Impact Report - Lexicon of Impacts™

Community

Location: 4 provinces in Kep, Kampot, Preah Sihanoukville and Koh Kong, Cambodia

Area: Fishing domain of 48,488 km²

Coordinates: 10.839394522932764, 103.36393250309662

Communities: Cambodian coastal fisheries communities

This Cambodian coastal area, spanning four provinces and 435 kilometers along the Gulf of Thailand, faces disputes over its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) yet plays a crucial role in the country’s development. With 40 community fisheries and significant marine biodiversity, it’s essential for industries like agriculture and tourism. However, vulnerable coastal fishing communities are at risk due to climate change, poverty, and unsustainable fishing practices. Fish stocks have drastically declined since 2017, exacerbated by poor governance and environmental degradation. Overfishing persists, threatening ecosystem health and the livelihoods of small-scale fishers, prompting urgent calls for sustainable management and adaptation measures.

Challenges & Opportunities

Increased numbers of fishers

Healthy coastal and marine fisheries provide livelihood options for communities, but as more people become fishers, with fewer fish they compete for limited resources and competition often results in increased effort and costs, and also innovation into gear types that are less selective and often illegal.

With increasing numbers of fishers, more fishing activities pushed to get more fish. The more fishers, more boats fishing with more gear leads to reduced fish.

Shoreline Damage

Fishers race to the bottom to compete for their share of a declining catch by using more exploitative gears and boats. With fewer fish left, fish prices increase with growing market demand encouraging increased importation of fish at lower prices.

Over exploitation and poorly targeted fishing accelerates the degradation and depletion of fish stocks. Coastal habitats degrade, leaving barren seabeds often being covered in sediment.

Competition

Less fish, increased uncertainty, smaller lower value fish, declining incomes unable to achieve minimum wages.

Fishing activities become uncontrollable. Too many boats chasing fewer fish in a competition for the remaining catch. Many fishermen shift to harmful illegal gears and larger vessels in order to maintain income. Without control, a fisherman trying to leave fish for the future is replaced by others that take them today. This race to the bottom depletes coastal resources as fishers struggle to survive. When fishing is in decline, fishers must travel further to catch fish, increasing their costs whilst they face declining revenue streams.

Climate change risk

Sea level rise, sea and air temperature increase, ocean acidification, seawater deoxygenated, algal blooms and hypoxia, along with storms and extreme Climate change is compounding the impacts of overfishing and coastal and marine ecosystem damage.

Climate change reduces marine productivity, adding stressors to key ocean and coastal ecosystems, driving fish to cooler higher oxygenated waters, reducing diversity and stocks available to fishers.

Project Details

Co-benefit sets of Sustainable Coastal and Marine Fisheries project that integrates the principles of nature capital to enhance biodiversity conservation and sustainable resource management.

Contact: Alvin Lopez, alopez@adb.org

Nature-Based Solutions

Nature-based solutions address environmental and societal challenges by utilizing natural ecosystems. It involves restoring, managing, or protecting ecosystems like reforestation, wetland restoration, sustainable agriculture, and coastal habitat and marine ecosystem services. By leveraging natural ecosystem functions, these solutions mitigate climate change, enhance biodiversity, improve water and air quality, provide flood protection, and support sustainable livelihoods.

Marine regeneration and fisheries management use natural processes for restoring and managing natural marine ecosystems to achieve sustainable outcomes. Marine regeneration focuses on restoring degraded habitats such as coral reefs, mangroves, and seagrass beds, which play crucial roles in supporting marine biodiversity and ecosystem services.

Biodiversity

SCMF regenerates fisheries habitats and stocks. The project transforms degraded and overexploited coastal areas into recovering ecosystems, achieving the main goal of building coastal resilience. Seagrass bed protection leads to more than 30% improved biodiversity and more than 40% abundance in four years.

Communities rely on natural resources from fisheries catch, coral reefs, seagrass beds, and mangrove forests to maintain and sustain their livelihoods. Communities able to adapt and recover while rebuilding fish populations and livelihoods.

As seagrass beds and seabeds are restored, marine organisms flourish, facilitating the restoration of ecosystems. Key Iconic species such as dolphins have increased presence in rejuvenated ecosystems as an indicator of increased fish abundance. Combination of habitat regeneration and mariculture increases fish biomass stock.

Natural Capital

Nature-positive finance supports actions that protect, restore, or enhance sustainable use and management of nature, as defined by activities such as biodiversity and ecosystem protection, ecosystem restoration, sustainable natural resource management, and enabling conditions like policies and incentives. By promoting these initiatives, nature-positive finance contributes to the broader ambition to halt and reverse nature loss by 2030.

