginning in a new country.

Fishers with their catch

People everywhere depend on nature—that is, ecosystem services—for their well-being. Yet many of these services are in a state of decline. In fact, according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, nearly 2/3 of ecosystem services are in worse shape than they were a half-century ago. The bottom line of this finding? Nature’s benefits can no longer be taken for granted. According to the Times article, fish populations in Senegal and from other parts of the region were once abundant enough to support livelihoods. But now, families find they are barely scraping by. Major fish stocks are dwindling because of fishing by local boats as well as international fleets, including from the European Union, China, and Russia. This crash in natural resources is encouraging northwest African nationals to attempt migration to more abundant societies. In 2007, about 31,000 Africans attempted to flee to the Canary Islands, which serve as a gateway to Europe. Of these, 6,000 disappeared or died.

WRI’s Mainstreaming Ecosystem Services Initiative brochure–download

Northwest African governments, lured by the promise of money from international trawlers and economic growth, have driven one of their most important natural resources to depletion. European officials, on the other hand, saw that their own fish resources were depleted decades ago and arranged deals to harvest the seas of northwestern Africa. In both cases, decision makers did not realize that many of their decisions both depend on and impact the ecosystem services nature provides.

In northwest Africa, new government policies to attract international fishing fleets in the hopes of payments and economic growth were dependent on wild fish stocks remaining abundant. Likewise, decisions by European officials to exploit fishing grounds in Africa had unforeseen consequences because the ecosystem service was degraded. Motivated by hopes of economic growth and cheap food for their populations, European nations are instead faced with floods of undocumented immigrants. Recognizing the links between ecosystem services and development goals can help us protect ecosystems from development. Perhaps even more importantly, we need to consider how to invest in managing ecosystems for development. WRI is working to solve problems exactly like these in northwest Africa through our recently launched Mainstreaming Ecosystem Services Initiative. Download our brochure: What Are Ecosystems Doing For You? Mainstreaming Ecosystem Services Initiative

Strange Days in a Warming Arctic

Ian Fossberg — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 06:55:10 -0500

A recent holiday visit brought home how global warming is already affecting the way we live—starting at the top of the world.

When my wife and I made our holiday plans this year, we decided for purely sentimental reasons to take my mother to her tiny arctic Norwegian hometown for her first Christmas there since 1946. We had no idea that, along with the traditional Lutefisk dinners, marzipan-covered desserts and dancing around the Christmas tree, we were about to confront the more contemporary issues of the newly warming Arctic and the resource-management struggles of the people who inhabit this part of the world.

The community we visited is called Hasvik, which lies on the island of Sørøya. The name means, “The Southern Island”—ironic because this island finds itself 300 miles North of the Arctic Circle and isn’t “south” of too many other inhabited places on the planet. Humans have lived there on and off for thousands of years.

Hasvik, Norway (December 2007). Downtown Hasvik at lunchtime. Source: Ian Fossberg.

Then and Now

My ancestors came there “late,” arriving in the 1800s from points south and east in order to take advantage of the thriving fishing industry that had resulted from the rise in export of Norwegian fish. The community kept thriving in its own way until Hasvik’s population peaked in the 1960s, at around 1800 people. Of course to say that a 400-year-old community that had only grown to the size of 1800 souls was thriving wouldn’t sound right for any other place, but given its remote location and the harshness of life up there, they had done well.

My mother said when she was little, every year some fishermen drowned, women died in childbirth, and people even died from things like lockjaw from cutting themselves on rusty metal. There was no hospital and there was no doctor apart from what could be found after a 7-hour boat ride, weather-permitting. And so they lived as well as people could have, given their circumstances.

But the same rich fishing banks that had sustained them and helped them grow (however haltingly) became a problem as the community allowed itself to remain dependent on its small-boat fishing operations while huge trawlers from southern Norway as well as from Britain and Spain fished the waters further out. The fish stocks started to show the strain in the early 1970s. I remember the summer of 1973, when we first saw fishermen trying to make sense of fishing quotas that they had been given by the Government.

And that was the beginning of the end. Every time I visited from then on, more people had left and slowly the harbor emptied of its beautiful traditional wooden fishing boats.

Fast forward to December 2007, my wife, 80-year-old mother, daughter of 6 and I all traveled up to see the old place. As we flew through the high winds of the North and said goodbye to the sun somewhere over central Norway, my Mom explained to my daughter that the only reason her town even existed was because of the Gulf Stream heating it from all the way down in the Gulf of Mexico, a fact that was taught to all the children of her town from a young age. They almost worshipped it.

