Tulinde Matumbawe yetu!
My name is Jean and for the past 25 years I have been living on tiny Chole Island, in the heart of the Mafia Island Marine Park Tanzania, off the East Coast of Africa.
COVID19 has really given us a wake-up call here on our little island.
Although COVID19 has still not reached us, it has had a radical impact on the economy of our island and my wife, Anne, and I have been forced to forced to accept that our dream of helping to educate the children of our island community as a way to achieve wildlife and environmental conservation goals, was perhaps naïve.
We had imagined that with better education the young people of our community could take up jobs in tourism or even start tourism-related businesses and that shift away from the exploitation of natural resources alone would take enormous pressure off of the environment
We now know without any doubt that tourism is extremely vulnerable to catastrophic collapses and one cannot afford to put all your eggs in the tourism basket.
Last year hundreds of people in the Mafia Island Marine Park lost their jobs, with no government support BUT they still need to feed their children and pay their medical bills. They of course returned to exploiting the natural resources in their environment , with tacit approval of the government in these very difficult times, which is having devastating consequences.
A huge increase in fishing, using unsustainable methods that damage the habitat, especially the primary producing substrate, such as corals, and seagrasses, has led to a rapid decline in the health of our reefs and in biodiversity, the cost of which we will only be able to calculate later.
The coral reefs of the Mafia archipelago are among the healthiest in Africa and have some of the richest biodiversity in the Western Indian Ocean. Most coral reefs in the Indian ocean have been devastated over the past decades, particularly the last two decades , yet until now the reefs of Chole bay has survived this devastation and we find ourselves living in the middle of a world heritage treasure .
Our environment is heavily dependent on the health of our corals.
If this decline in the health of our corals and sea grasses continues, the future looks extremely bleak for our community. The only prospect for many people in an over-exploited environment, stripped of biodiversity, with profound habitat destruction is to eak out a meager existence in abject poverty.
We have as a result decided to take action to study coral regeneration, promote coral conservation and help make our local economy more resilient to future economic shocks.