When Imanuel Mofu dove down to the reef fringing Boo Island in early March last year, he knew immediately that something was amiss. The 32-year-old patrolman and his fellow crewmembers had inspected the colourful corals many times before. Now, they lay in pieces, bombed by fishermen to kill fish for easy collection.
“I was very sad to see this. A large part of the reef was gone,” recalls Mofu. Only one month before, another crew had been arrested for dropping explosives on a reef nearby that is also part of the Kofiau-Boo Islands Marine Protected Area (MPA), which is located in Raja Ampat, an archipelago in the province of West Papua in Indonesia’s far east.
It is rare that perpetrators get caught, Mofu says. Monitoring the park, which covers 148,979 hectares, an area about twice the size of Singapore, and contains a staggering 44 small islands, is no easy feat. Mofu heads out on patrols up to 10 times a month, yet no one can be everywhere at once, and the reserve lacks the resources to send out staff around the clock.
Most of the time, only traces of illegal fishing practices are found. That can be corals blasted to shreds. It can be unexploded, homemade fish bombs, sunk to the ocean floor. Sometimes, it is dead sharks, thrown back into sea after their fins had been cut. Every violation is meticulously documented by patrolmen to eventually get ahead of the offenders, increasingly through mobile applications.
Mofu is from Arborek, an indigenous village that is part of an Indonesian government programme to boost tourism in the area. His community relies on the reefs, not just for food—about a quarter of the ocean’s fish depend on healthy corals—but also because they attract visitors. And so, several years ago, he decided to join the patrol teams that scout the park to help keep it safe.
Commitment from communities and the local government has been a key ingredient to West Papua’s success in safeguarding its rich marine ecosystems, says Meity Mongdong, who manages Conservation International’s West Papua programme.
When the group surveyed the area’s incredible biodiversity and released the findings together with other organisations like the Nature Conservancy and the World Wide Fund for Nature in 2003, authorities promptly invited all customary leaders and other stakeholders to Tomolol village in the south of Raja Ampat to officially declare that the region needed protection, and that no more destructive fishing would be carried out. In 2006, the first two MPAs were introduced. Four more were added two years later. Today, more than a dozen parks are scattered across the region.
“Communities are extremely supportive of MPAs,” says Mark Erdmann, who is vice president for Conservation International’s Asia-Pacific marine programmes, and has provided technical support to conservation projects for many years. “They know that if you don’t restrict commercial fishing, outsiders will come in and damage the ecosystems that their livelihoods depend on.”
More and more, villagers are recognised as critical stakeholders in conservation planning and management. In 2014, Indonesia established its MPA management authority (UTPD), which has since been turned into a collaborative institution to allow authorities and communities to look after marine parks and govern financial resources together. It is a trend that has emerged across Southeast Asia, notes Erdmann.
“In recent years, a major change in marine conservation has been a growing belief that it should be bottom-up,” he says. “Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, MPAs were set up through a top-down process. At the national level, somebody in a faraway skyscraper would decide on a new MPA, draw a line on the map, and drop out of the sky onto these communities. And they, of course, were not very happy about that.”
“No one likes to be told what to do,” he continues. “It’s far more effective to bring communities on board to give them a sense of ownership and ensure the area has value to them.” Ongoing education and outreach efforts are important too to make sure villagers don’t forget about the perils posed by overfishing, he adds.
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