Coastal Livelihoods

June 16, 2008 -- Kingston, RI

This week we are looking at coastal management issues through the lens of coastal livelihoods. How do we ensure that we are sustaining the economic environment for people on the coast while we are managing the other resources? What is a sustainable livelihood?

For many of the other participants it seems that this terminology is somewhat familiar. I had a hard time translating some of the concepts into something relevant to the place I live and work. What it seems to boil down to is what we would call sustainable development or sustainable economic development. Many of the examples we talked about today, such as seaweed farming in the Philippines or paprika farming in Tanzania require such a different approach to implementation than I think about when it comes to sustainable development just because of the vast difference in social and institutional capacity.

Even with some of those huge differences, I saw some application and a few common themes that resonated with my experiences. A paper I read on seaweed farming stressed that approaches to sustaining livelihoods have to been seen in a more complex way than we like to do. Something like seaweed farming as an approach to reduce fishing pressure may have positive benefits when market prices are good, and diseases don't decimate the crop. However in some places seaweed farming may just provide more cash for fishers to buy more fishing gear or it may spur immigration and result in more pressure on the fish stocks when the seaweed crop fails or prices fall. We looked at a few examples of these complex suites of issues using systems maps that Don and others worked up. One case from Tanzania linked a wide variety of factors together that related to protection of the fish and wildlife populations in a nearby park with paprika farming and HIV AIDS health status in a complex web of interactions. What was fascinating was how one could link healthy families (with members not living with AIDS) to less poaching and how AIDS prevention measures helped protect wildlife.

We also talked a bit about how one measures the effectiveness of projects to improve livelihoods and sustainability. This approach is sometimes thought of as having three "bottom lines", including 1) quality of life, 2) ecosystem health, and 3) societal health and human services. I find a lot of appeal for measures that try to address quality of life in particular over simply measuring economic growth. There is one country, Bhutan, that measures "Gross National Happiness" instead of Gross National Production. That makes sense to me. The production should be for a reason, right? We are not just working for the sake of working are we? Do we make money just to make money or is there something more important that we are striving for? I'm a big fan of Ted.com and really like this talk on Habits of Happiness. I remember seeing another presentation there that addressed this issue as well, but now I can't remember just what talk it was. Hmm...

Anyway, I am certain that economic growth just for the sake of growth is not only unsustainable, but just simply misguided. In this season of presidential campaigns however, how often are we going to hear about growing our economy and creating more jobs? A lot I'll bet. I don't expect we'll hear much about enhancing our national quality of life though.

A few threads that I picked up from the overall discussions about sustainable livelihoods both here today and previously include the following. To develop a sustainable system on this planet so humans can survive a while longer we need to:
-- educate and empower women
-- significantly reduce poverty
-- manage our behavior within the ecological capacity of the system in which we live
-- diversify our economic base in our communities
-- focus on improving quality over increasing quantity
-- consume less, understand more
-- build happiness within ourselves rather than from external things

Hmm... I think I've gotten off on a tangent and a bit distracted by TED.com (it's easy to do if you are at all curious about things) so I guess I'll wrap it up for today.

Be happy.