The Sustainable Coastal and Marine Fisheries project is rooted in natural capital principles, focusing on activities such as protection, restoration, and sustainable management of marine ecosystems. By steering economic development away from risks associated with nature loss, the project enhances policies aimed at improving the management of fisheries resources.

Flyway

The East Asian-Australasian Flyway is among nine major migratory routes for waterbirds worldwide. Cambodia provides one of the crucial sites within this global network of flyways, supporting key habitat for migratory water birds. It is one of nine major flyways worldwide and supports over 50 million migratory birds from more than 250 species.

The ADB’s Regional Flyways Initiative will collaborate with SCMF to safeguard this flyway in Koh Kong province. Koh Kapik, situated in the northeastern Gulf of Thailand, encompassing mudflats and sandbars within an intertidal ecosystem slated for protection.

SCMF supports Regional Flyways Initiative through protecting The Koh Kapik Ramsar site, aligned to Koh Kapik CPA and CFI, part of the East Asian-Australasian Flyway in northeast Gulf of Thailand that covers the intertidal mudflats and sandbars.

Gulf of Thailand

Cambodia spans across 181,035 km² and shares borders with Lao PDR, Thailand, and Viet Nam. Along its coastline, which extends approximately 435 km, Cambodia’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) encompasses 55,600 km² or 16% of the total area of the Gulf of Thailand. The four countries experience similar challenges on declining fishing resources and climate change risks. Sharing the marine area with other countries, Cambodia has several challenges in managing the area collectively with other countries especially in key areas including co-management, illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, exclusive economic zones, territorial disputes, conservation and environmental concerns and globalization and trade.

SCMF revitalizes marine habitats and enhances fisheries management across five key impact areas, aimed at benefiting marine areas in the Gulf of Thailand. The project sets a strong precedent for improved management of Gulf of Thailand stocks, enhancing legacy practices and fostering collaborative decision-making across countries.

UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

True resilience involves focusing on five key impact areas that coastal regions need to identify and analyze. This guide has helped our team establish essential practices for building resilience and aligning with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Restoring and revitalizing marine habitats to build ecosystem resilience.

Partners

https://www.carbonicons.org/fingerprints/sustainable-coastal-and-marine-fisheries/

Air.

Clean air is vital for maintaining human health, reducing the risk of respiratory diseases, and supporting ecosystem balance and biodiversity.

Enhances air quality by preventing and eliminating overfishing and replacing harmful gear and trawling vessels that contribute to high energy use, fuel emissions, and water pollution. By implementing better fisheries management and surveillance, cleaner air is achieved through the use of low-impact, sustainable fishing vessels and gear.

Practices

(to learn more about practices, check out our podcast series)

Water.

Clean and accessible water is crucial for the well-being of ecosystems, the preservation of biodiversity, and the fulfillment of essential human needs.

Safeguards mangroves and seagrass beds, greatly enhance water quality by acting as natural filters that capture pollutants and sediment. Healthy mangrove forests continue to purify water, benefiting both marine life and coastal communities, while also helping to counteract the effects of climate change induced water pollution. Water quality improves as fisheries efforts are reduced. By safeguarding fishing areas and improving practices, the project enhances water quality, leads to biomass increase and ecosystem replenishment.

Practices

(to learn more about practices, check out our podcast series)

Soil.

Healthy soils are essential for promoting robust plant growth, enhancing nutrient cycling, supporting diverse microbial communities, and mitigating soil erosion.

Revives critical marine habitats like seagrass, seabed, and mangrove, leading to enhanced soil health. This initiative benefits benthic communities, prevents soil erosion, increases fish biomass, and safeguards coastal structures.

Practices

(to learn more about practices, check out our podcast series)

Biodiversity.

Clean and accessible water is crucial for the well-being of ecosystems, the preservation of biodiversity, and the fulfillment of essential human needs.

Biodiversity thrives with the Ecosystem Regeneration project, through restores lost habitats in nearshore fishing areas, coral reefs, seagrass beds, seabeds and mangrove. This revitalization attracts marine life back to once-degraded areas, transforming them into thriving ecosystems abundant with fish and other marine organisms. SCMF reverses the decline of fish stocks and ensures key species blue swimming crabs, shrimp, and fish are conserved and fished sustainably.

Practices

(to learn more about practices, check out our podcast series)

Equity.

Supporting equity and inclusion fosters social justice, ensures equal access to resources derived from the environment, and promotes the well-being and participation of all, regardless of background or circumstances.

Fishers and coastal communities are benefited through Ecosystem Regeneration’s alternative livelihood, mariculture business, enterprise incubation programs and habitat restoration. This leads to improved income, reduces poverty and increases food security. By revitalizing fish populations and restoring ecosystem balance, these initiatives support local fishers and their families, reducing dependency on dwindling resources and promoting resilient, nature-based economies.

