Three years in the making, the International Coral Reef Symposium has opened in the Australian city of Cairns with a call to governments around the world to take action to preserve coral reefs.
At the heart of the conference are the themes of coral reef science, management and conservation, with some 2,000 international delegates in attendance.
Presenter: Liam Cochrane
Speaker: Professor Jamal Jompa, director, Centre for Coral Reef Research, Hasanuddin University
JOMPA: Frankly speaking this is a good way of really sharing ideas so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel and solving this problem, because the problems are really very serious, we cannot wait too long to think and to study, but we really need to have actions. In the Indonesian case, we do have a lot of problems, I think just like other cities and maybe developed countries in natural resource utilisation and especially coral reef utilisation. So the way in terms of lessons learned from Indonesia is that we do understand, we know exactly around 65 per cent of this threat is the driving force or really the cause of degradation is coming from human activities, and the human there is maybe about 80 per cent coming from fishermen who either doing destructive fishing by bombing or cyanide fishing, or over-fishing. And so we instead of focussing on studying and looking at our coral reefs, we actually also are trying to study and approach and really doing something with the community. What their understanding of the research is, what is their kind of expectations for the future, and what the solutions that we can do together, because as you know Indonesia is a very big country, law enforcement I think is the least expectation you can really expect to solve the problem. So we rely on the public participation, especially those who contributed the most to the problem. So instead of them as an object, as a troublemaker or problem source, we actually invited them to work together to be problem solvers.
COCHRANE: How do you do that in a practical sense though, how do you get fishermen say who are using explosives to fish and damaging the coral reefs or poison, cyanide perhaps? How do you try and get them to help protect the reefs?
JOMPA: Right, that’s a good question. I think without the support of the Indonesian government through a project, what we call COREMAP, Coral Rehabilitation Management program, I don’t think we could do this because we involve masses of people around Indonesia to work at the community level. We send a lot of people to talk to the community, to work together and of course this project has quite a sophisticated structure so that we can really expect that people eventually institutionalise themselves in working together toward a better future. It takes a long time, this is not one day or one month or one year, it takes like three years actually to prepare the action together. And we start from very basic things like protecting some of this area, so instead of opening 100 per cent, we ask them, hey, we have this open for 100 years, why don’t we allow this maybe ten per cent of the reefs just to give them a break, to preserve them for the future and because theoretically it’s very good for the close area, but also good for the other areas. And they really like the idea because they know exactly they need it but they need to be strengthened, there needs to be a given trust and mandate and authority to be able to really manage these small reserve areas. So we started with that and eventually after three years later, we have more than 400 these kind of small-scale marine coral reef sanctuaries. And along the way we also put so many kind of approaches for public awareness, including media partnership and education and so on and so forth, including law enforcement.
COCHRANE: I guess if people do stop fishing in particular areas and give the reefs a break, there is the consequential loss of income, that they’re not getting money from those fish that they might have been catching by using explosives or cyanide. What about the role of other kind of industries to come in and replace that fishing income; things like tourism and scuba diving and getting people in and getting tourist dollars in that way? Is there a role for that in the context of reef conservation?
JOMPA: Yes of course but coming back to the first statement that you made, closing some of the reefs is not really reducing their income in the way that the reefs have been destroyed all over, it’s just like an engine or a factory, the whole factory of that reef can only produce 20 per cent of the optimum product. So they are really not doing well, the reefs are sick. So they need to help these reefs to recover and by closing some of them actually not reducing their possibility, not even for a very long time, but giving a lot more better chance at recovering. But then we do have kind of incentive of these good people, so that we open a lot of possibilities of other sources of income from very small scale livelihood, aquaculture and also open for small-scale tourist operator, because we don’t want to of course that the whole tourist operator will benefit from these thousands and thousands of people. Usually it’s not that simple, so we mostly focus on these small enterprises in the short term. In the long term I think I agree with you that we need to have this potential to be tapped into.
2011 ABC