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Ocean Policy Program

History and Description | Highlights | Staffing | Related Publications | Funding

Program History and Description

The Ocean Policy Program promotes policies and science that support ecologically sustainable and economically viable ocean management. We collaborate with ocean managers, fishermen, scientists, conservationists, and others. Since 1996, our projects have focused on:

• Ecosystem approaches to ocean and fisheries management
• Ecosystem-based science programs for management
• Conservation of the world's seabirds and shorebirds
• Funding for ocean science, management, and conservation

Ocean Policy Program Highlights – Seabirds and Shorebirds

Policy reform and implementation

Conservation of seabirds and shorebirds in the Pacific, Indian, South Atlantic, and Southern Oceans became a major focus of the Ocean Policy Program in 2005. The purposes of these projects have been accomplished primarily through advising The David and Lucile Packard Foundation on the foundation's recent marine bird conservation initiative.

Although seabirds are among the most threatened species in the world, seabird conservation has received little attention compared to other important ocean conservation concerns, such as marine mammals, sea turtles, fisheries reform, coral reefs, and marine protected areas.

Animals and plants introduced by humans to the islands where most seabirds breed are the single greatest threat to most seabird species. The worst offenders are rats; on many islands they have little to survive on but seabird eggs and chicks. The populations of native birds, reptiles, land crabs, and plants recover dramatically with the removal of these invasive species. As a result, one of our high-priority strategies is restoration of ecosystems on islands where seabirds breed.

Some seabirds are also at risk away from their breeding islands. For example, 19 of the world's 21 species of albatrosses are threatened. The principal cause: tens of thousands of these magnificent birds are accidentally killed each year by tuna and swordfish longlines and other fishing gear. Our second seabird conservation strategy is to find projects that reduce this "bycatch" of seabirds by developing safer types of fishing gears and getting the fishing industry to use them.

Although only 10% of the world's shorebird species are immediately threatened, the picture is likely to become much worse. The great majority of these species are entirely dependent on coastal wetlands for at least part of each year. The world's coasts continue to be subject to the greatest development pressure, and sea-level rise is squeezing wetlands from the other direction. Moreover, most shorebirds breed in tundra, and climate change is already causing observable conversion of tundra to forest. With coastal development, rapid and significant sea-level rise, and loss of shorebird tundra breeding habitat over the next century, what will be the effect on shorebird populations? That is the most significant question facing shorebird conservation.

The Packard Foundation initiative looks for direct and effective means to address these marine bird conservation challenges.

Ocean Policy Program Highlights – California

Many of our projects since 1997 have used California as a laboratory for applying new approaches to ocean management and science. The projects have provided assistance to the Resources Agency, the State Coastal Conservancy, the Department of Fish and Game, and the California Fish and Game Commission as they implement a suite of recent ocean policy, management, and science mandates and programs. The following highlights, in roughly chronological order, mention some of the initiatives in which the Ocean Policy Program was centrally involved.

The Marine Life Management Act of 1998

The Marine Life Management Act (MLMA) mandates fundamental reforms of marine life and fisheries management policies and provides a blueprint for their implementation. The Act, negotiated and drafted by Ocean Policy Project staff, has moved California in directions that are coming to be accepted as the most promising means of avoiding the now familiar scenario of collapsed fish populations with attendant economic hardships for fishermen. Those directions include:

• Management that allows only sustainable uses of the ocean;
• Fishery management that maintains the health of the natural systems that support the fishery;
• Management that values fishing and non-consumptive uses equally;
• Management that matches the level of precaution with the level of information managers have about the interactions between the fishery and the ecosystem that supports it;
• Incorporation of no-fishing areas as a standard fishery management tool to serve a variety of ecosystem-based management needs;
• A shift from single-species data collection to ecosystem monitoring to provide the information for ecosystem approaches to management;
• Recognition that successful management is a collaborative process that requires participation of all those who will be most affected by management decisions.

Following passage of the MLMA, the Ocean Policy Program initiated a multi-year project of working closely with the Fish and Game Commission and the Department of Fish and Game to implement major elements of the new law. Our efforts focused on the following:

• Guide to California's Marine Life Management Act, by Michael Weber and Burr Heneman, published by Commonweal (out of print). Online at: www.fgc.ca.gov/mlma/home.html
• Funding the first marine policy consultant to Fish and Game Commission (1999-2003)
• Funding public process consultants to assist Department of Fish and Game staff
• Drafting and adoption of the Nearshore Fishery Management Plan (see below)
• Drafting California's model commercial fishery restricted access policies (see below)
• Applying ecosystem-based marine science to new, ecosystem approaches to management (see below)
• Helping secure roughly $45million in new funding for ocean management and science in California
• The Master Plan: A Guide for the Development of Fishery Management Plans, California Department of Fish and Game. Online at: www.dfg.ca.gov/mrd/masterplan/index.html
• California's Living Marine Resources: A Status Report, California Department of Fish and Game. Online at: www.dfg.ca.gov/mrd/status/

Nearshore Fishery Management Plan (2002)

The Nearshore Fishery Management Plan (FMP) lays out the state's path to adopting risk-averse management that incorporates ecosystem concerns. The Nearshore FMP is one of the pioneer effort in the fisheries world in incorporating fundamental elements of ecosystem approaches management.

The Commission adopted the Nearshore FMP in October 2002. It is available online at: http://www.dfg.ca.gov/mrd/nfmp/index.html.

Restricted Access Fishery Policies (1999)

The most significant contribution of the Ocean Policy Program to our goal of promoting economically viable fisheries has been through the drafting of the model commercial fishery restricted access policies adopted by the Fish and Game Commission in 1999.

