Coastal 500: Uniting Mayors for Ocean Conservation

When we talk about the oceans, we talk a lot of times about bad news is happening sea level rise and climate change effects like sea surface temperature increases and coral reefs dying because they're bleaching and all this bad stuff that happens around like small islands where they their shores are just all plastic from plastic pollution from other countries and things like that. A lot of the times we don't talk about the resiliency of these coastal communities in

different parts of the world, especially small island states. On today's episode, we're actually going to be talking about the building of that capacity and that resiliency in different countries like the Philippines, Honduras, and other countries that just need that little extra help. And RARE, an organization that I've worked with before and we've had on the podcast before, talk about this on

this episode. I talked to Rocky Sanchez-Tirona, who is here to talk about the projects in the Philippines, as well as other places, about their Fish Forever program, as well as their Coastal 500, where their goal is to bring together 500 communities, 500 governments, to talk about and to sharing resources about building that coastal resiliency in a lot of places along the equator. We're going to talk about that on today's episode. I'm super excited. Let's start the show. Hey,

everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I am your host, Andrew Lewin, and this is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean, and what you can do to live for

a better ocean by taking action. And on today's episode, we're gonna be talking about living for a better ocean by taking action in a way that I haven't really talked about in a long time, and that's looking at what organizations like RARE does with small island communities. These are communities within small islands that are fishing communities that primarily depend on fish and

fishing for their sustenance, as well as making a livelihood. And obviously changes in the environment that are affecting the availability of those fish, the availability of that seafood for

them to live a proper life and the life that they're used to living. And so it's building that resiliency to be able to continue to you know, have that livelihood, be able to live the way they've wanted to live in the way they have lived for hundreds of if not thousands of years, and be able to do that in the face of change, ups and downs, whether a typhoon comes in, whether there is, you know, bleaching within a coral reef, or, you know, there's a change in, you

know, the topography or whatever that might be, you never know what's going to happen in the ocean. That's what's kind of the dynamics of the ocean. It gives it such a great and interesting way of studying it. But also, you know, these communities depend on the fish and seafood from the coastal areas. And it's important that organizations like Rare help these communities as much as possible and provide them and empower them to be able to become resilient for a long time into the future.

So, we have on a very special guest, Rocky Sanchez-Torona, who joined me from the Philippines to be able to talk about the program, how Fish Forever was built within the Philippines, how it grew by community and community, how they came to basically work with about 700 or 800 different types of villages, different governments, and how they're bringing mayors and government representatives from all over the world in small islands and other places where they're talking about protecting

fish and how there's some similarities between some of the challenges that they have from Honduras to the Philippines to Mozambique to Mauritius and all different other types of islands. It's really interesting. It's something that I can't wait for you to listen to. So here is Rocky Sanchez-Torona from Rare talking about the Fish Forever program and the Coastal 500 program in the Philippines and elsewhere. Enjoy the interview and I will talk to you after. Hey, Rocky. Welcome

to the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Are you ready to talk about the wonderful i love the name coastal 500 almost sounds like a you know one of those f1 races or like those nascar races it's really sounds really exciting i'm looking forward to getting into this because this is how this conversation sort of came to be rocky and i you and i kind of got together because of a common colleague zach lowe who works for rare just like yourself and he was he reached out to

me he's like andrew you know You've got to talk to Rocky about Coastal 500. There's some new progress that's been made. We talked a little bit about it in my last conversation with Rare with Steve, but there's been so much that's happened since. I'm looking forward to getting into this conversation. But before we get into that, Rocky, why don't you just let the audience know Sure. So my name is Rocky. I'm based in Manila in the Philippines, and I am the managing director of

a program called Fish Forever at Rare. We work with local communities and local governments to help them It's quite an interesting program because you work in the Philippines, obviously, but there are a lot of fishing villages in and around the Philippines who rely heavily on fishing for sustenance, for getting paid to feed their families, to get kids in school. That's a really cool thing, a really cool program to be a part of. How did you get to

working with Rare? Where did your interest in this type So I have always loved the ocean. I'm a big scuba diver. I've been doing it for almost 30 years now. And so any excuse to get in the water, I will take it. My first life was actually in marketing and advertising communications. I'm sorry I sold a lot of shampoo. But increasingly, over time, I really wanted to try and see whether those skills could be applied to B3D, the things I really cared about. And when

