11th ICRS Abstract book - Nova Southeastern University

21-37
Exploitation And Trade Of Coral Resources in Bangladesh.
Mohammad Zahirul ISLAM* 1 , Mohammad Sazedul ISLAM 2
1 Marine Conservation, Marinelife Alliance, comilla, Bangladesh, 2 Marine Conservation,
WCRC, comilla, Bangladesh
In Bangladesh corals are being rapidly and seriously extracted and traded to major tourist
town Cox's Bazar. Cox’s Bazar coral market possibly the biggest open market of coral
and shells in the world. One is called Jhinuk Market containing 22 shops entirely for
corals and shells and Laboni beach providing more than 200 shops permanent and 150–
200 mobile sellers. The approximate sales are 4-5 hundreds of thousands pcs annually
including branching and tabular Acropora sp., and among massive Favites, Goniastrea,
Platygyra etc. In Bangladesh the only sources of coral is St. Martin Island and
southwestern marine area up to Myanmar and down farther may have connection with
Margui Archipelago. But coral trade included the smuggling items from nearby Burma
town, Mongdu. During the National Conservation Strategy Implementation
Project/MOEF coral protection started by St. Martin Pilot Project and local volunteers of
MarineLife Alliance in 2000. Currently much awareness and enforcement conducted by
various GO and NGOs, instead hiding coral business ongoing at deferent spots like
Cheradia, west beach, and main market. The supply from St. Martin still continuing that
is traced in Cox’s Bazar market. Collection and selling were done collectively by 24
personnel’s at St. Martin Island, recorded during 2001-06 and out of them some were
from outside and Myanmar. Several female heads were also engaged in the major
smuggling. Many traders initiated the business with financial help from leading NGO,
BRAC for curio business. Along with corals, more than 5 metric tons of shells also
traded. Thais sp., Monodonta sp., 6000 pieces of cowries Cyprea sp., have been recorded
to trade along with and unknown number of sea urchin also to make ash tray. At least
total 22 species of shells majority of Gastropods are traded at Cox's Bazar curio center
from St. Martin Island.
21-38
Supporting Environmental Stewardship, Conservation, Livelihoods And
Environmnetal Education in The Coral Archipelago Of Lakshadweep, India
Vineeta HOON* 1
1 Centre for Action Research on Environment Science and Society, Chennai, India
The paper discusses a combination of community-based strategies being carried out in
Lakshadweep Islands with micro budgets to address the issues concerned with coral reef
conservation and livelihoods. The program is based on our belief that the local
community will pay more attention to environmental issues if they have been involved in
data gathering, analysis and establishing key learning’s. They will then be able to speak
with conviction and generate support for local management solutions.
Establishing a community based socioeconomic monitoring team at Agatti. Workshops
for environmental wardens and local NGO’s and educated youth for conducting
socioeconomic assessments, reef related activity monitoring and ecosystem health
monitoring. These workshops led to the formation of a local team called the ACRMN.
The coral reef awareness and education project included environmental orientation
workshops for schoolteachers and children (classes 6-9) so as to bring in local
environment and cultural features in their teachings. The final output was to get a
children’s perception of their environment and to correlate this with topics in their
syllabus.
Discussions with fishers and women using the participatory appreciative enquiry
approach and the Sustainable livelihoods framework to establish a livelihood strategy to
increase incomes from fisheries. This led to the establishment of the Maliku Hikkimass
Producers society at Minicoy.
This paper will discuss the processes adopted; key learning’s from each of the projects
and provides recommendations for the future.
Oral Mini-Symposium 21: Social-ecological Systems
21-39
Coral Reef Conservation In A Changing Climate
Joshua CINNER* 1 , Tim MCCLANAHAN 2 , Joseph MAINA 2 , Nick GRAHAM 3 , Tim DAW 4 ,
Selina STEAD 3 , Katrina BROWN 4 , Andrew WAMUKOTA 2 , Mebratu ATEWEBERHAN 2 ,
Valentijn VENUS 5 , Nick POLUNIN 3
1 ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University, Townsville,
Australia, 2 Wildlife Conservation Society, Mombasa, Kenya, 3 University of Newcastle,
Newcastle, United Kingdom, 4 University of East Anglia, East ANglia, United Kingdom,
5 International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, Enschede,
Netherlands
Climate change is likely to pose new challenges to the conservation of the Earth’s natural
resources by increasing the frequency and intensity of large-scale temperature events, which can
profoundly impact sensitive ecosystems such as coral reefs. Addressing these challenges will
require a response framework for pragmatic conservation actions informed by site-specific
susceptibility to climate change and the capacity of societies to cope with or adapt to change.
Depending on a particular location’s environmental susceptibility and social adaptive capacity,
appropriate conservation actions will require some combination of: (1) large-scale protection of
ecosystems; (2) actively transforming and adapting social-ecological systems; (3) building the
capacity of communities to cope with change; and (4) donor aid focused on de-coupling
communities from dependence on natural resources. We apply our framework to five western
Indian Ocean countries, where climate mediated disturbance has greatly impacted coral reefs.
We integrate results from an oceanographic environmental model that uses environmental
conditions during previous extreme warming events to predict the susceptibility of coral reefs to
future bleaching with results from a socioeconomic survey of 29 communities that used eight
quantitative indicators to provide a household-level index of social adaptive capacity. We plot
communities’ mean adaptive capacity against the predicted susceptibility of adjacent reefs to
bleaching and examine how differing conservation actions may be appropriate across nations
and sites. We find that current conservation strategies are ill-prepared for climate change. In
particular, the countries with the highest susceptibility to bleaching and low adaptive capacity
are those where marine conservation strategies are highly dependent on reef-related tourism,
making the sustainability of this protection strategy under climate change scenarios
questionable. Alternatively countries with low susceptibility to bleaching and high social
adaptive capacity should be a high regional priority for reef conservation, but in practice these
countries are protecting