Virtually every fishery faces the intractable management problem of the "race for fish" so often described in fishery management and economics literature. With access to fish open to anyone, the result is too many vessels, too much gear, too much waste, and too little income for fishermen. This excess fishing capacity commonly leads to overfished populations of fish and then confrontations between fishermen and fishery managers over the status of the resource and the need for more restrictive regulations.

The effective solutions to these fishery problems restrict fishing effort in some way so that the race for fish is ended. Because many restricted access programs have failed their basic purpose — to limit effort — fishermen lack confidence that they can work. What does not work is a management system that lacks the clear policies, the will, and the compassion to design and implement restricted access systems that reconcile the need of fishermen to make a living with the need to restrict total harvest.

With too many fishermen and vessels chasing too few fish a major problem in California as in most of the world, the state embarked on a process (1998) to rationalize the ad hoc approaches it had used for decades to limit the number of commercial fishing permits. The result is the restricted access policies adopted by the Fish and Game Commission in 1999. The policies are online at: www.fgc.ca.gov/html/p4misc.html#RESTRICT

Applying the Model Restricted Access Fishery Policies (2000-2002)

The result of adopting restricted access programs has often been the opposite of what was intended: perversely, instead of fewer permits, more were created. The California policies were designed to prevent that. The first test was in the nearshore live-fish fishery, which had ballooned from zero to more than 1,100 permits in the space of a few years. Over a period of three years, the state, with the assistance of the Ocean Policy Program, reduced that number to 200 through consultation with the fishermen and conscientious application of the restricted access policies.

California Ocean Resources Stewardship Act (1999) and the California Ocean Science Trust

Commonweal initiated efforts to improve funding for science for California ocean resource management in 1999. The first result of this effort was the California Ocean Resources Stewardship Act of 1999 (CORSA), which authorized creation of the California Ocean Science Trust. The Trust was created in 2002. In addition to being represented on the founding board of trustees, the Ocean Policy Program also helped secure seed funding for the Trust.

The purpose of the Trust is to encourage and fund ocean science collaborations between science institutions, management agencies, and others, and to improve the often inadequate communication among agencies that manage ocean resources. Under a recent reorganization, the Trust has the additional responsibility of providing scientific advice to the state's high-level, inter-agency Ocean Protection Council.

Coastal Ocean Currents Monitoring Program

In 2003, the Ocean Policy Program was able to play a key role in securing $21million of state bond funds for what has become the Coastal Ocean Currents Monitoring Program (COCMP). The program, using relatively inexpensive, shore-based monitoring technologies such as high frequency radar, is providing information expected to benefit a wide range of ocean management concerns, including oil spill trajectory modeling, coastal water quality monitoring, and fisheries management.

The State Coastal Conservancy, the lead agency for the program, asked the Ocean Policy Program to assist them in initiating COCMP. Our successful partnership with the Conservancy to launch COCMP concluded in 2007.

A description of COCMP is available online.

Increasing funding for management and management-related science

Since 1998, Commonweal's Ocean Policy Program has been instrumental in acquiring more than $40million in new state funding for the Department of Fish and Game for Marine Life Management Act implementation, to the State Coastal Conservancy for the Coastal Ocean Currents Monitoring Program, and to the Resources Agency for the California Ocean Science Trust.

In addition, with funding from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the Resources Legacy Fund Foundation, Commonweal has also made strategic investments in several projects of others through our California Nearshore Science Program. We have selected projects that advance ecosystem monitoring of California's nearshore environment and apply monitoring information to real-world management questions.

Staffing for the Ocean Policy Program

Burr Heneman, Ocean Policy Program Director

A co-founder of Commonweal, Burr has been involved in marine policy and science at the state, national, and international levels since the 1970s. He formerly was director of the (now) Ocean Conservancy's Pacific region (1991-1994); consultant to BirdLife International and the Saudi Arabian wildlife agency on the Gulf War oil spill and fires (1991); consultant to the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission on marine debris and conflicts between marine mammals and fisheries (1985-1988); and executive director of PRBO Conservation Science (1980-1984).

Investigation of various marine issues has taken him to the Farallon Islands (seabird and great white shark research and conservation); the Pribilof Islands (seabirds and marine debris); the Lesser Antilles, Baja California, and the Yucatan (marine debris); Prince William Sound (the Exxon Valdez oil spill); the Galapagos Islands (seabirds and fisheries); the Persian Gulf (the Gulf War oil spills and fires); Shetland (oil spill prevention and seabird/fisheries conflicts); the Gulf of Maine (seabird research and restoration); Belize (shark research); and Fiji (seabird conservation).

Burr serves on the Stakeholder Council of the Marine Stewardship Council. He was awarded a Pew Fellowship in Marine Conservation in 1999.

Ocean Policy Program consultants (current and recent)

Dr. John Croxall, Chair, BirdLife International's Global Seabird Programme; formerly, Head of Conservation Biology, British Antarctic Survey.

Dr. Les Kaufman, Professor of Biology, Boston University Marine Program.

Paul Siri, Ocean Policy and Science Consultant; director of the California State Coastal Conservancy's Ocean Science Applications program, which includes the Coastal Ocean Currents Monitoring Program.

Michael Weber, ocean, coast, and fisheries program officer, Resources Law Group, Sacramento, CA.

Ocean Policy Program partners (current and recent)

• The Pew Institute for Ocean Science
• The State Coastal Conservancy (California)

Publications Related to the Ocean Policy Program

The following list includes several recent publications related to the efforts of Commonweal's Ocean Policy Program to disseminate information about best practices in marine life and fisheries management:

Funding for the Ocean Policy Program

The Commonweal Ocean Policy Program has been funded by the following:

• Jenifer Altman Foundation
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
• David and Lucile Packard Foundation
• Pew Fellows Program in Marine Conservation
• Resources Legacy Fund Foundation
• Anonymous grants and contributions