I heard about RARE, it felt like the perfect fit. RARE is focused on the human aspects of environment and conservation, and really understanding how you can help people become solutions to environmental challenges. And so I thought that at least my background in help understanding human behavior and really thinking about the ways that can move people can be useful. So I joined RARE and that came at a time when RARE was just

starting Fish Forever in the Philippines. And like, so I finally found myself in a position where I could use my skills and Now, that's quite exciting to be able to want a position very similar to this. It obviously matches up very well to your skill set and your experiences in marketing and communications from before. But Rare is that kind of organization. It's a rare organization, no pun intended, of an organization that's built on marine conservation principles, but really focusing on

people. Now, I have to admit, a lot of times when someone says, oh, I'm involved with an organization that protects the ocean, when you started to look at things that were important to you, which I assume were ocean protection and conservation and things like that, did you think organizations like RARE, being out of the field of marine conservation, did you think organizations

like Rare existed? Have you ever met or learned about No, I had been dabbling in another NGO, I was volunteering for the board and it was very focused on reefs and kind of like, you know, so I learned how to do transects and count fish and things like that. But I hadn't really thought about really putting all the effort or I guess predominant, you know, a large part

of the effort really on the people side of things. I mean, It felt like a no-brainer, and I was really glad to see that Rare had really positioned itself squarely in that space. And Rare doesn't just work on marine, it's really the understanding that you can apply behavioral insights to

any sort of environmental challenge, right? There's So is that why you got into marketing and communications in the first place was more of the psychology behind, you know, putting out messaging for whether you're Yeah, I think so. I was actually a psych major in college. That was my next question. Yeah. And but I also like to write so so so it felt again, it I sort of like fall into these things where, yeah, oh, okay, here's where I kind of are interested in people, but I can

write and I'm creative. So And I stayed there for quite a long time because it's a fun industry, you learn a lot, there's a lot of interesting things to do. And even within that field, I started gravitating towards communications projects that were really focused on social impact and behavior change. and advocacy. So that's where I was happiest, right? And that's actually how I met Rare. Rare was my client first. And I said, hey, they're really cool. They do these things and

I can help. So when I said I want to make the jump, I really came to Rare and said, what can I do for you? I mean, So before you met Rare, though, and you were doing this, seems like a consultancy, what other type of social impact projects I did a lot of work on family planning. And that's another big one, right? Health, vaccination, and kind of just health, good governance is another thing, anti-corruption kind of activity. So I think that gave me a really good view of society

and kind of like systems, right? And so I kind of know what are the levers. We had a client that was great at education, for example, and education governance. And I still see a lot of those parallels to the work we're doing now on environment, right? And the role that local governments, for example, play. Yeah, no doubt. It's really interesting. When you first started working with Rare, was it this project, like the Coastal 500 that So in the beginning, actually,

this Fish Forever actually has expanded and grown. When we started it, When I started at Rare, it was just starting and basically what we were trying to figure out was how you can get communities to manage the fishing effort around protected areas so that they could kind of like reap better benefits than just kind of

closing off areas. The premise was that Having these communities have exclusive rights or preferential rights to fish in an area gives them reason to actually protect and manage more sustainably because they're the ones that are going to benefit from the catch. So we started out by just kind of proving that that was true and that we could do that and figure out what's the policy that needs to be in place so that that can happen. And we started doing that in the Philippines and it took off. And

really, people got excited. The first time we did it, there were communities that said, wow, we've been doing marine protected areas for years. And while we saw the impact of that, this is the missing piece. This is the part where now we know that we're the ones that are fishing around it. And therefore, we have good reason to change our gear, to cooperate with each other. follow more rules, right? So it becomes a much more holistic kind of protection. So that's