Her home region is the world’s northernmost year-round, ice-free coast and a beneficiary of the great ocean conveyor belt. But that heating effect doesn’t quite change where this place is on the planet, it just makes it warmer than the tundra of Siberia. Christmastime, therefore, was still going to be a pretty icy cold experience for the likes of us Washingtonians.

Or so we all believed.

The Disappearing Winter

As our plucky little propeller plane tottered onto the Hasvik runway in 60-mph winds, I immediately noticed two things. One was that it was raining, and, two, that there was no snow on the ground. When my wife stepped off the plane onto the tarmac, a gust of wind immediately took her glasses with it, and those glasses became a part of that dark arctic night, never to be seen again. Luckily my wife did see again when the postman appeared at my uncle’s house bearing his wife’s spare glasses, which the grapevine had informed him would fit my wife’s prescription. Time elapsed from glasses flying into the night to the kindly postman offering perfectly fitting extra pair: one half-hour. This is a small town’s small town. Everybody we met knew exactly who we were and why we were there. They also immediately waved around them and said, “Sorry we have no winter for you.”

No winter indeed. Of the 10 days that we spent in arctic Norway it only dipped below freezing for two days and then just barely. That used to be unheard of. We did need our coats and hats though, because the wind never goes below 30 mph and even a balmy 40 degrees can be mighty nippy. And the darkness of winter was still there. There was two hours of weak daylight a day with no sign of the sun but a slightly yellow horizon. At least the darkness was still as it should be!

Hasvik, Norway (December 2007) A place for hardy tourists? Source: Ian Fossberg.

With no real arctic winter to awe us, and in my desire for some authentic experiences, I decided that what we needed was a small sea voyage. We went to the dock early one morning and stood in the mist waiting for the boat to what locals call, “the City”, i.e. the town of Hammerfest – 9,000-strong and growing. I’ll get back to why it’s growing instead of dying out like Hasvik in a minute.

The boat was late and after a while a man asked us if we wanted to wait with him in his car. Bundled to the nines, we obviously looked like we weren’t used to standing on a dock in the dark while the locals looked like they were dressed for a springtime stroll through on the Washington Mall. After we accepted his offer and introduced ourselves, Geir immediately mentioned how spooky it was to have September weather in December.

It also turned out that he knew all of my relatives, had shopped in my grandfather’s general store when he was a child, and knew all about who had gone where and when. And it was true that almost every single kid or relative that I had played with as a child—as well as all of their siblings—had moved elsewhere. Geir, our benefactor, was himself going to move. He had taken a job with the huge natural gas field project in Hammerfest called Snøhvit, (Norwegian for Snow White). In one of those more ironic blasts of globalization, Snøhvit was about to start selling natural gas to Washington, DC. Geir was going to move his family south and then commute north to Hammerfest to work on a project that would have a direct relationship to the frying of my Sunday morning breakfasts back here at American University Park as well as the heating of a good many WRI employee homes!

So here was the reality, Hammerfest is growing with the gas field, and Hasvik is shrinking from over-fishing.

We made it back home to Hasvik on a boat ride so bumpy that even the locals got seasick and I managed to experience the sensation of having my feet leave the floor as the boat went into a trough only to then come crashing to the floor as the boat rose up the next wave, and then, in my attempt to force myself back to my feet, I would fly up into the air as the boat lurched back downward into the next trough.

Not Just the Ice Sheets Are Shrinking

Back in Hasvik, my cousin arrived with his family. He was born and raised on the island, had hiked and explored every bit of it, and had even kayaked around it. Even he had moved to where he could work as a geologist. It makes sense that someone that grew up in this dramatic landscape would want to study the nature of rocks, mountains, seabeds, and sediments.

Hasvik, Norway (December 2007) My Hasvik-born and bred cousin Frode (left), his Swedish wife Aasa (middle), and me. We had to hike up into the hills to find some winter. Normally the place we are standing in this picture would be under two meters of snow. Source: Ian Fossberg.

He took us for a hike one day up into a highland area where we finally found some snow and some frozen ponds. When we took a break, he pointed out a small town in the distance and said, “That is Dønnesfjord, and no one lives there anymore.” It was strange to hear him say it, with a little awe in his voice. My mother used to visit friends in Dønnesfjord when I was little kid. And here we were looking down on a perfectly kept little town with a church and a school and nobody around. It looked doubly strange in the half-light of an arctic noon.

The island is filled with abandoned villages and settlements, some say they go back to the stone age, but this one was abandoned in our era in a country that consistently ranks as having one of the world’s highest standards of living. Even being in a rich country can’t save some places from the ultimate irrelevance of simple abandonment. And all this is only about 70 miles from the industrial dynamo that is Snøhvit. As we walked back down the mountain, my cousin said, “In a few years, Hasvik will be nothing but a summer vacation retreat for people from other places.” The statistics bear that out. In the 1960’s the population hovered around 1800 people and now it has diminished to around 1,000. On average, about 24 people a year move out of the community. Since the older ones tend to stay behind while the younger ones move away, the death rate is accelerating while the birth rate is decelerating.

