Empowering Fishing Communities in the MAR Reef

Heading to Honduras we encounter one of our partners, Coral Reef Alliance (CORAL), an organization that works at local, regional, and global levels to keep coral reefs healthy, so they can adapt to climate change and survive for generations to come. In their line of work, CORAL has an extensive socio-economic database of fishing communities (33 communities) across the Honduran Caribbean. To support these communities, they will implement a project to develop sustainable livelihood diversification strategies for Honduran fishing communities that harvest in the Cayman Crown Reef (discovered in 2013, by Ana Giro, of Healthy Reefs Initiative, and local Guatemalan fishermen).

Cayman Crown is incredibly important, due to its location and reef health status, it boasts some of the highest coral cover in the Mesoamerican Reef (MAR) region (Giro, 2019). Considering that reefs are critically important for their connectivity, resilience, and marine biodiversity, Cayman Crown is an essential resource both for marine populations and the communities that depend on this resource (Giro, 2019; McField et al., 2020; Pérez Murcia, 2020)

To reduce the fishing pressure in Cayman Crown and provide fishers with an alternative to fishing, CORAL will equip local fishers with the necessary tools and resources for sustainable income diversification. To achieve this, CORAL will lay the groundwork for implementing a comprehensive livelihood diversification strategy, focusing on the communities most affected by the Cayman Crown recent fish replenishment zone (FRZ) protection.

The project has three specific objectives:

• Empower local fishers' associations of at least two communities in Honduras for self-sustainability by June 2024 through capacity building.
• Develop and implement two contextually relevant livelihood diversification strategies by 2025.
• Document the establishment and evolution of 2 livelihood diversification initiatives in at least two Honduran communities that harvest in Cayman Crown by 2025.

All the work that we do and the support we provide to our partners is possible thanks to you. We will keep you posted on how this project develops and the results achieved, stay tuned.

Thank you for your help in providing different alternatives to fishing communities, hence protecting the Mesoamerican Reef.

The MAR Fund Team