Posted on September, 30 2004

The calm turquoise water is warm and clear, the intense sun sets colours ablaze. Fish in all imaginable shades and shapes weave through a landscape of delicately branching purple-tipped staghorn coral and undulating lettuce coral. A school of tiny, bright blue damselfish hovers above a table coral, huge clams open up their wavy, coloured lips to feed. Suddenly, a white-tipped reef shark zooms by, the presence of its slender shape stirring the calm for a brief moment.

Everywhere life. This is Mafia Island Marine Park underwater.

Above the surface, life is as busy. About 18,000 people live in and around the protected area, many relying on the bounty of the sea for their livelihood.

Most are very poor. Eighteen thousand mouths to feed is a lot for a few small islands, putting tremendous pressure on land and marine resources. The ocean, realm of multi-coloured fish and corals, together with the soothing breeze through swaying palm leaves, the friendly people, and the humid wrap-around heat also make Mafia an attractive destination for tourists wanting to escape mainstream resorts.

But how can you successfully combine the livelihood of local people with tourism and conservation? On Mafia, managers try to do exactly this.

Mafia Island Marine Park, Tanzania’s first and largest marine protected area, was gazetted in 1995. An advisory committee was set up as part of park management, with representatives from local communities, tourism operators and the commercial fisheries sector. What has happened since?  

In order to evaluate its management, Mafia Island Marine Park decided to take part in a pilot evaluation scheme in 2003. The basis for the evaluation was a guidebook on how to assess management effectiveness of marine protected areas (MPAs). With the catchy title How’s Your MPA Doing?, the guide was produced by WWF together with the US National Oceanic and Athmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the IUCN World Commission of Protected Areas (WCPA). 

”This guidebook will help break new ground in marine conservation,” said WWF’s Miguel Jorge, member of the design team for the MPA Management Effectiveness Initiative and coordinator of the WWF pilot sites. He continued:
 
”Hampered by insufficient budgets, staff, or community support, many MPAs are struggling to achieve their objectives, be they socio-economic or ecological. The guidebook will empower MPA managers by helping them determine specifically what's working and what isn't, and with that information they can make strategic management decisions to help the MPA achieve its goals.” 

The guidebook offers MPA managers a method to evaluate how effective their work is, by using a set of criteria that consider both environmental and social aspects of the MPA. Each park manager chooses those criteria that best match the objectives of the park. 

”We found the WCPA guidelines really invaluable,” said Jason Rubens,  WWF’s Technical Adviser in Mafia. 

”They helped us to think broadly about what constitutes a successful marine protected area and steered us towards covering some of the less obvious social, economic and procedural indicators of success, as well as the more common biological indicators. Local community attitudes towards the park’s regulations, for example, is as important an indicator as the amount of coral on the reefs. The guidelines also contain good technical guidance on methodologies. There is a really quantitative focus to almost all the indicators which I think is critically important, especially when one is effectively evaluating oneselves. Less room for self-deception!”

Jason was also optimistic about the wider appeal of the guidelines: 
 
”I think the guidelines will have a global reach because of their flexibility. They lay out a kind of buffet feast of more than 40 indicators, covering all possible circumstances around the world. If you have limited resources you can just pick two or three and do a quick job in a month or two. If you want to go the whole way and lay down a major monitoring baseline for a well-funded MPA, as we did in Mafia, you can really indulge yourself and go for 20 indicators or more. I’m sure we couldn’t have tackled such an ambitious task in Mafia without the support of guidelines.” 
 
So, what was the verdict for Mafia? 
 
One of the most positive results is that the park’s ecosystem is on the mend. Both coral and reef fish communities are recovering steadily from past impacts of destructive fishing methods, overfishing, and the severe coral bleaching of 1998. The beautifully bright-coloured butterfly fish, often taken as an indicator of reef health, have increased threefold on one important reef since dynamite fishing was stopped. And where corals had been wiped out by bleaching, many small corals now fill the gaps.

But, as was recognised on Mafia, for a marine protected area to work in the long term, it needs to have the support of the people relying on its resources — the same people who benefit from the park. And protection must be properly managed and enforced. 

