Blue Ventures

Blue Ventures is a registered charity focused on nurturing locally led marine conservation. The organisation partners with coastal communities that depend on marine resources.

Blue Ventures' marine management models aim to combine community-led resource management, community health, and alternative livelihood initiatives for the benefit of both the people and the environment.

The organisation operates in the Indian Ocean, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean. Blue Ventures implements its own field programs in Madagascar, Belize, Indonesia, and Timor-Leste, and has small staffs in Comoros, Kenya, Mozambique, and Tanzania to support partners' projects.

Organisation
Blue Ventures consists of two entities: limited company Blue Ventures Expeditions Ltd (BVE) and registered charity Blue Ventures Conservation (BVC). From 2003 to 2020, BVE operated ecotourism expeditions to raise funds and awareness for conservation; international volunteers traveled to project sites and supported research and community initiatives. BVC, which is registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales (charity number 1098893), conducts its own fundraising activities and makes up the majority of the organisation.

Blue Ventures employs about 270 people and is headquartered in Bristol, with additional regional offices in London; Antananarivo, Madagascar; and Denpasar, Indonesia. UK-based teams, comprising about 50 employees, provide overall leadership and support the larger field teams based outside the United Kingdom.

History and philosophy
Blue Ventures was co-founded in 2003 by Alasdair Harris, Matthew Linnecar, Dr. Robert Conway, and Tom Savage. Their goal is to place the management of fisheries and marine resources in the hands of local communities, particularly in low-income countries where the national capacity for enforcement of marine and fisheries legislation is often weak. Their approach is based on the idea that sustainable management of natural resources is best achieved when entrusted to those who depend on it most.

Blue Ventures' strategy focuses on empowering coastal communities to manage their own resources and developing effective, adaptive and locally appropriate conservation strategies. The organisation advocates for fundamental human rights of small-scale fishers and promotes a human rights-based approach to fisheries management, designed to sustain local small-scale fisheries and safeguard marine biodiversity.

Blue Ventures operates field sites in Madagascar, Belize, and Timor-Leste, and collaborates with partner organisations in East Africa and Indonesia. They focus on four main program areas: fisheries, mangroves (blue forests), aquaculture, and alternative livelihoods.

Rebuilding fisheries
In 2004, Blue Ventures supported the village of Andavadoaka in southwest Madagascar to pilot a temporary octopus no-take zone (NTZ) near the island of Nosy Hao. The temporary octopus fishery closure was found to increase catches and boost fishers' incomes. The results prompting neighbouring villages to replicate this approach to fisheries management. The village of Andavadoaka was awarded the United Nations Equator Prize as a result of its efforts to promote sustainable marine resource management. In 2015, a paper analysing periodic octopus fishery closures was published by Thomas A. Oliver and colleagues. It revealed significant positive impact following the over 36 periodic closures in a time span of eight years.

These replication efforts disclosed a need for coordination of closures among villages and for rules for fishing beyond octopus gleaning. The communities, Blue Ventures, and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) therefore set up Velondriake Locally Managed Marine Area (LMMA), administered by the Velondriake Association. This protected area, which unites more than 8,000 people from 24 villages in management of almost 1000 km2 of marine and coastal environment, is amongst the largest community-managed protected areas in the Indian Ocean. In 2014, Blue Ventures supported communities in northwest Madagascar to establish the Western Indian Oceans' largest LMMA in the Barren Isles. By 2017, 28 communities in southwest Madagascar were implementing temporary octopus fisheries closures.

Blue Ventures now supports a network of nearly 100 community data collectors in Madagascar, who are local fishers trained to collect important data from daily fish landings in their villages. The data helps communities design and adapt resource management measures.

Learning networks
In 2012, Blue Ventures and the Velondriake Association hosted Madagascar's first national LMMA forum in Andavadoaka. This brought together 55 community members from 18 LMMAs representing 134 villages throughout Madagascar. The meeting resulted in the creation of a national LMMA network called MIHARI, an acronym for "MItantana HArena and Ranomasina avy eny Ifotony", ("Marine resources management at the local level"). Blue Ventures is providing training and educational tools for the network. MIHARI now represents 196 LMMA associations, together protecting an area covering 17.7% of Madagascar's seabed (17,125 km2).

Blue Forests
Mangroves are one of the world's principal stores of "blue carbon", a term given to carbon accumulated in coastal or marine ecosystems. Globally, the amount of carbon released through clearing mangroves amounts to 24m tonnes of per year. Madagascar is home to nearly 4000 km2 of mangrove forests, the fourth largest in Africa.

Blue Ventures' Blue Forests programme, established in 2011, links the conservation of mangroves, seagrass, and coastal wetland habitats with international carbon markets and other incentives to catalyse community support for mangrove protection. It incentivises community-based conservation of mangrove ecosystems in western Madagascar. Programmes such as REDD+ generate carbon offsets, which in turn support sustainable management of mangroves while alleviating poverty and educating local communities on the value of the mangrove forests. The Blue Forests project uses scientific research to examine deforestation and carbon sequestration in mangroves.

In 2017, Blue Forests staff worked towards the transfer of management rights of more than 4,500 hectares of mangroves to communities from regional government departments. The transfers empower local community members to monitor and enforce good practices in the forests upon which they depend.

Aquaculture
Blue Ventures' aquaculture programme supports communities to diversify their livelihoods by developing profitable sea cucumber and seaweed farms as a way of reducing fishing pressure and alleviating poverty. Since their community-based aquaculture programmes were established, more than 700 people have been trained to farm sea cucumbers and seaweed. Over half of these are women, for whom alternative income sources are limited.