Another reason why my cousin may be right about the vacation retreat idea is that the area around Hasvik is drop-dead gorgeous and could actually thrive on its good looks if more people knew about it.

Of course, if the Greenland ice sheet melts sufficiently to disrupt the Gulf Stream, as some scientists are claiming is possible, then this slow, orderly emptying of Hasvik will have been for the best.

Hasvik, Norway (December 2007) A Porch light in the Twilight. Source: Ian Fossberg.

On Christmas Eve we went to the church (as is the custom in small Norwegian towns) to listen to a sermon delivered by a priest who had flown in from southern Norway (they don’t have their own priests anymore in Hasvik). He seemed like a nice guy, but he also seemed almost foreign, like he came from the normal conduct of things into this slowly disappearing, and unnaturally warm place. After the service, we visited my grandparents’ graves and lit a candle on them. As we walked away one of the kids said, “The flame’s already gone out, should we light it again?”

My uncle, who has taught three generations of schoolchildren in Hasvik, just shook his head. He knew it would just flicker out.

Glimmer of Hope for Embattled African Lake

Thu, 31 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

by Charles Mkoka

Unsustainable utilization practices on Lake Chiuta - which is shared by the two Southern African states of Malawi and Mozambique - and the poor state of policing and control of fishing activities have led to conservation conflicts which are rocking the management of the African lake.

A glimmer of hope, however, appears more evident as a result of continued consultations by authorities among communities that derive benefits from lake that lies on the frontier of the two countries.

The local conflicts have arisen from differences over the management of the Lake by fisheries authorities from the two neighboring countries. While Malawi is implementing conservation efforts to ensure sustainable fisheries management, the Mozambique side is relatively unchecked. The scenario has created fears that the lake resources will be subjected to over-exploitation, resulting in reduced fish stocks in the long run.

While Malawi and Mozambique share Lake Chiuta, the fishing policies and regulations for the two countries are different and the two countries have different enforcement capacities. This has been another source of conflict as there have been contentions on such issues as fish species, fish sizes to catch, close seasons, demarcated fish sanctuaries, net gear size and type as well as methods of fishing.

“Since the advent of colonial rule, fisheries management in Malawi has been based on a centralized approach,” said Friday Njaya, Divisional Fisheries Manager for Southern Malawi. “Management decisions have been made with little or no consultation with the user community. Biological consideration informed much of the policy, legislative and resource management outcomes.”

Starting in 1994, however, there has been renewed interest in the involvement of local communities in fisheries management through participation. One outcome of the Lake Chiuta crisis has been the formation of community based fisheries management committee such as Beach Village Committee (BVC) and Fisheries Association (FA), among others.

These communal groups have been formed in all the three major lake areas of Malawi. This follows the recent passing of a new Fisheries Management Act that provides for the establishment of co-management initiatives and, through a decentralization policy, allocates activities to be done at district level. The fisheries co-management program has been a model example where local communities involved in the management of fisheries resources can help change the situation for the better.

According to Transborder Dialogue, the official newsletter of the Southern Africa Network for Transboundary Natural Resources Management (TBNRM), the countries sharing the lake have their own policies and regulations governing the use and management of fisheries resources in Lake Chiuta. Fishermen have therefore tended to take advantage of the side where regulations are regarded “weak.”

“Before the collaborative management approach,” said Village chief Asibu Saute Ngokwe, “communities were being undermined when it came to discussing issues in their localities. Organization came to implement activities without consulting the village leaders. What they did not realize is that as leaders we can resolve our problems. All we want is to be given a chance to choose our own destiny.”

A recent community dialogue between Malawi and Mozambique that was convened by the Malawi Fisheries department has demonstrated that community involvement is helpful in deriving solutions to natural resources management. The dialogue was aimed at developing a common approach to resolving the conflict and identifying community level institutions that will implement and monitor agreed strategies. The communities recognized the different fishing practices used in both countries, including the use of different types of nets.

After years of tension over fishing practices and access to resources along the lake, local fisherman from the two sides have agreed on strategies for their respective countries that promise to deliver a common approach to fisheries management in Lake Chiuta.

Only through transborder local dialogues have these two communities begun to resolve this issue and wait for further discussions at policy and ministerial levels. Because local communities have been intimately involved in the identification of problems and the development of solutions, this network will act as a case study in addressing further border disputes in southern Africa. (WRI Features, 670 words)