One important lesson learned in Mafia is that a large proportion of locals and other stakeholders do not feel adequately involved in park management, and less than 5 per cent of those questioned know the name of their three representatives on the park’s advisory committee. This clearly shows that communication between locals and their three representatives must be strengthened. In response to these results, several initiatives have been started or planned, aimed at strengthening community involvement in the management of the park. 

Another lesson is that continued efforts are needed on education and awareness raising. Although 90 per cent of people recognise that dynamite fishing has a negative impact on reef productivity, only a quarter knew that corals are living creatures. Less than one-third understand the park’s regulations. 

Patrols to enforce regulations have increased four-fold during the span of five years. Nonetheless, nine years after the creation of the park, there are still problems with destructive fishing methods. 
 
”Dynamite fishing was rife in Mafia before the creation of the marine park. But whereas dynamite fishing was stamped out within two or three years, we still have a problem with small-meshed seine nets,” said Jason Rubens. 
 
Out on the reef, a boat arrives, anchor is thrown. Some eight fishermen jump into the water, quickly spreading a net with mesh as fine as a mosquito net and with stones tied along the bottom end, around a few corals, fiercely beating the corals with wooden sticks.

Underwater, chaos ensues. Fish of all sizes rush out from their hiding places, bits of fragile corals are broken off, the water is filled with clouds of sediment. The fishermen round in on the frenzy and all fish are caught, no matter how small. The net is hauled onboard and the fishermen depart. As calm is restored, a fish eagle slowly descends on the scene, catching a few dazed fish left behind.

This incident illustrates one of the main problems many marine protected areas across the world face today: the lack of adequate resources for properly enforcing their management. In Mafia, each park visitor pays US$10 per day directly to the park. But this is not enough to fund a sufficient enforcement team. The park has only three rangers to cover 822 sq km of land and sea — insufficient to curb illegal activities everywhere — and the local government does not currently have the resources to employ additional permanent staff.

One of the initiatives to boost community participation in Mafia is to promote self-enforcement by creating surveillance teams on a village basis, thus tackling the problems of low stakeholder participation and lack of resources for patrol teams in one go. So far, the park  has helped its 11 villages to establish their own enforcement units which can operate at much lower costs than centralised ranger units.

This strategy has already had some success as local teams have reported a series of illegal incidents, showing that local communities very well can participate in management and shoulder the responsibility of surveillance. And in doing so take control of their future.

Out by the reef once again, a lone fisherman in a sun-bleached dug-out canoe hauls up a nicely sized silvery barracuda. As the sun sets behind the main island, he sets sail towards his home beach. The sea, helped by the protection it is given, has once again afforded his family an evening meal. 
 
Mafia Island Marine Park:
In 1995, after years of preparatory work by WWF and local groups, the Tanzanian government gazetted Mafia Island Marine Park, off the Tanzanian coast, and opposite the vast Rufiji River delta. 
 
Coral reefs and mangroves dominate Chole Bay, the main part of park. The waters are important nursing and feeding grounds for several species of marine turtles, with at least 14 beaches where turtles lay eggs. Seagrass beds are also a crucial part of the park’s biological diversity, acting as nurseries and feeding grounds for many fish species. 
 
A new management plan for Mafia Island Marine Park was set up in 2000, including a zoning scheme within the park’s boundaries. Each zone has its own set of criteria for who can use the area, and which equipment is allowed. The core area comprises no more than five percent of the sea area of the park, where no extractive resource use is permitted. In the specified-use zone, some fishing methods are allowed but only by residents, whereas in the major part of the park, the general-use zone, outsiders must buy permits to access resources.

The waters of Mafia Island Marine Park are part of the East Africa Marine Ecoregion, which runs for 4,600km down the east African coast from southern Somalia to northeast South Africa. The ecoregion is one of the most diverse coral, mangrove, and seagrass complexes in the western Indian Ocean. It includes an almost continuous fringing coral reef along the coastline of Tanzania and Kenya as well as one of the most important coastal wetlands in East Africa, the 3,200 hectares of mangrove forest in Tanzania's Rufiji Delta. 

The East Africa Marine Ecoregion is one of WWF's Global 200 ecoregions — a science-based global ranking of the world's most biologically outstanding habitats and the regions on which WWF concentrates its efforts.