Small scale fishing communities were heavily impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Reduced demand for seafood due to the disruption in distribution and decline in tourism led to reduced seafood prices, resulting in a significant drop in household income. Having access to alternative livelihoods and/or access to savings helped to mitigate this loss in income. 

Alternative livelihood programmes can increase local resilience to economic shocks. Alternatives accessed during the COVID-19 crisis included seaweed and sea cucumber farming, drying or smoking fish to preserve and store it until markets recover and collectors return.

Community-led savings and loans groups have provided a critical buffer against financial difficulties as they enable people to save money and access credit in remote areas where this would otherwise not be possible. These locally led community groups pool together their savings in order to address financial hardship and provide loans to those most in need within their group. 

In order to enable communities to engage in the complex, long term work of the sustainable management of marine resources, their basic needs must be addressed. Working across sectors to enable communities to meet their basic needs creates an enabling environment within which they are able to work towards longer term goals.

The need for a livelihood is addressed through Blue Ventures’ work to rebuild fisheries, and through livelihood diversification initiatives where appropriate. The unmet need for health care is addressed through supporting and strengthening local health systems, and through partnerships with health care providers.

Working in a multisectoral way creates efficiencies through the sharing of resources and opportunities across programmes. It provides opportunities to broaden community engagement and build trust, and experience has shown that it enables communities to better respond to shocks and stressors.

Our strong local presence, and emphasis on working in partnership with communities and local stakeholders to rebuild fisheries, has meant that much of the work has been able to continue in spite of travel restrictions and other disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Empowering communities to sustainably manage their own resources and health services has proven to be a more resilient approach to conservation in the context of this major shock. 

Communities have the most to gain from the effective management of natural resources (and good community health services), and the pandemic has served as a powerful reminder of the value of locally led approaches to marine conservation. 

This Building Block aimed to develop a multilingual storytelling tool to showcase both existing conditions and scenarios for the pilot in the Gulf of Guayaquil. The objective was to present the data and information in a simplified and interactive way, and as such to turn complex concepts into notions easily understood by all stakeholders.

This Building Block aimed to analyze potential future conditions of the Gulf of Guayaquil in order to build three scenarios by 2030: trend scenario; conservationist scenario; and integrated scenario. The developed scenarios DO NOT represent official proposals for the area; instead, they are a starting point for a multi-sectoral and cross-border dialogue about the desired future. A technical report was developed and made publicly available.

This Building Block aimed to analyze the current conditions of the Gulf of Guayaquil (historical bay shared by Ecuador and Peru) as an example that could be replicated in other cross-border areas. Policies, data and information on the marine environmental and main maritime uses were analyzed to identify use-use and use-nature conflicts and compatibilities, resulting in the development of a technical report publicly available.

Spatial data was compiled with the support of the National Focal Point of each country, who contacted and requested the data to the competent governmental authorities. A geodatabase with metadata was built and maps developed. Consultation activities (local and binational) were organized with stakeholders in order to review the maps and provide further information about conservation and sectoral issues. 

This BB aimed to structure the tasks related to stakeholder engagement and communication through the development of:

I) A Strategy for Public Participation based on:

• Three pillars: identification of stakeholders; engagement activities; and monitoring and evaluation of participation
• A two-way participatory approach: balance between top-down and bottom-up

II) A Communication and Dissemination Plan to set a unified tone and direction so that all activities, tools and materials work in harmony to create a shared vision to raise awareness of the initiative and its results. It also included monitoring of a number of metrics – through various channels and means – to evaluate the overall impact and success of communication and dissemination actions.

Standalone communication and dissemination plans, as well as engagement plans and reports were developed to guide and evaluate each activity implemented. The key messages from these reports were used as web news in order to communicate and report back to the stakeholders.

In the Southeast Pacific pilot, the following engagement activities were implemented:

• Stakeholder meetings, especially for the mapping exercise in the Gulf of Guayaquil
• Institutional workshops at national and regional levels
• Training courses for governmental authorities and sectoral stakeholders

The implementation of EbA solutions is a result of a long process, where resources, knowledge, and leadership of different sectors are united by a common goal. Another crucial element is to have a financing mechanism that allowed the funding of proposed projects. To evaluate and prioritize different adaptation options in the three destinations, the project applied over 30 cost-benefit analyses and had several workshops with local technical experts.

As a result, in San Miguel de Allende for example, a new Green Fund was established by the Ministry of Environment that channeled private sector fees and contributions towards EbA measures. In addition, the money mobilized through the Green Fund was matched with money from an existing Program for Payments of Ecosystem Services (PES) run by the National Forestry Commission (CONAFOR).

Through this co-financing scheme, the city was able to implement five EbA solutions wich include handmade dams and forest restoration accordingly with level curves of the site to ensure sufficient drinking water in the future. All solutions were implemented with the cooperation of local NGOs (like Salvemos al Río Laja A.C.) and communities. 

Because of the pandemic, the other proposed EbA solutions in the other sites were not implemented.

Despite ecosystem health and the services they provide being crucial for the industry, they not always considered sufficiently in tourism development plans and policies. Therefore, ADAPTUR assigned one Technical Adviser to the Ministry of Tourism (SECTUR) and another one to the Ministry of Environment (SEMARNAT) to worked closely together and established cooperation structures which allowed to integrate aspects of biodiversity and climate change into national legislation.

One important result was the new Tourism Programme 2020-2024 PROSECTUR, which represents a major milestone in Mexico´s ambitions to fulfil its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) and to integrate ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA) into its sector plans. On the subnational level, one Regional Technical Adviser was also assigned to each of its three project destinations to provide permanent facilitation of local cooperation processes.

By doing this, several subnational policies and development plans which integrate EbA have been developed (e.g., Municipal Climate Plan Puerto Vallarta, Municipal Climate Plan Bahía de Banderas, Urban Development Plan San Miguel de Allende). Recently, policy proposals made by the Congress of Quintana Roo, and the initiative to mainstream the NDC and PROSECTUR goals in sub-national tourism policies have started.

Adaptation to climate change is a complex change and transformation process and needs good cooperation and coordination between the private and public sector who usually have different understandings, priorities, and work cultures. In many cases there is even a history of failed cooperation attempts and an underlying sense of mistrust or prejudice. To overcome those obstacles and to build a strong cooperation structure between its counterparts, ADAPTUR followed the Collective Leadership Model from the Collective Leadership Institute in Potsdam, Germany.

The model understands change as a longer process with several phases and includes key elements from creating a shared vision, building cooperation structures, consolidating agreements, and implementing learning mechanisms. The result was integration of smaller groups of well selected change agents of private, public and social sectors (so called “containers”) who show strong support for the envisioned change, act as first movers and at a later point in time motivate other actors in the sector to join the initiative or movement.