Save our Sharks was a project of the Dutch Caribbean Nature Alliance, in collaboration with the Dutch Raad van Staate and local nature organizations, focused on the ABC and SSS islands, to better protect sharks from extinction. SevenSenses conducted Participatory Action Research for this on the island of Saba, focusing on ways in which local stakeholders can work together to improve the health of the marine ecosystem and help protect sharks around the island of Saba from extinction.
To facilitate local stakeholders of the Saban marine ecosystem in co-creating and realizing initiatives that directly and/or indirectly help saving sharks from extinction.
In seven weeks, Saban fishermen discovered and developed a way to solve the issue of plummeting redfish stocks. They developed their own law, an agreement for a closed season for redfish. As sharks’ lives depend on a healthy marine ecosystem and since redfish belongs to their diets, through this initiative fishermen indirectly help save sharks in a way that suits their personal needs and perspectives. A direct way to save sharks is a clause they put on their agreement to throw back living sharks they find in their traps. An extra economic incentive to improve living circumstances for sharks is to fish for (marketable) the invasive lionfish using lionfish-specific traps, which are currently being tested. See below the fishermen’s agreement.
Local nature organization Saba Conservation Foundation measured improvement of fish catches after the closed season. Also fishermen have noticed better fish catches: “after the closed season fishing was good!” However, more factors than only the PAR could have influenced this outcome. Whether redfish populations and shark populations have indeed increased thanks to this PAR is hard to measure as they migrate.
Fishermen claim to feel heard during the PAR process as opposed to -in their words- “having laws pushed down our throats”. They also expressed pride of what they had achieved, establishing their own official law:
“For twenty years we’ve been struggling to find a solution and to come to an agreement. Nobody has ever accomplished this, not even the experts. Now we have done it ourselves in just seven weeks!”
It has also impacted restaurants, as the facebook message of a local cook indicates (in Dutch):
The agreement is developed in a way that fishermen can adapt and use it each time they think it is necessary.
Read the full story of this Challenge in our handbook Participatory Action Research (in Dutch).