Yeah. So for the Fish Forever, like so before Fish Forever kind of was built in the Philippines or was brought to the Philippines, before it was what people would just say, here's a marine protected area, you have to follow the rules. Go protect it. But the fishing villages didn't really completely understand I think the benefits were sort of limited. So yeah, so before I joined Rare, actually the first, Rare got known for what are called pride campaigns. They would teach communities how to

run behavior change campaigns around certain solutions. So the first round of work in the Philippines were there were these protected areas and then they added on these behavior change campaigns and they were excited because the fish came back and people were really all on board. But then the fishers would say, we've been doing all this work protecting and then other people come and fish. in the area around the protected area and we're still poor, right? So that's the

piece that was missing. That's the part that said, okay, if we then try and manage how you're fishing in the areas around the protected areas, and you're the ones that benefit from it, then you can actually stick to it longer. So that's how it expanded, and that's where we got, we started working much more closely with local governments in the Philippines, for example, because they have authority

over all of these municipal waters. So now they saw, okay, that combination of protected areas, and then these areas where the fishers are following rules and changing their gears, they're benefiting from this, that becomes something that we can sustain and actually keep going because this is in effect the whole engine.

So that's Fish Forever. And then when Coastal, we got the idea for Coastal 500 when we realized just how much power the local leaders, like the mayors that were on board, had in making change happen, right? So when you had a good, inspired mayor that really pushed things, made the right calls to policies, allocated budgets, showed up at these events and told fishers why it was important to do this, things moved

a lot faster and it really paid off. So we thought then the next logical step is to bring these mayors together. so that they could learn from each other, inspire each other, and actually kind of like become a

That's really interesting. Okay. And so now that, so coastal, so you had Fish Forever that really helped show the benefits of a little extra management around the marine protected areas, so that the local area would benefit more instead of having everybody else come in and and benefit from this protected area, even though they didn't really necessarily make the sacrifices that, you know, the local fishers

would do. And then Coastal 500 kind of expanded on that, where it started to bring in the local mayors and other bodies like municipal and regional bodies to say, hey, let's expand on these protections. Am I understanding that right? And so they got more involved. So for the mayors to get more involved, I guess it's interesting when you have local management where there's

a community that's managing it. But then when the government comes in and says, OK, we're going to manage this a little bit more, does there need to be community and Yeah, so that's where the idea of co-management comes in. Depending on the country you're in, the level of authority that's devolved to local governments varies. We were lucky to have been starting it in the Philippines, where there's really a fully devolved local government, so

they have authority over these waters. And the challenge was to convince the local government that they actually get better work done and have more success if they work with the community from the get-go. to gather the representatives from the local government and leaders of the, let's say, the fishers, if they're the ones saying, oh, this is the area that needs protection. These are the kinds of rules that will work.

And then everybody agrees on that and it's turned into policy by the local government, then it's much easier to enforce and the community will support it more When you get the buy-in from the community, so the legislation, the laws that get passed end up being a lot stronger because you have the buy-in from the community. It makes the government look good because they're passing laws that are actually seeing change

because they have the buy-in, because they've already done the work. How much work is it for those mayors and government to talk and, I guess, negotiate with the community? I mean, there's got to be times where there's a bit of conflict, right? Not everybody's going to see eye to eye. There's trust to be built. There may have already been trust issues. You never know, like I live in Canada and I know there's trust issues between the government and everyone. So I can imagine, you know, a

small state where there's maybe more contact with the government. There's probably some trust issues there. How does that happen? Like, does that happen often? And then how does So that's, I think that's a large part of what we do, kind of like facilitating that process to get to agreement and then kind of like helping them

sustain it. I think the key pieces there are finding the right people in the local government that can lead that process and then building their capacity and helping them, arm them with the tools and skills needed. So for example, If you're going to go into a community and you know you're going to have to start that difficult conversation of, hey, we're going to have to protect certain areas

or we're going to have to impose new rules, right? How do you have that conversation so that they're open to the idea and kind of like go with you along the way? So that's where we give them things like, here's a fish game where if you run it in the community, people play, they come to realizations about kind of like how things are and what will happen if we keep them the

way they are, if we don't make any changes. But they do it in a safe, friendly way where they're having fun and they're much more willing to have that conversation afterwards. So providing those kinds of trainings and tools and processes, I think is where we come in. And that's where our partners have kind of said, we really appreciate you helping us do this and helping us also translate science in a way that's easier to absorb and kind of like exactly what is

Right. And it's interesting because Rare has a really good reputation for working in collaboration with communities. You mentioned it like partners. It's not as if, you know, Rare is going in, it's like, you need to do this, you need to do this, you need to do this. A lot of the times from my understanding is you come in and it's like, hey, what help do you need? Like, what are your challenges that you're facing?

