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In the Asia Pacific, community-based marine management is widely recognized as the most successful vehicle for conservation. Communities are often heavily dependent on the resources for food, medicine, storm protection and income. Communities are also most often the resource owners and the most able to effectively manage them. As a result, our work is closely aligned with the Locally-Managed Marine Area (LMMA) Network.

Our program has also conducted workshops at regional and international conferences in the Asia Pacific and worked on individual campaigns with local partners, such as the Fair Catch campaign in Hawaii that aims to address declines in inshore fish. But to date, our sustained work has focused primarily on the LMMA network and with the country-level networks in Fiji and Papua New Guinea, where we have program offices.

In Fiji and Papua New Guinea, we have helped build capacity in strategic communications in government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, academic institutions and communities. We have also helped our partners to continuously utilize these tools by directly engaging policy makers and the media through briefings and other outreach events. We are currently working with our partners to harness the capacity that now exists in these countries and launch social marketing campaigns.

Because of the many requests for our services, we are now exploring opportunities to expand our program and export our model of engagement to other countries in the Asia Pacific. We are also working with our partners on engaging regional initiatives to help create more support for community management and stronger ocean protections at a national and international level. In addition, for issues such as climate change and ocean acidification, communities can and must develop adaptive management programs. But it will ultimately take a global effort to address the issues and SeaWeb is working with its partners to raise the voice of developing island nations in this and other global debates on the health of our oceans.

For more information, please e-mail apinfo@seaweb.org.