Habitat restoration projects restore an ecosystem's natural resources following damage. Habitat restoration is important to the survival of native species. There are different types of habitat restoration, including reforestation, riparian buffering, prairie restoration, and coral reef restoration.
Many of these management options begin with the forced evacuation of all humans from the area to be managed. Such authoritarian actions harden the subjected individuals against the government running the forced evacuation. This scenario is a textbook example of why ignoring the political context of an ecosystem management option can lead to a political backlash that may cause the intended improvement to an area's ecosystem health to fail.
The world's oceans present a complex challenge to habitat restoration in that the main damage to maritime habitat is from bycatch, over-fishing, and the poaching of marine animals. Hence, an effective way to restore maritime habitat is to reduce these various forms of the harvesting of marine wildlife.
The oceans are being stripped of all marine life from unintended hooking and netting of species other than those animals being commercially harvested. This unintended harvesting by the world's fishing fleet is referred to as bycatch. Those species most at risk of extinction due to bycatch are sharks, sea turtles, and seabirds (see US-NOAA Definition of Bycatch). Hence, the firm decides to conserve sharks, sea turtles, and seabirds in the South Pacific ocean.
What project would effectively conserve these species? It is tempting to develop technological solutions to mitigate the volume of bycatch. The Bycatch Management Information System describes many such solutions. These approaches to conserving marine animals, although well-intentioned, simply encourage more fishing since implementing any of these solutions by a particular fishing fleet may make it more acceptable to international and national regulating agencies -- and hence enable it to increase harvesting.
Another major pressure on marine wildlife is illegal fishing. ??expand
A food processing firm therefore, decides that the best way to restore an ocean's habitat is to reduce maritime fishing pressure. How to do this? Expulsion under threat of arrest is not only a poor idea from a political standpoint as discussed above, it would also be difficult to enforce given that most ocean surface area is located in international waters that are not under the jurisdiction of any governmental authority.
This firm rather, decides to woo fishermen off of the South Pacific ocean by offering them an alternate way to make a living: Working at a fish farm built and operated by the firm itself. This fish farm will raise those fish species that are already being commercially harvested by some nearby fishing fleet. To this end, the firm decides to build their fish farm close to Lamongan Harbor in East Java, the largest fishing port in Indonesia in order to lure fishermen off of their boats that would otherwise be harvesting everything in that ocean. The firm ensures that only ex-fishermen will be hired into their fish farm by working with the relevant government officials to enact a temporary exception for their fish farm from Indonesia's equal employment opportunity laws. The firm chooses Indonesia because of their large impact on marine life in the South Pacific ocean. For instance, there are about 3,000 fishing vessels in Lamongan Harbor and six million Indonesians are emplyed in marine fishing (Indonesian fishing industry
A second component of the biodiversity project is the purchase and subsequent scrapping of the largest fishing boats that are docked close the the fish farming facility. This second component is similar to what U.S. oil companies and automobile manufacturing companies did in the 1920's to, in-part, force cities to buy buses: They bought streetcar lines in many cities and then tore up the tracks ( streetcar demise). This second component takes advantage of the need for ready cash that is typical of many disadvantaged people in developing countries (the poor's need for ready cash). Because of high unemployment in Indonesia ( high Indonesian unemployment), without this second component, the jobs on boats vacated by the newly-hired fish farmers would be immediately taken by others from the population of unemployed Indonesians. This second component at least delays the availability of these jobs until replacement fishing boats are inevitably built.
The firm decides to market a new snack cracker as their biodiversity offering that is attached to this biodiversity project. In addition, the fish raised at the fish farm is designated as an additional biodiversity offering that is marketed to biodiversity-concerned customers living in Indonesia.
As with the ICO project, there is an issue of scaling: A potentially large number of fishermen may need to be given alternate employment in order to reduce fishing pressure enough in the South Pacific ocean for the marine populations therein to stabilize.
Marine preserves may be an alternative but these have significant enforcement challenges due to their size and proximity to international waters.