So Rare continues to do that. So I assume like a lot of the times, once you get a reputation within some villages and some coastal communities, I assume other communities might be inviting you to help them and have conversations with Yes, exactly. And that's sort of how we've been growing, where one community does it and then their neighbors say they want to do it. local governments. So we've helped them come together as an alliance so that they can coordinate among themselves and

share resources as well. So that's sort of like a And I think that kind of comes to sort of the name Coastal 500. Can you just sort of describe what the 500, obviously coastal is So 500 was sort of like the aspirational number. If we had 500 local governments doing this, we could actually cover this many communities and this many people. It also And we know we will exceed it. I think what we're hoping for is by 2025, we're

doing 500 communities. By 2030, hopefully we have 5,000. then we will figure out the ways that we can pass on more resources, more learning, more connections in ways that don't maybe a little less intensive on So are you looking at 500 communities within the Philippines or is this 500 communities almost across the world, right? Right now, we have 170 or so member communities in seven countries. Right now, those are also areas where we're directly working

as RARE, so RARE staff are on the ground. working with these communities. We wanna get to a point soon where we can open up membership to others, where they'll just get kind of like a set of tools and resources and links, connections to the others, and then they can do things It's more scaling it, because you can only be in so many places, right? Right. How many communities right now are working on

this program within the Philippines itself? Because I feel like just with the way that the island's shaped, the country's shaped, there are a lot of sort of archipelagos and ins So how many communities? We have 75 local governments that are members of Coastal 500. They represent, I think, something like 700 or 800 communities or villages actually. Wow. Within that, That's a lot. We think it's about almost, we're at about 9% of all the coastal municipalities in

the Philippines. So it's a lot. It's a lot. Yeah. And it's nice because of that devolution, right? There really is a clear mandate for local governments to do this for their constituents. So it's very aligned. The government understands

this. The Department of Interior supports that. And the mayors are kind of like really also see the value So for RARE, do you have a system where you evaluate the sort I would imagine too, because I would imagine each community has their own goals that they want to set that are probably very different by region Right, so we do have a number of indicators that we're tracking like you know the number of hectares that are under strict protection or no take, the number of

hectares that are under some form of management, so that's sort of like at the very loose end. We try to figure out whether there's an actual management body that's established and meeting. That kind of means it's functional in some way. And then we are also gathering data where we can. about the ecological impacts. So the amount of fish in the water, the biomass and the abundance of the fish of certain species that are important to the community. So

we're tracking that. We're doing household surveys and tracking changes in how people are feeling. Are they feeling more positive? Are they feeling like food secure or livelihood secure kind of thing? But it's It's a lot of places and the more we scale, the less able we are to kind of like have data constantly. So we're sort of thinking about what are the quick ways that we can keep doing this for years so that we

really know what's happening. Because even in the places where we're tracking, we'll see, okay, doing well, doing well, and then a typhoon kind of like wipes out the coral and then it all drops. So again, try again. understanding Yeah, changes happen. I mean, even like a global pandemic, you know, that probably changes things as well as you go through depending on where you live. And, you know, changes happen,

especially with the storms these years. I know, you know, in North America and the Caribbean, we're expecting probably our worst hurricanes a season. yet, you know, the record. I would imagine the same thing is similar in your area, like you're part of the world in Southeast Asia. And so it could be interesting. I mean, changes do happen, you know, and there are a lot of changes in the environment that can happen

that will affect communities. And I think it's funny because when you do evaluation programs, you're always looking for Positive outcomes and if the positive outcomes don't hit you're like, well, what's

wrong with the program? But that doesn't necessarily mean there's something wrong with the program It could just be like you said a typhoon comes in wipes out the corals or ruins the corals that habitats gone So it might take a year six months a couple years to rebuild and rebuild that fishery but I think having And having that program in that evaluation program and tracking it through, you can see how fast the recovery might be. And once you start getting that information, you

can better predict what's going to happen. So if a typhoon hits, as you mentioned, coral gets ruined. The next time that happens after you rebuild, what worked last time to help rebuild it faster? How did the community get involved? How did the local government get involved? Is there funding to help that? You can build almost programs from that, right? Like that adaptation would probably be a lot more helpful from programs like that. Is that sort of where you're

