Blue Ventures Conservation | Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship 2015 - YouTube

I am trying to create a world in which people interact very differently with the ocean.

In which people understand that taking less out of the sea

actually gives everybody a huge amount more.

There is no asset class in the world

that recovers as quickly as fisheries can

if we just give them time and we know this.

But we are stuck on how we get there.

The decline of fish stocks worldwide

is a critical problem for livelihoods and for food security.

About 97% of the world's fishes live in the developing world.

These fish stocks are collapsing because of

over-exploitation and with climate change, these problems are only becoming much more severe.

I recognized, increasingly, that conservation wasn't just about me, a biologist,

counting species.

Conservation needed new tools.

It needed entrepreneurship,

it needed social marketing,

it needed new ways to engage people.

I decided to hang up my diving fins

and really try to develop business-based solutions to the problems I've seen.

So I was a reluctant social entrepreneur.

Our work as an organization addresses

the pressing problem by working with

people that depend on the sea more than anyone else on the planet,

some of the poorest coastal communities in Africa.

And listening to them and understanding what the barriers are that

they face when we talk about conservation.

We have come up with approaches, we have come up with new models,

new ways of designing marine protected areas

whose goal isn’t necessarily conserving by diversity,

but recovering fisheries.

In 2004, Blue Ventures encouraged residents of

coastal Madagascar to try cordoning off a small section of their octopus fishing area

for a designated period of time.

When the area re-opened,

the community was surprised to discover what had happened.

We did this trial, first in 2004, and the result was good, production was very significant.

As the production increased, all the other villages became interested in setting up reserves. They saw the benefits.

By targeting the fisheries that are important to people first,

using this closure model,

here in Madagascar, the octopus recovered with a monthly internal rate of return of 92%.

Doubling your money in a month.

So we use these very fast reproducing species that are important for local markets

to demonstrate to communities,

recovering fisheries can be the best investment opportunity out there.

Because the products in the reserve are so abundant, our catch earns us a lot of money.

We can use it to buy clothes and food.

And there is even more money left over, which we can save.

We employ community members that we train to

collect fisheries data on the catches that they bring out of the water

from one day to the next.

We use a number of approaches including data books on beaches

and mobile phones and all kinds of apps that we are developing to

streamline the process to improve it's efficiency

and we can track the effectiveness of those protected areas.

For the mangrove reserve, you can now take any products from it, crabs, seashells, everything.

But cutting its trees is forbidden.

When Blue Ventures works with the communities,

it gives them full responsibility

about the establishment of the protected area,

For example, it's the communities who are responsible for mapping out the boundaries of the reserve.

Most excitingly as a conservationist,

what we have seen is that this approach

catalyzes interest at a local level

in conservation writ large

in creating marine parks, permanent marine reserves, within which

all forms of fishing are prohibited to enable other stocks to recover.

The first time you heard about the idea of doing a reserve,

what was your first thought?

Crazy foreigners.

Blue Ventures now works with the communities to create mangrove,

coral and sea grass reserves on thousands of square miles of

ocean along with training workshops and community exchanges

fisheries authorities in Madagascar,

Mauritius and Tanzania have adopted the model, with others in progress.

Blue Ventures has also integrated family planning

and maternal and child health into its work,

impacting tens of thousands of coastal residents.

We need a whole new approach to the way that we

get people talking about conservation

by demonstrating in a very visible, immediate and tangible way

that conservation reaps dividends and

gets people behind the movement, and that's what we can do.