An Overview Of Our Solution
Illegal Marine Wildlife Trade & Destructive Fishing Field Investigation Training
Who is this solution impacting?
Ecosystem
Oceans/Coasts
Community Type
Rural
Additional Information
- Population Impacted:
- Continent: North America
Problem
Describe the problem
Our solution consists of training 18 marine enforcement officers, resource managers, community leaders, scientists, and litigators on how to investigate anthropogenic events. Using the established Coral Reef CSI Underwater Investigation protocols and the recently developed Illegal Marine Wildlife Trade Field Investigation module this program focuses on creating multi-disciplinary teams to investigate, document, and mitigate damage to protected marine species and habitat. The seven-day workshop will include lectures on underwater forensic investigations, along with hands-on field injury and crime scene investigations guided by experts in marine enforcement, wildlife forensics, eco-toxicology, and marine resource damage investigation. See www.coral.org/coral_reef_csi for more information.
Biodiversity Impact
Most nearshore ecosystems around the world are under various levels of impact from vessel groundings, illegal and destructive fishing, pollution and runoff, trade in endangered species, and poaching of regulated wildlife. Often such activities are illegal, and perpetrators are liable to prosecution, penalties and restoration/mitigation costs. However, only rarely are trained field investigators and well-developed natural resource or wildlife forensic programs available to properly assess and handle the wide variety of anthropogenic events occurring within a defined area. Coral Reef CSI (CRCSI) is a program designed around underwater field forensic and other investigative techniques which can directly help enforcement officials, resource managers, community leaders, and the judiciary within a country to maximize prosecution, mitigation, negotiation, mediation, or litigation success. It also helps build compliance with legislation and aids enforcement of natural resource regulations. Effective enforcement and prosecution of responsible parties for damages to fully protected species and habitat is critical for effective natural resource management and leads to enhanced compliance and support on the part of resource users and the general public. Having established methods to quantify damage and then apply that against the lost ecological services to determine the best mitigation routes (i.e. emergency restoration, restoration and/or compensatory mitigation) will result in maximum benefit for the affected natural resources and effected or displaced user groups.
Solution
The focus of the training would be on investigative strategies, chain-of-custody, field risk management, ecological risk assessment, forensic techniques, treating data as evidence, incorporating local reef ecological issues and impacts into an investigation, dealing with the Media, and enhancing compliance. Some of the specific training features that would be used to protect biodiversity within the region include night surveillance of marine habitats, marine search techniques, field fingerprinting of marine objects, and field mitigation strategies. A key feature of the workshop will be a number of marine ƒ??crime/injury scenesƒ? that the participants will investigate using the techniques learned during the workshop. The scenarios will be as realistic as possible and will involve actual field investigations and analysis by teams of workshop participants. We would run a mock court at the end of the workshop to challenge the participants on the evidence collection and chain-of-custody they followed. Each participant would be provided a field forensics investigative pack for conducting future investigations and documenting natural resource damage. Once trained, teams would be available to respond to natural resource damage incidents in a timely and regionally-based fashion. The resulting incident response and mitigation cases would, over time, raise both user group compliance and public support for the management of the regional marine biodiversity through both habitat protection and conservation, and species-specific actions, especially within the targeted MPAs. // We would train three multi-disciplinary, multi-agency underwater investigative teams; one for the Bonaire National Marine Park and two additional teams that could be used elsewhere on Bonaire and for neighboring Aruba and Curacao, or possibly St. Eustatius. At a minimum we would cover 2,700 hectares for the Bonaire National Marine Park, but potentially also additional 5643 + 2750 + 600 hectares if we include the Washington Slagbaai National Park, St. Eustatius Marine Park and Curacao Marine Park respectively. Other Netherlands Antilles areas that would like to be involved include both Saba and Saint Maarten. Of course these numbers are conservative, as these investigative and mitigative techniques would be used for all shallow marine waters and coastal areas within the targeted region by the teams that are trained, resulting in a majority of these areas being covered (up to 210,000,000 hectares of coral reef and coastal areas).
Replicability
How many years has your solution been applied? 5 years // Have others reproduced your solution elsewhere? Yes // The CRCSI Field Training Program is a result of the Enforcement and Investigation Working Group of the International Coral Reef Symposium (ICRI), run through the international NGO, the Coral Reef Alliance (CORAL). The CRCSI Program Director is Dave Gulko, a natural resource damage assessment specialist and coral reef ecologist with the State of Hawaii. Senior professional training staff include Ken Goddard, Director of the USFWS Wildlife Forensics Laboratory; Dr. Patricia Ramirez, a Mexico coral reef eco-toxicologist; Wayne Evans, a South Africa wildlife forensics expert; Paul Cochran, senior marine enforcement specialist with the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park; Angelique Brathwaite, Barbados marine resource manager; and Dr. Karenne Tun, Singapore coral reef ecologist. The proposed training workshop would be seven days and train three teams of investigators using four of the above staff plus one assistant instructor, two divemasters, a regional instructor and a regional coordinator (to handle on-site logistics) from Bonaire. Participants would be selected based on qualifications and review by CRCSI staff and STINAPA (the marine resource management agency for Bonaire). Participants would be provided with all materials, references, training, and supplies necessary to carry forward with such investigations after the training. The CRCSI program will follow-up with post-workshop evaluations to target use and progress towards multi-agency, multi-disciplinary teams making use of the training to address problems within the region.
Human Well Being and Livelihood Impact
There are fewer and fewer areas of coastal marine high biodiversity left within any given region. Many feel that the best way to manage these remaining places is through Marine Protected Area designation, though often it is difficult to gather the necessary public support, especially amongst key user groups, for their creation and continued maintenance. One method has been through documentation of spillover and other economic benefits to the surrounding user communities. Poaching and other forms of illegal fishing, habitat destruction, and pollution all greatly diminish these benefits and make it more difficult to garner support for resource protection and conservation. Through the CRCSI training program, we provide local marine resource managers and their multi-disciplinary, multi-agency investigative team the tools to hold responsible parties accountable and to target mitigation methods that address the lost ecological services from their actions. As such, through restoration and compensatory mitigation, both the affected resources and user communities (cultural, subsistence, recreational and economic) are positively impacted by this investigative approach in a timely fashion that prevents both the lack of accountability for damages and the non-direct use of fines and mitigation projects that have characterized many marine damage incidents in the past. This in turn increases benefits across the wider spectrum of users, encourages increased compliance and support for the directed conservation efforts. // We have run 14 standard Coral Reef CSI Underwater Investigative workshops all over the globe (see www.coral.org/node/5204 for more information). We have run one pilot workshop in Thailand for the ASEAN Wildlife Enforcement Network using the new module for Illegal Marine Wildlife Trade, and have two more planned and focused on Illegal Marine Wildlife Trade for 2012 (Mexico for CONANP and PROFEPA; and Bali for the Indonesia Marine Police). In total, we have trained over 350 marine resource managers, enforcement officers, community leaders, agency scientists and litigators since the program’s inception. Through extensive feedback and review we have continued to modify and improve the program, often through addressing the specific needs of the workshop participants. While individual country’s laws and regulations regarding natural resources vary widely, the techniques and tools used to document damage and to collect evidence are relatively standardized but often unavailable to those who are the marine resource trustees. The CRCSI program is the only international program dedicated to training multi-agency, multi-disciplinary teams representing the natural resource trustees of a defined area (including, where appropriate, members of the local community) to address damage and loss of marine natural resources through documentation and evidence collection to be used for decision making and mitigation (through emergency restoration, restoration, and/or compensatory mitigation).