Exactly, yeah. And I think increasingly we're recognizing that resilience really comes from having people that can work together, that kind of know what to do, so that they can act on changes and respond to them and adapt, right? And increasingly that's what we're after, I think. Gotcha. Yeah, so even things like, in a way, we've been seeing kind of like, we've been adding things to the program that help enhance that. So, for example, financial resilience, right,

of households. So, we've got these savings clubs that are being formed in the communities. They're keeping money. Next time a typhoon comes, they're actually able to draw from those savings. So, those are things that enable them to then sustain the good practices that they're doing because they have that. And having leaders that can read that and kind of understand that that's what we need to keep pushing, I think it's important.

So it's almost building that capacity to understand, here are the environmental changes that could happen, here's how it's affecting the community. We have the data, you know and now you can track it and now you can be better prepared for it and each community can be better prepared for it instead of just sort of going through the motions and

never knowing what to do afterwards. Do you find that change is already happening like you're already starting to see positive outcomes from you know, storm coming through and people, you know, there's there's a bit of savings or is it too early in the program to No, so those we've seen. In fact, I love savings clubs because they're sort of like quick return, right? A nine month cycle, they'll already have money while you're while the fish take seven years to recover. There

are days where we joke, let's just put up savings clouds. The payback is, the emotional payback is

faster. But yeah, so we see those. We've seen examples where because they were organized and kind of like working together when a typhoon comes, they're actually the team that actually helps the rebuild and kind of like does the you know, in one place, they actually, two days after the typhoon hit their town and their houses were destroyed, they were actually back in the water putting back the marker buoys for the protected areas, right?

So, because they know that that's important and they know that they actually saw it for themselves that in the period right after the typhoon, they could get food from the marine protected area. Because it was already there. Yeah. Oh, that's really cool. That's really cool. I love to hear that. That's that's amazing. Instead of before, if there was no marine protected area, everybody's fishing wherever that could have been overfished a long time ago. So when a typhoon hits,

you're not going to get anything. At least now you can get something and you can still feed your families. You can still pay for food, like, you know, basically support your families and things like that and support a living. That's amazing just to think about that. Now, it's interesting to work with regions and different villages, as you mentioned, 700, 800 villages

and talking about different regional governments. But recently, you guys had a meeting, and I think it was in the last few months, where you brought those leaders from the communities, the mayors and from those governments. into one area. Was it Manila? Was No, we went to Siargao in the Philippines. That's a set of islands in the southern, southeastern part of the Philippines. We had, including the Philippine mayors, we had 16 mayors from six

Different countries, yeah. Oh, cool, cool. So we had mayors from Honduras, Guatemala, district administrators from Mozambique, representatives of the local government from Brazil, from Honduras and then Indonesia. Palau, a governor from Palau was there, yeah. And they spent a week in the Philippines and it was nice

because it was a series of things. The first two days were about visiting communities in Siargao, so two separate local governments hosted them for the day where they kind of saw different aspects of coastal resource management, right? So on the first day it was kind of like the protected area, the enforcement, the kind of like policies that the local government had passed. And then they talked to savings clubs. On the second day, it was a kind of like the ecotourism component of

the work that the local government was doing. along with additional social protection programs that they had implemented for their fishers, so insurance links to the government projects, etc. So, those were like the field trips, and then in the afternoons, they would come back together and sort of brainstorm what this meant for them and kind of like things that they would want to do. in their own countries

and communities, right? And then we got them together to then also think about, okay, as a network, what could you do together? So, we see that sometimes in alliances when they're kind of like associated and they'll say, okay, we'll do a joint enforcement plan, etc. At the national level, they can

become a real powerful force for advocacy. In Honduras, the mayors all along this one bay have been working with the national agency to push for a law that will exclude industrial fishing from 12 nautical miles to really kind of like protect 12 nautical miles and reserve it for artisanal fishers and the communities that depend on them. And that will also take out some of the more destructive fishing practices like bottom trawling. And if they were just going like one or two mayors tried to do

