It’s a simple enough question — would you rather get into a sea that has a lot of sharks in it or be given a big bag of money?
Very few are going to choose the sharks. But over the long term you can’t have an ocean emptied of its sharks and a healthy economy at the same time. These animals are not only a keystone species, which means they’re vital for keeping marine ecosystems in balance, they also tell us about how coral reefs are doing, how robust deep-sea environments are, what the impact of destructive fishing methods is and how much bycatch fishing companies are hauling in, to name just a few headline items.
We need sharks big and small, in shallow and deep waters for the ocean to thrive; but our ocean isn’t thriving. Tracking the sharks shows that. A systematic conservation plan for sharks and rays is needed in South Africa, according to Nina Faure Beaulieu, a PhD candidate at Nelson Mandela University, who spoke at the 7th International Marine Conservation Congress (IMCC) in Cape Town last month.
“South Africa is home to 194 species, which represents about one-fifth of the global shark and ray fauna,” Faure Beaulieu says, adding that if you also take the number of endemic species and the number of evolutionary distinct species into account, South Africa is consistently in the top 5% of the richest regions for sharks and rays.
How are they doing? “Unfortunately, not great,” Faure Beaulieu says. “About 44% of South Africa’s sharks and rays are threatened and following global patterns. Their main threats are national fisheries, which catch about 103 species, so just over 50%, through either targeted catches or incidental catches.”
As Rhett Bennett, programme manager for the Western Indian Ocean shark and ray conservation initiative at the Wildlife Conservation Society, pointed out at the IMCC, South Africa protects only about 19 species, a measly 10% of all species in the country.
While South Africa may have 41 marine protected areas (MPAs), with another 10-20 more sites in the pipeline, the existing MPAs make up just 5.4% of the ocean that falls under South Africa’s jurisdiction. And the sad news is that the MPAs aren’t offering the sharks very much protection.
Faure Beaulieu says that in KwaZulu-Natal the reach of the MPAs may be sufficient, but that’s not the case off the south and west coasts. Further, she adds, these last two coastlines are generally areas which have higher fishing pressure, with a lot of trawling and long-lining. This means that not only are sharks being targeted as well as being caught accidentally as bycatch (which results in many of them dying), but sharks aren’t in the parks set aside for marine protection.
Several scientists at the IMCC said South Africa’s decisions about where to place MPAs would be better if the selection were overlaid with data from the Important Shark and Ray Areas (ISRA) project. The identification of ISRAs is based on the application of scientific criteria and is independent of political pressure. While MPAs have specific rules to ensure human behaviour is controlled, ISRAs are focused only on the survival and wellbeing of one or more shark and ray species.
As the ISRA project website says, sharks are facing a global crisis and it’s estimated that more than a third are threatened with extinction.
“Over the past century, fisheries have had a huge and cumulative impact on sharks, and this threat has been compounded by habitat loss and climate change,” it says. “Fisheries and trade management measures alone are not enough to reverse population declines. However, a place-based conservation approach can play a critical role in halting these declines by sheltering populations from fishing pressure as well as from habitat changes.”
If your ecosystems collapse, your pillars of society and everything else collapses too
— Mandy Lombard
And that’s where marine spatial planners come in. Rather like town planners are needed in built-up areas, people are needed to delineate areas of the ocean for all manner of activities. But, says one local marine spatial planner at the IMCC with 32 years of experience, saving sharks, and more broadly, the ocean and the human race, goes beyond scientific models, conservation planning and talking about climate change.
“There’s something more nuanced,” Prof Mandy Lombard of Nelson Mandela University says. “And it talks to the world that we live in and the work that we do. Very broadly, our objective as conservation planners or conservation practitioners is to save wild places because we believe that this is important for life on Earth. But the context that we work in is of swimming upstream.”
While making it clear that she’s sharing her own opinions and not necessarily those of the university, Lombard says she believes the world is basing itself on two very faulty models.
The first model looks like a footstool with three legs. This model is about sustainable development, and the environment is seen as one of the legs. “But,” says Lombard, “you can’t have social systems, and you can’t have economic systems or any other kind of system if you don’t have healthy ecosystems. And so I don’t believe the environment is one leg of a stool. I believe it’s the foundation.”
“If your ecosystems collapse, your pillars of society and everything else collapses too.”
What we need is a circular economy or a steady-state economy, in which the fiscus is of a relatively stable size, featuring a stable population and stable consumption that remain at or below carrying capacity.
— Professor Mandy Lombard
The other faulty model, according to Lombard, is the economic growth model. This model assumes that natural resources are not really to be valued, that they are limitless, that waste is simply a nuisance and that we require perpetual growth driven by consumption.
“But [is that] the real economy? Everything is connected to everything, and everything has to go somewhere,” Lombard says. She supports the view of ecological economist Robert Costanza that it’s time to leave GDP behind as a metric and use more subtle metrics that speak to sustainability and the quality of life and wellbeing.
What we need, says Lombard, is a circular or a steady-state economy, in which the fiscus is of a relatively stable size, featuring a stable population and stable consumption that remain at or below carrying capacity. She adds that this type of economy would have environmental, lifestyle and moral advantages.
While some have delved into trying to prove how much an MPA is worth in financial terms, Lombard wonders whether the scientific community should be playing that game. “Should we be critiquing this current economic growth model much more seriously than we do?”
Quoting friend and mentor Prof Richard Cowling, she says: “We live in a world increasingly overshadowed by leaders who are callous, greedy and narcissistic. This at a time when we need leadership that is compassionate, generous and selfless so that we can create the institutions of collaboration required to solve the wicked problems that plague our world.”
More MPAs are not necessarily the answer, though, according to Lombard. She calls it “the overburdened protected area problem”. In South Africa there’s a list of criteria for MPAs. These regions don’t have to meet all of the criteria, but they need to hit a number of the targets to be considered.
“Increasingly MPAs are expected to deliver on everybody else’s objectives — they’ve got to be food sources, recreation hot spots and semiprotected areas so that all the processes that threaten biodiversity can carry on unabated; and they mustn’t annoy any stakeholders. It’s an impossible demand,” Lombard says.
This, she believes, is why South Africa has parks on paper, but not the kind of parks needed for the sharks. Or other critical species, for that matter.
Scientists and conservationists “need to start thinking in systems” other than ecosystems or socioecological systems, says Lombard. “To have an impact we need to work in all the other systems — the legal systems, the governance systems, the political systems and the economic systems. If you start to do that, you start to find those leverage points where you get your bang for your buck and you get your work for conservation [too].”
Lombard adds: “We have to talk to all the other players in all the systems whose behaviour we hope to change, and the only way to do that is to collaborate — and not just with friends or the people we like. We need to collaborate with industry, with fisheries and with whoever it is we believe is part of the system we need to change.”
Granted, not all scientists are collaborators or have the time to try to build broad connections across a multitude of stakeholder groups. Scientists shouldn’t have to be all things to all people. But that’s where the social scientists, the ocean literacy experts, the educators and the marketing and social media teams come in.
Together they need to act quickly to convince more people that swimming in a sea with sharks is what will bring long-lasting economic prosperity.
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