Experts benefit from capacity-building training in fisheries management |19 August 2022
Dr Ebrahim delivering his introductory remarks
Over 30 participants primarily from the Seychelles Fishing Authority, the ministry of fisheries and the department of the blue economy, last week took part in a three-day training to boost their capacity in fisheries management.
The training, organised and led by the International Climate Initiative (IKI), was held at the Eden Bleu Hotel from Tuesday to Thursday.
Launched in 2008, IKI is a funding programme of the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety which aims to support measures that are essential to implement the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity in partner countries.
During the training participants also had the opportunity to explore their roles to create better context by clearly identifying the interconnected links and data flows. This set the stage for learning about harvest strategies and associated fishery management concepts and principles, by using the local Spanner Crab fishery as a case-study.
In his opening address, the head of fisheries management at the Seychelles Fishing Authority (SFA), Dr Ameer Ebrahim, highlighted the events leading up to the workshop and said that an invitation was extended to the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) to run a FishPath introductory workshop at the SFA in January 2019, which identified broad activities to be incorporated in the IKI final proposal.
In Seychelles, the IKI grant is supporting priorities for industrial and small-scale fisheries by integrating fisheries (FishPath and tuna) into management and sharing lessons learned on Marine Spatial Planning.
“While there have been setbacks due to the pandemic, over the past year or so, the IKI team has been working tirelessly with the SFA to bring these trainings here in the Seychelles,” Dr Ebrahim said.
“This workshop was the first, much-awaited, in-person engagement with the SFA since the IKI project formally commenced in April 2021 and the feedback was resoundingly positive,” said Dr Natalie Dowling, senior fisheries scientist with CSIRO and one of the main facilitators of the training.
She added that using their newfound knowledge, the participants managed to complete a full draft harvest strategy that builds on the proposed licensing framework of various static management measures and embeds it in the context of the upcoming Spanner Crab stock assessment with the option to invoke dynamic harvest control rules as the fishery continues to develop.
Work on capacity building and the development of harvest strategies are key objectives of the IKI project, which is slated to run until 2025. A critical aspect of this will be dedicated efforts to ensure and direct engagement with, and involvement of, fishers and other stakeholders. Other upcoming workshops will take place in Seychelles virtually and also in Australia.
Contributed