that, it probably wouldn't work. But the fact that they had 16, that made Yeah, nice. Yeah, so that's super exciting and it fires up the, yeah, it gets action from national government and the communities feel like they have somebody backing them up, right? Right. So that's exciting. And then we also have been taking the mayors to global events. So our mayors have spoken at the UNFCCC COP, they've spoken at our oceans and the CBD,

right? And it's a way to elevate the voices of local I think that's one of the other very important pieces here. As the world talks about protecting the ocean, land, and sea, and hitting these targets, we have to make sure that we're not forgetting that so many people depend on these coastal waters, and that they actually have the power to make change happen and sustain it because they're the ones closest

That is so cool. That is awesome. So we're seeing a lot of power in that and even sharing among sort of global leaders in this has probably helped. Were there any sort of benefits that we saw? I know it's still soon to tell because they just met a couple of months ago, but did you hear of talk of being excited of learning to Yeah, I think that really came through where they said, I'm going to copy that, or I'm going to do that thing. Because in

a way, they're all really working the same problem. And there's a general similar solution, but how it's adapted or how it plays out, those are the ones where you really need to see somebody else doing it and Yeah, even offering advice on how to go about doing it, more mayors together, more advocacy power, even just sort of the structure, the framework of how to do it. could probably help a lot. And I guess now they're probably going to just be in constant

connection. You know, they've met each other. They, you Yeah, we've set up a WhatsApp community. Oh, you know, WhatsApp is just texting back and forth, talking to each other. I love it. And hopefully we're trying to drive more of like, show, you know, send a picture of what you did to get other people excited. Yeah. Yeah, that's amazing. That's amazing. I'm sure that communication will develop as you go along to do that stuff. There seems to be a lot of great things on this program. And

it seems to be just getting bigger and bigger. How is Rare trying to grow this program to include One very big element of this is really kind of rethinking our delivery pathways. As I explained earlier, for the longest time, we got where we were by really having people on the ground working closely with every local government or community and kind of like walking them through the process. So we are still doing that, and that's an important part of the work. But we're also really trying to figure

out ways that we can pass it on to others. So we're working with, let's say, provincial governments. where we're training their staff on how to work with local governments so that they can help them do certain things, or universities, for example, and again, downloading elements of the program in that way. Coastal 500 is, in effect, another piece of it where it's really lighter touch, where it's about influence and access to others into a network. Hopefully

all of those kinds of things add up, right? and they come up to a growth and kind of like deeper, I guess wider reach. We're also exploring a lot of partnerships as well, either with other NGOs or other kind of like initiatives or programs where we can add value or just maybe do a component of it. as well. We're also looking at ways that, so some of the partnerships we're exploring are with groups that, let's say, fund local

organizations. So, you know, having a combination where they're providing the funding but we're providing the training would Yeah, getting more dedicated groups because they can spend more time on it because they're getting paid to do it. is probably a lot better than just having volunteers who have other jobs or other priorities. And then it's an extra thing on the board. I can I can see that happening a lot. I

mean, you see that a lot with board of directors, right? If they're volunteering, some of them may be too busy to do the work that they need to volunteer as Some board members are more present than others. I would imagine the same thing with communities if they they have the funding to actually spend some time on it and get the right resources for it. then it'll probably be a lot more dedicated to achieving those goals, right?

Yeah, yeah. So we're trying to find ways to link our partners, our community partners to more sources Yeah, that's awesome. That's amazing. You know, you've done this for quite some time. You've seen a lot of different communities, you know, change over time. Can you talk about maybe one that really stuck in the back of your mind of just being like, this is this was a really cool to

Sure. I visited a local government, this is interesting because we started working in this area called Tanyan Strait in the Philippines back in 2010. This particular local government was actually not part of the first ones that we had worked with. So they were like a neighbor. And they were just there, but they're pretty strong and awesome on their own. They have good staff that have stayed there and

they were doing things, but we hadn't kind of partnered with them. And then in 2017, we finally signed an MOU with them and they were part of a batch of communities in that area where we did kind of like almost just a light kind of intervention. We were experimenting to see how much lighter can we go, right? So that it's not so intensive and expensive. And they were like the star pupil in that cohort and kind of like ran

with it, et cetera, and did things. And then at the tail end of that two-year engagement, they were also saying, oh, and you know what, we're going to pull together our neighbors and form an alliance. Oh, wow. So they went ahead and we helped a little bit in terms of kind of like, oh, here, Manuel is here. But they kind of ran with it. They worked with the provincial government. I visited them recently, and they were showing me stuff like, here's the roadmap that you showed us, and we still do

this. That is so cool. So to me, that's kind of like, that's our dream, right? And they were, even now, they're functioning as the lead in that alliance where they're actually sending their divers to help do ecological surveys in the other communities. Wow.