Practices

(to learn more about practices, check out our podcast series)

Carbon.

Carbon capture and storage plays a crucial role in tackling climate change, and by safeguarding the sustainability of our ecosystems, helps to ensure a thriving future for all living beings.

Climate adaptation improves the resilience of coastal communities to climate change. Through interventions of habitat regeneration and promoting sustainable fisheries practices, the project mitigates vulnerability to extreme climate change risks. By nurturing resilient ecosystems and livelihoods, coastal communities are empowered to flourish despite persistent environmental challenges.

Practices

(to learn more about practices, check out our podcast series)

Sustainable Coastal
and Marine Fisheries

Overall Impacts | Path of Continuous Improvement

The project consists of interventions across five impact areas. Each intervention is on a path of continuous improvement, generating impacts across six dimensions: air, water, soil, biodiversity, equity, and climate. Collectively, the impacts arising from the continuous improvement pathway can be represented as an Overall Impact Score.

CLICK ON THE ICONS to learn more about each impact areas’ contribution or scroll down for details. The score was calculated by summing the contributions of each output to ecological benefits.

Five Impact Areas

Areas of change resulting from Sustainable Coastal and Marine Fisheries Project (SCMF) in marine ecosystem regeneration. This includes areas of habitat regeneration, ecosystem health, and climate resilient livelihood.

How much area of seagrass were restored?

25,000 Hectares

How many fisheries productivity structures?

5,000

How many mangroves have been restored?

34,000

Biomass increased by what percentage?

30%

Location: Kep, Kampot, Preah Sihanoukville, Koh Kong
Duration: 2024 – 2029
Interventions: seagrass regeneration, mangrove ecosystem, biomass regeneration, East Asian Australasian Flyway site.

Restoring and revitalizing marine habitats and species within seagrass, mangrove, marine fisheries, and flyway site ecosystems that have been degraded and exploited due to excessive fishing activities.

Supporting the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Ecosystem Regeneration: Interventions

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Each impact area is addressed with a unique combination of social, environmental, and economic interventions to ensure the goals are met. This requires measurement, reporting, and verification. Each intervention affects ecological benefits differently.

How many community fisheries facilitated?

40

Nearshore fishing domain area increased how much?

37%

How many gears replaced?

2,000

How much did the juvenile bycatch reduce?

50%

Location: Kep, Kampot, Preah Sihanoukville, Koh Kong
Duration: 2024 – 2029
Interventions: Fisheries institutional strengthening, community fisheries, fisheries information management system, marine fisheries management area.

Effectively regulate and oversee fisheries activities to ensure sustainable fishing activities. This anchored in regulatory sub decree transformation, empowering community fisheries, fisheries information management system and protecting additional areas in marine fisheries management area.

Supporting the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Interventions

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How many fishers transitioned to farming?

1,900

How many hectares of aquaculture are there now?

3,385

How many tons per hectar per year of blood cockles?

10,000

How many tons per hectar per year of greenlip mussel?

75

Location: Kep, Kampot, Preah Sihanoukville, Koh Kong
Duration: 2024 – 2029
Interventions: Shellfish culture, safe seafood, seafood traceability.

Open water – nonfed mariculture of mussels, oysters, blood cockles, and other marine products, offers fishers an opportunity to transition away from wild capture fishing. This shift allows remaining fishers to enhance their catch and improve their livelihoods. When efficiently managed with clear market linkages and strict adherence to food safety requirements, mariculture can provide greater stability and potentially higher income than traditional fishing.

Supporting the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Interventions

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How many fisheries administrative infrastructure have been built?

4

How many landing sites have been built?

8

How many community protected infrastructures?

6

How many community fisheries infrastructures?

4

Location: Kep, Kampot, Preah Sihanoukville, Koh Kong
Duration: 2024 – 2029
Interventions: Coastal resilient infrastructure, nature based coastal infrastructure led by Fisheries Administration and Ministry of Environment.

Durable and accessible coastal infrastructure to prevent product deterioration due to heat as mitigation to climate change and building resilience. Robust and resilient structures can withstand climate risks, protecting both workers and their families.

Supporting the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Interventions

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How many child care facilities have been built?

8

How many women used the facilities?

200

How many women and kids benefited from the facilities?

600

How many successful SMEs have been developed?

50

Location: Kep, Kampot, Preah Sihanoukville, Koh Kong
Duration: 2024 – 2029
Interventions: Khmer Enterprise SME business incubator, gender equity, women economic empowerment.

Cambodian new thriving SMEs adopt sustainable practices and create livelihood opportunities while reducing pressure of fishing, contributing to uplift communities well-being and long-term health of coastal ecosystems and communities.