Rare

Coastal, tropical waters support diverse fisheries that employ 200 million people and provide food for a billion more. But these resources are largely unmanaged and on the brink of collapse.

Fish Forever is the first global effort delivering a replicable model to reverse overfishing, protect biodiversity, and safeguard the prosperity of coastal communities. This approach pairs community-based management with behavioral insights to build and align social and political momentum so local actions become national reform.

In 2018, we created the Global Hub for Learning and Collaboration to support implementation and scaling of Fish Forever across multiple geographies. Based in the Philippines and composed of global staff, the Global Hub applies user-centered design and behavioral insights to develop tools, trainings, and tactics that are grounded in local context and experience but distilled and adaptable to communities worldwide. 

Fish Forever is at a tipping point with increasing requests for replication. With support from The Elevate Prize, we will scale Global Hub capacity to meet demand and train additional partners, with the goal of reaching 500 local governments and one million fishers, by 2023. The resources will lay the foundation for others, including NGOs and local governments, to advance global coastal fisheries reform. 

My love for the ocean led me from a successful career in advertising to leading Rare’s Fish Forever program in the Philippines. Every day, I use my background in understanding how people think, feel, and behave to solve how to motivate communities to join together to protect the ocean and become more empowered and resilient in the process.

Since joining Rare in 2013, I helped grow Fish Forever into a global movement to protect and sustain coastal seas, and by doing so, alleviate poverty, provide food, and protect livelihoods. Following a mass-prototype in three countries, we codified our approach for replication and scale. Today, Rare supports over 1,000 communities, 150,000 fishers, and 1.4 million people in eight countries on the same path to balance effective protection with sustainable production across nearly three million hectares of coastal seas. 

In 2018, I took on the additional role of establishing and leading the Global Hub with the mission of making the implementation of a complex solution simpler, easier, and fun across Fish Forever countries. The Elevate Prize will unlock our potential to support hundreds more partners and governments around the world to use the Fish Forever solution set themselves to transform coastal protection. 

Coastal, tropical waters have the highest concentration of marine life on the planet, supporting diverse fisheries that employ 200 million people and provide food for a billion more. But these resources are largely unmanaged and on the brink of collapse: a global environmental disaster that can trigger a humanitarian crisis. 

Launched in 2012, Fish Forever is the first global effort delivering a replicable model to reverse overfishing, protect biodiversity, and safeguard the prosperity of coastal communities. By linking the protection of critical habitat with a community’s exclusive rights to fish in surrounding waters, Fish Forever builds clear incentives to replace destructive competition with effective coordination, where communities receive measurable benefits from protecting critical marine habitats and managing their local fisheries. This work supports healthier coastal habitats, creates resilience to climate change, preserves diverse marine life, and challenges policymakers to rethink the way coastal ecosystems are prioritized, protected, and managed. 

The Global Hub for Learning and Collaboration currently supports implementation across eight Fish Forever countries across the developing tropics. The Global Hub works to simplify and codify this proven approach, grounded in behavioral insights and adapted to each country context, for use by partners and local governments around the world. 

Rare uses insights from behavioral science to motivate people and communities to adopt behaviors that benefit people and nature. We do this for each aspect of the program so that each step in the process is human-centered and easy to adopt and sustain.

The Global Hub is key to achieving impact at scale. Our creative and solution-mind team works with all Fish Forever country teams to contextualize and translate the science and theory, incorporating behavioral insights and distilling into simplified guidance and rules of thumb that can be used by across the program. 

Take for example, fisher registration. A well-managed fishery must register all fishers to regulate fishing effort. Setting this up and making sure the data is correct, consistent, and accessible requires enabling policy, the right technology, an efficient system, and adoption by both managers and fishers. Putting those into place varies per country, and in some cases, per state or province, or even per community. The Global Hub facilitates cross-regional and cross-functional collaboration to map different contexts and strategies to produce guidance, a customizable digital system, templates for policy instruments, and behavior adoption tactics that can be used across diverse Fish Forever countries and communities.

Fish Forever’s foundation is in establishing clear rights, strong governance, local leadership, and participatory management, and then networking this approach across neighboring villages and local governments. Rare’s unique delivery method mobilizes communities towards individual and collective behaviors that overcome the “tragedy of the commons,” replacing competition with cooperation. By networking these efforts together socially, politically, and geographically, we align a social movement for ecosystem protection connecting the benefits of collective action back to the livelihoods of individual households. Ultimately, this changes the social norm around fishing and replaces it with one that emphasizes being a responsible fisher, protecting the no-take areas and following local regulations — actions that are good for the individual, community, and ocean. 

For the communities we serve, our work ensures a more sustainable food supply, improved social equity, and greater resilience to external impacts — especially in the face of climate change and global pandemics. With support from The Elevate Prize, we can scale our proven approach to reach 500 local governments and 10 million people, including one million fishers, by 2023.