Yeah, that's so cool. Like to be able to see a community just take it on so much and you see the benefits, right, of all the communities that take it on and they're much more prepared for any kind of adaptation or any kind of, you know, change,

ups and downs and so forth. It must make your job feel really good to see like your communities really, you know, rallying behind this and being able to see, you know, that resilience in those communities to the different environmental changes that happen, especially in in small islands because small islands feel it the most with these different changes. So I

really do appreciate hearing that. Now, are there some challenges that are faced, particularly in the Philippines, maybe new challenges that need to be addressed that you're looking forward to sort of taking on? you know, whether it be sea level rise, whether it be, you know, plastic pollution or any kind of like litter, marine litter, or anything

like that. Have you seen anything that's been like a sort I think in the Philippines and countries where there's high population and just kind of like the rate of coastal development, I think this is the piece that maybe something to be confronted really. And I think that's why it's so important to be working with the local governments where everything lands. Planning and everything. Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot of it has to do with planning and what's allowed, what's not allowed in the area.

Because along with that are things like sewage going into the ocean. Yes. Making sure. And those things you can't fix without good land use and planning plans and systems. Yeah. That's a big, that's a big thing. One of the articles that Zach sent me It was about the meeting and one of the mayors mentioned, I guess it was in Seargo, is that how you pronounce it? Mentioned how the mangroves protected them from, it was a typhoon. that

Yeah, two years ago. So can you just talk a little bit about like, like maintain, like, you know, you talk about planning, talk about urban development, the importance of maintaining those coastal systems. You know, this, this mayor mentioned how this was going to be like, this was a huge thing. Is that is that with all the members that are part of the coastal 500? Is that a a common theme is mangrove, seagrass, you know, coral

Yeah, sure. So that case in Siargao is actually really interesting and we really can't take credit for all that they've done because he was, that mayor's pretty visionary when he first took office in the, I think in the, around 2010 or thereabouts. That's when he kind of really saw that they needed to address the threats to the mangrove areas. They've got the largest contiguous mangrove forest in

the Philippines actually, so it's a big deal. But it was also getting cut down for firewood, etc. So he kind of like put in a lot of policies and systems. at the time and kind of like, you know, demonstrated political will to really kind of like stop that. Then he met us in 2014, I think, and that's when we kind of like trained them on behavior adoption strategy. So they sort of like layered that on and applied it and in effect deepened the

impact of it. So that's really changed. He took it upon himself to add on livelihood programs around the mangroves that made it more, you know, again created greater incentive for communities to stick with protection. And so their payoff was really during that typhoon where it was, it's there. And we've seen that in many ways, either for coral reefs, paying off for food,

Even like wave energy too, right? Dissipating wave energy that comes Yeah, the science just isn't great, so it's a little harder to prove it to communities. Yes, true, true. Yeah, yeah. It's not as obvious that way, but yes, I think food is kind of like the main thing that people see

when they think about coral. But with mangroves, it's this really kind of like that Yeah, it's you know, I think this is this example right here is where you see the power of coastal 500 because you have, you know, a mayor who may or may not in the past have only been able to speak to a couple of other mayors in and around the region to and I don't know what the dynamics are in the Philippines in terms of how often mayors get together and how far reach

they have to other mayors in the country. But now we're talking over different countries and different parts of the world and being able to share the benefits of maintaining mangroves, not only for protection, but also doubling down and saying, hey, we're going to put livelihoods around the maintenance of the mangroves and things

