Philippa J Cohen
PhD Candidate, James Cook University

IMAS Taroona seminar room
12:00 – 12:50, Wed 18th Jan

Abstract:
Traditional marine area closures (‘taboos’) have long been practiced in the Pacific for cultural reasons including the death of community leaders and to protect sacred sites.  The use of traditional closures has declined, but contemporary initiatives to establish community-based management of marine areas promote their reinvention as closed areas of reef, subjected to periodic harvesting.  In the Pacific, such closures are a prominent feature of many community-based initiatives and are touted as being a successful traditionally-based measure for marine management.  However, there is little evidence that employing periodically harvested closures will sustainably manage fisheries for the range of taxa exploited by small scale and subsistence fisheries.   My research uses fisheries and social science methods to examine fisheries management outcomes of periodically harvested closures.   I present data on the cultural drivers of area openings and closures, alongside patterns of fishing during openings.   In some cases fishing effort has been reduced on reefs with closures while others are heavily exploited when opened to the point where sustainability is questionable.  I discuss the implications for meeting social, ecological and fisheries management objectives and conclude that a more nuanced interdisciplinary understanding of periodically harvested closures is required for their application to meet a wide-range of community and national objectives.

Bio:
Pip is from Tasmania where she completed her undergrad and honours at UTas, and then the first three years of her career in fisheries research at TAFI.  Pip then escaped the cold of Tassie to the tropical Pacific – Tonga, Fiji and then Solomon Islands.  Pip lived and worked in the Pacific for next 5 as an Australian Youth Ambassador for Development, a consultant on a fisheries and development project and then a coordinator for a regional knowledge management project.  She commenced her PhD candidature at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University in 2009.  Pips current research investigates the contribution of community-based fisheries management initiatives to food security in Melanesia.