Blue Ventures develops models for community-based aquaculture in which farms are owned and operated by community members. The organisation's aquaculture teams provide materials and technical guidance, and assist the farmers with start-up costs.

Blue Ventures also facilitates small business development with training programmes that build the technical, financial and organisational skills needed by fishers to manage their aquaculture businesses for the long term.

Community health
Isolated coastal communities face a range of interlinked social and environmental challenges. Just as a lack of transport infrastructure can prevent access to seafood markets, it can also prevent community members accessing essential health and family planning services. To improve access, Blue Ventures initiate a community health programme, known locally as Safidy, which means "choice" in Malagasy.

Safidy contributes to Blue Ventures' holistic People, their Health and the Environment (PHE) approach to conservation and development, which aims to generate long-lasting positive economic, social and ecological change. PHE entails the integration of family planning and other community health services with natural resource management, biodiversity conservation and alternative livelihood initiatives

In 2017, in partnership with Madagascar's Ministry of Health and other private health organisations like USAID, Mikolo and Mahefa Miaraka, Blue Ventures' community health team, collaborated in training and supporting community health workers across three regions in Madagascar (Atsimo Andrefana, Menabe, and Melaky) in order to provide family planning, maternal and child health, and water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) health services. This will expand into the Ambanja region in the northwest of Madagascar.

Eco-tourism
Blue Ventures ran volunteer expeditions to Madagascar, Belize and Timor-Leste, for international volunteers and for school and university groups. Expeditions halted in 2020 as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Its volunteer programme received numerous awards within the tourism sector, and was praised by Simon Reeve of the BBC's Indian Ocean with Simon Reeve series.

A central component of Blue Ventures' tourism activities was the community homestay, which offered a way for coastal communities to reap direct economic benefits from tourism.

Madagascar
Blue Ventures was founded in southwest Madagascar in 2003, and historically the majority of its operations have been focused along the south, west and northwest coasts of the island. Its national headquarters is located in the capital Antananarivo, and there are five regional offices (in Ambanja, Andavadoaka, Belo-sur-Mer, Maintirano, and Toliara) linked to the organisation's programme sites. Blue Ventures' longest running marine expeditions programme is based in Andavadoaka in the southwest.

Blue Ventures is working towards a future where Madagascar's coastal zone is managed effectively by local fishing communities with the support of the government and other actors, thereby providing resilient livelihoods and food security for coastal people, while improving both human and ecosystem health. At priority conservation sites, it supports communities in developing solutions to local challenges and incentive-based models. Once they identify which approaches can be replicated, Blue Ventures then collaborates with ipartners both nationally and internationally to facilitate the wider uptake of these models and develop learning networks that can sustain them.

Belize
Since March 2010, the organisation has been running volunteer expeditions to Belize to conduct scientific research and educational outreach programmes. The volunteer programme in Belize is located on the Belize Barrier Reef, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The organisation conducts ecological monitoring within the Bacalar Chico Marine Reserve to advise the Belize Fisheries Department on management effectiveness. Much of the work in Belize is focused on tackling the invasive red lionfish (Pterois volitans), including creating a market to drive the targeted removal of the lionfish, developing alternative sources of income such as lionfish fin jewellery and ecotourism trips to survey and hunt lionfish. Focusing on the economic interests of local fishers has led to much more ambitious fisheries management and in 2017 Blue Ventures led the development of a national lionfish management plan in collaboration with the Belize Government.

It also carries out community education, alternative livelihood development and outreach activities in Sarteneja, Corozal District, the largest fishing village in Belize. These include fishery-based management, a collaboration with the Sarteneja Homestay Group and supporting Belioness Lionfish Jewelry.

Timor-Leste
Blue Ventures' newest expedition site (established 2016) is located on Ataúro island in Timor-Leste, within the Coral Triangle. Covering less than 2% of the Earth's oceans, the Coral Triangle hosts more than 75% of all known coral species, almost 40% of all known coral-reef fish species, and more than 50% of the world's coral reefs. Recent research indicates that Ataúro's reefs may harbour the world's greatest average fish diversity

The organisation is working with communities to diversify livelihoods to relieve pressure on declining fisheries, and to manage local marine resources by implementing local customary laws known as tara bandu.

Blue Ventures is also collaborating with communities to map the relatively unexplored marine biodiversity of Ataúro. The organisation has trained eighteen community members in seagrass monitoring, eight of whom have started mapping Ataúro's seagrass meadows, a vital habitat for threatened dugongs. The community of Ilik-Namu has requested support from Blue Ventures to establish a new LMMA and community consultations are underway to develop plans for the area to be protected under Timorese customary law, tara bandu.

Awards
Blue Ventures has won a number of awards including;
 * WWF Duke of Edinburgh Conservation Award, 2015
 * Global Youth Travel Award for Outstanding Volunteer Project, 2015
 * Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, 2015
 * The St Andrews Prize for the Environment, 2014
 * Excellence in Leadership for Family Planning (EXCELL) Award 2013.
 * Tusk Conservation Awards - Highly Commended prize 2013.
 * SeaWeb Seafood Champion Award 2012 for seafood sustainability.
 * The British Youth Travel Awards 2012. Winner in "Best Volunteering Organisation" category.
 * The Buckminster Fuller Challenge award in 2011 Buckminster Fuller Challenge, 2011 - "For developing a comprehensive, integrated, solution that has significant potential to solve one of humanity's most pressing problems."
 * Responsible Tourism Awards 2010. Winner in the "Best Volunteering Organisation" category.
 * Condé Nast Traveler Environmental Award 2009.
 * Equator Prize 2007.
 * Skål International Eco-tourism Awards 2006. Winner of the "General Countryside" category.
 * United Nations SEED Award (UNDP, UNEP, IUCN) 2005.