Fostering Community Strategies for Saving the World's Oceans

When the U.S. government announced in August that it planned to provide special protections for 20 varieties of coral under the Endangered Species Act, marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson suggested the move was not nearly enough.  To her mind, the government’s justification for the protections — which hinged on the impacts of climate change and ocean acidification — overlooked much more immediate threats to these “Ayanaecologically and economically vital corals:  overfishing, pollution, and coastal development.” 

Aggressively curbing these, Johnson said, is something that can be done by coastal communities immediately — and with dramatic results. 

As the executive director of the Waitt Institute, an ocean conservation organization based in La Jolla, California, Johnson recently put that approach to the test on the Caribbean island of Barbuda, near Antigua.  Working with the government and local residents, the Waitt Institute’s Blue Halo Initiative helped to establish a comprehensive zoning system in Barbuda’s waters that was designed to halt overfishing and establish marine sanctuaries. In an interview with Yale Environment 360 web editor Crystal Gammon, Johnson discussed how she helped Barbuda to craft these rules, which were signed into law in August, and why she favors community-driven conservation efforts over more top-down approaches. 

“We now have the data to prove that if you manage your resources really well locally, you have a much better chance of surviving the things you can’t control,” she said, “whether that’s climate change or storms or whatever it might be.”

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