Aquaculture, sustainable development in Madagascar

Over-exploitation of wild-fish stocks by traditional small-scale fisheries threatens coastal ecosystems and communities throughout the tropics. Locally-managed marine areas (LMMAs) are a promising tool for linking marine conservation with local management, but their widespread uptake and effectiveness is under-realised due to continued over-reliance on extractive fishing.

Over the past 10 years, award-winning NGO Blue Ventures has worked with local communities and private seafood exporters in Madagascar to develop models of community-based seaweed and sea cucumber aquaculture that provide both food and income security. This work complements research at the University of Edinburgh on marine coastal governance, biodiversity, ecosystem services, and benefit sharing.

The University of Edinburgh now proposes a partnership between Blue Ventures, as a dedicated field-based community conservation organisation, and a multi-disciplinary team of internationally-renowned researchers from the University of Edinburgh, to develop a scalable and widely-applicable approach to integrating small-scale aquaculture with LMMAs to provide direct ecosystem and community benefits.

This partnership provides:

1. The learning needed to enable broader replication of community-based aquaculture production systems, which contributes to food security and human well-being
2. Innovative opportunities to examine fundamental marine biodiversity and function questions, essential to long-term resilience of key coastal ecosystems.