like that. So now I see now where it's like, OK, other mayors start to see this and be like, oh, so there is a reason not like more than one reason to keep those mangroves in instead of like, you know, getting pressure from developers to be like, Oh, no, we're gonna put a hotel or resort here, or we're gonna put a building here, we're gonna put some whatever development that might be. I think

that's really cool. Because you get those, those mayors with those types of visions really have a lot more power in Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there's also I think there's also benefit to it being a global group. Yes. Because in a way you remove the element of political competition and kind of like... Yeah, true. Because they're just mayors together, right? When they're in that kind of a situation. So it's fantastic. They let

their guard down. They're more open and honest as well And even seeing, as you mentioned before, the similarities of the problems and the challenges that they face, and then how those solutions can maybe help one in the Philippines and one in like Honduras or Guatemala or wherever that might be. There's a lot of power in this. And I really like the fact that Rare is involved in this and trying to help and scale it to a point where it's like, you

may not need Rare at this point too much. You know, it's a it's a it's a large organization, but it's a small organization for the impact that you're having. And I just appreciate the work that you and your colleagues have done to get this program off the ground and to help these communities and and, you know, to really empower the communities. I think that's really what's, you

know, where conservation has been heading for a long time. And Rare's been at the forefront of that for a very long time with Fish Forever and their other programs and the pride campaigns that they've had for various species at risk and so forth. So Rocky, thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast to share this

information. I know this is something that's very positive for us to hear and for the audience to hear because every once in a while we need some positive news about marine conservation and Thank you for having me. It was fun. You bet. Good conversation. Thank Absolutely. You bet. Thank you, Rocky, for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. This was amazing. I

love being able, this is what I love about my job. This is what I love about doing this podcast is I get to speak to people like Rocky who work for organizations like Rare, who work with communities to become more resilient. It energizes me because I know that these communities are better off. a savings account for the community, having this savings bank to say, hey, you

know what, if something happens, we're ready to go. You know, we're ready to be able to support each other because we're prepared for anything that might happen. Because we never know what kind of storm is going to come through. We never know what might happen. Our infrastructure is better. Our support is better. Our financial support is better.

And we're ready to go. Even to just think that after a storm, Villages will go out and put out their marker buoys to mark out the boundaries for the marine protected area because they know that they have more fish after a storm than they would previously if they didn't have a marine protected area in place. That is huge. That is what we call resiliency. And that is what I'd like to see more and more of and hear more and more of with different communities

that live around the ocean, live on the coast. around the world. I want to hear this because a lot of the times we hear this news and even on this podcast, we hear news and I tell news about really damaging things and really big challenges that we face. But we see these organizations and these communities come together to work, to become more resilient to these changes and be able to adapt. and manage these areas a lot better

than they have been in the past, just because of the changes that they're facing. And even though there are probably more changes coming, they're still going to be able to be more resilient because they're prepared. And although that change is going to continue to happen, although there's going to be challenges that they're going to face, they're going to adapt, they're going to make more preparations, and they're going to be able to be ready for anything that is

put in their place, and they'll be more resilient for it. This is what I love about my job. This is what I love about organizations like Rare, about people

like Rocky, to be able to work with communities like this. And of course, the resiliency of the community to be able to identify challenges that they have, invite people in such as Rare to come in and help them out and provide resources, work with governments that There may have been trust issues in the past and be able to overcome those and have visionaries of mayors like we just talked about in Siargao in the Philippines to

be able to say, hey, we need mangroves. And mangroves actually save our towns because when we keep them in place, they save our towns from flooding and from storm surges and so forth during typhoons. And we're going to put livelihoods around that. So we need to protect even more, especially after there's a lot of development, in the face of a lot of development. So love the fact that we have these types

of episodes. Love the fact we have these organizations and people like Rocky and Rare to be able to help out these communities in all different types of places. Thank you, Zach, for putting me in touch with Rocky and making me aware of this story. Thank you, Rocky, for coming on the podcast and sharing your insights, sharing your experiences, and sharing your

stories. And thank you, the audience members, for listening to this. I want you to share this because this is one of those episodes that I feel like are so shareable that people will really become more optimistic about how we adapt to changes in our environment, to changes in our ocean. So, share this with one of your friends, your colleagues, your family members, whoever that might be. These

are stories that we need to get out more and more. So, thank you so much for listening to this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time and