When Protection Meets the Sea: Rethinking Marine Protected Areas with Fishing Communities
DELHI, February 5 (IPS) - Melanie Brown has been fishing salmon in Bristol Bay, Alaska, for more than 30 years. An Indigenous fisherwoman and a coordinating committee member of the World Forum of Fisher Peoples, she speaks about the sea with deep care and lived knowledge.
When interviewed for IPS on Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), a global conservation policy introduced by the IUCN in 1999, Brown sounded both hopeful and cautious.
“It’s interesting,” she said. “Where I fish in Bristol Bay, if you follow the river upstream, it eventually reaches a lake system. Right at the point where the lake meets the river, there is a national park.”
Brown fishes the Naknek River, which has had a steady salmon run for years.
“I really believe it’s because of that park,” she said. The park, Katmai National Park, was created long before the UN’s 30×30 target — the global goal to protect 30 per cent of land and sea by 2030 — was signed in December 2022. It was first protected after a historic volcanic eruption in 1922 and later became a tourist attraction. Inside the park is Brooks Falls, where bears are often seen catching salmon.
Indigenous people are still allowed to fish in parts of the park, but only with special permission. Brown explained how salmon change when they enter freshwater.
“In the ocean, they’re shiny and silver. In freshwater, they turn red. They look different. They taste different.” Brown continues, “They stop feeding once they hit freshwater. All they care about is spawning. Dried salmon is important for us. It’s how we preserve food.”
She said this kind of protection has worked because it didn’t erase Indigenous fishing. But when it comes to Marine Protected Areas, she has mixed feelings.
“If an MPA stops people from doing their traditional fishing in places they’ve always fished, that’s wrong,” she said. “That shouldn’t happen unless there’s a real overfishing problem.”
Brown believes decisions should be made with the fishing communities.
“You can’t just draw a fenced area on a map and tell people they can’t go there anymore,” she said. “You need to work it out with the regulatory bodies and the fishers.”
Still, Brown knows MPAs can work if they are written well. In southeast Alaska, she said, a marine protected area was created to stop factory trawlers. “Small boat fishing is still allowed. The big industrial boats are kept out, but local fishers can continue.”
For her, the lesson is simple: protection and fishing do not have to be in conflict when communities are involved.
Community Custodianship in Kerala
That idea of community involvement also emerged in an interview with Kumar Sahayaraju, a marine researcher with Friends of Marine Life (FML), who is also from a traditional fishing community in Trivandrum, Kerala, and a scuba diver. He believes MPAs only make sense when they are shaped by the people who live with the sea.
“It would be good if marine protected areas were created with community involvement,” he told IPS. “That’s why internationally there is a push for co-management — a bottom-up approach.”
Sahayaraj spoke about reefs off the coast of Trivandrum — underwater ecosystems that fishing communities have used for generations. “These reefs were part of our traditional fishing grounds,” he said. “They were like a commons.”
But large mechanised and trawler boats have now entered these reef areas. “They are damaging the reefs and catching all the fish,” he said. “These reef fish supported traditional fishers for generations.”
Like Brown, Sahayaraju sees MPAs as a possible tool.
“In a situation like this, an MPA could give custodianship back to traditional fishers and stop destructive fishing methods,” he said. But he stressed that protection alone is not enough. “Access, authority and custodianship must remain with the community. That’s the only way MPAs can work for people and for the ocean.”
This tension between protection and access is playing out across the world as governments push new conservation solutions to deal with climate change and biodiversity loss. One of the biggest is the UN Convention on Biological Diversity’s 30×30 target. MPAs are now central to this goal.
Global Targets, Local Realities
Nayana Udayashankar, Senior Programme Officer at Dakshin Foundation, who works at the intersection of law, policy and marine conservation, explained that in India, Marine Protected Areas are legally set up under the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972, and future MPAs will follow the amended Act of 2022.
“This law allows two kinds of conservation measures,” she said. “One is area-based protection, and the other is species-based protection.” MPAs, she added, fall under different categories of protected areas within this law. The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF&CC) has notified several MPAs across the country, including the Gulf of Mannar National Park off the coast of Tamil Nadu.
But Udayashankar questioned the core logic behind how many MPAs are designed.
“The fundamental idea of MPAs is often ‘no-take’ and the exclusion of humans from certain spaces,” she said. “That approach doesn’t always work for marine conservation.”
According to her, area-based protection in the sea is especially difficult.
“Marine life doesn’t stay in fixed ranges,” she explained. “Fish move constantly. You can’t just draw a boundary or fence off a part of the ocean and expect everything to stay inside it.”
She also pointed to wider contradictions in how conservation is practised.
“Several studies by agencies like CMFRI and the Gulf of Mannar Marine Biosphere Reserve Trust have clearly shown the ecological importance of both the Gulf of Mannar and the adjacent Palk Bay,” she said. “But at the same time, ecologically damaging activities just outside these MPAs continue.”
Unsustainable fishing practices and other coastal activities, she warned, threaten this rich marine ecosystem and undermine both conservation goals and sustainable development efforts.
Udayashankar stressed that she is not against conservation.
“A large number of people depend on marine resources for their livelihoods and income,” she said. “Sustainable fishing and other nature-based activities should be at the heart of any serious marine conservation approach.”
She argued that conservation strategies must be site-specific and shaped by local ecology.
“Most importantly, fishers need to be at the forefront of fisheries and coastal management, because they are directly dependent on healthy ecosystems.”
This may require changes in existing laws and policies. She pointed to alternatives such as Locally Managed Marine Areas, which Dakshin Foundation supports.
“These allow more flexibility and can meet multiple conservation objectives,” she said.
Udayashankar also highlighted Kerala’s fishing councils under the Kerala Marine Fisheries Regulation Act, where fishers participate in managing local fisheries.
“These initiatives are not perfect,” Udayashankar said, “but they are a step in the right direction.”
IPS UN Bureau Report
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