August 6, 1999
Boston — The coastal communities
and resorts, beaches, wetlands, and islands of Baja California
are witnessing a tragedy. Daily, common sense decisions of residents
and visitors to live, to eat, to make a living and enjoy life
are steadily consuming more of the ocean's resources than are
naturally replenished.
That scenario, referred to as the tragedy of the commons, occurs when resources such as the food supply from the ocean are open to harvesting in an uncontrolled fashion. Each individual makes the rational decision to catch all of the fish they possibly can. The problem is that everyone makes that same individual decision. When that happens, there is simply not enough to supply everyone with everything they take for very long. Eventually, the fish stocks supplying commercial, subsistence, and recreational fisheries in the Gulf of California and Pacific Ocean will collapse without some change.
Roberto Enriquez Andrade, a professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, wants to better understand what drives that process and develop a method to reverse the trend that is acceptable to all users of the marine resources up and down the peninsula. When those lessons are learned, Enriquez believes they will be transferable throughout much of Mexico, Central and South America.
Recognizing the serious threats facing marine life along the coasts of Baja California, the Pew Fellows Program in Marine Conservation has selected Enriquez as one of 11 Pew Marine Conservation Fellows in the 1999 cohort. The recipients of the tenth annual Pew Fellowships range from an environmental journalist, to academicians and national policymakers, to an underwater photographer and an environmental lawyer. They will receive an award of $150,000 to carry out an innovative, interdisciplinary project that addresses an urgent conservation challenge facing our seas. The total of $1.5 million presented annually by the Pew Fellows Program in Marine Conservation makes the fellowships the world's largest award for marine conservationists.
Enriquez plans to utilize the support from the Pew program to analyze the economic and social underpinnings of current practices that are unnecessarily destructive to the marine coastal environment, then develop incentives to entice individual and collective behavior into appropriate avenues. He plans to make progress into the daunting task by bringing together groups of individuals affected by the decline of local coastal habitats. Enriquez explains that these groups will include representatives from all sectors and will work together to identify problems and try to find solutions.
"Working in collaboration we hope to conduct a thorough analysis of the social, economic, and ecological forces contributing to the degradation of the coastal marine ecosystems that are part of the Baja California peninsula," he said.
In particular, Enriquez intends to address the problems raised by the current method of regulation of the coastal marine zone. Presently, the coastal zone from 20 meters inland of the mean tide mark to the extend of the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) 200 miles out to sea, is constitutionally defined as public property and is de facto an open access area without effective restrictions to utilization. "Our challenge is to find an efficient and equitable framework to establish who can and cannot use the resources and under what rules," Enriquez said. "Those are not properly defined in Mexico."
Enriquez believes that the answers to that challenge will be found at the community level. "I think the federal system of management for coastal ecosystems is too centralized and not working. Putting control of the resources at either the state or municipality, or even better at the community level, and allowing them to develop rules could be an effective solution," Enriquez said. "Communities must then develop strategies based upon their competitive advantage in regional and international trade systems such as the North American Free Trade Agreement."
After developing an understanding of the social and economic processes contributing to the degradation of marine resources and developing potential economic and property-rights solutions, Enriquez hopes to help stakeholders actually implement those solutions. "Local, state, and federal authorities have expressed an interest in participating in the project," Enriquez said. The project will identify an area or issue and a corresponding solution, then attempt to implement that solution in order to observe and document the impacts.
The final phases of Enriquez's proposed project is to broadly disseminate the results of the study and trials so that others throughout Mexico and other countries facing similar problems may benefit from the knowledge gained as a result of the Pew-funded project.
"This is a wonderful opportunity because this kind of funding is very scarce in Mexico," Enriquez said. "There is no experience with the use of economic and property-rights based approaches to nature conservation. So, the approach is virtually unknown to Mexican conservation by modifying the overlying institutional framework."
Enriquez specializes in coastal conservation using social and market incentives for enhanced governance of marine resources. His background includes experience in academic and non-profit conservation management. Roberto is a professor in the Faculty of Marine Sciences at the Universidad Autonoma de Baja California in Mexico where he developed the gra-duate curriculum in coastal economics for the coastal oceanography program. He was instrumental in establishing the Marine Resources Management Program (MRMP), a one-year diploma course in coastal zone management and fisheries management which was the first of its kind in Mexico. Enriquez has served as program coordinator for MRMP and continues to teach professional training courses. From 1996 to 1999, Enriquez also served as director of the Baja California Peninsula Chapter of PRONATURA, Mexico's largest and most influential environmental non-profit organization.
He is an alumnus of the Universidad Autonoma de Baja California, where he received his bachelor's degree in Oceanography. Enriquez attended Oregon State University, in Oregon, USA for his master's degree in Marine Resource Management and his doctorate in Natural Resource Economics.
Return
to Frontpage