Abstract

The Caribbean Fish Sanctuaries Partnership Initiative (C-Fish Initiative) is a strategy for building resilience to climate change and improving the sustainability of livelihoods in coastal communities across the Caribbean. The C-Fish Initiative will establish a sustainable financing mechanism to support community-based fish sanctuaries in close partnership with local and international private sector companies in the tourism sector. The initiative will capture and leverage the increasing willingness of tourists, tour operators and resort owners to actively participate in supporting the livelihoods of vulnerable communities and the management of coastal resources. The C-Fish Initiative will develop a craft programme as a fund-raising mechanism that will also support local artisans and artists through training, promotion and access to markets, thus spreading the economic benefits of the project to another vulnerable sector of Caribbean society. The C-Fish Initiative will use an innovative communication strategy and Web 2.0 technologies (e.g. social media, interactive multimedia) to engage a wider range of regional and international stakeholders. The project website will include streaming video from underwater cameras placed inside fish sanctuaries which will be used to promote awareness and facilitate ecological monitoring. These video streams will also be part of a new research and technology transfer collaboration with an international consortium (Fish4Knowledge - see http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rbf/Fish4Knowledge/) that is developing image analysis software tools that can automatically recognise, identify, and measure tropical fish species.