Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Ep 26. Alasdair Harris, Executive Director Blue Ventures: Conservation by communities, for communities
55 Plays3 years ago
“The real disruption in our work has come about as a result of our impact model which is (about) turning conventional approaches to conservation upside down and grounding management of the sea in secure local tenure… management by communities for communities”
Alasdair Harris is Founder and Executive Director of the marine conservation organisation, Blue Ventures.
With a mission focused on rebuilding tropical fisheries with coastal communities, Alasdair talks about how developing an impact model that was truly by communities, for communities, has been transformative in sustaining locally led conservation.
We discuss approaches for achieving impact at scale, including Blue Ventures’ partnership with United World Schools. The collaboration is aimed at developing an education programme in order to provide holistic support to fishing communities in the poorest regions of Madagascar.
Alasdair shares insights learned on his leadership journey, going from biologist to social entrepreneur to human rights advocate!
We also talk about his hopes and aspirations for the global climate conference, COP26.
Recorded October 2021.
Guest Biography
Alasdair Harris is the Founder and Executive Director of Blue Ventures.
Blue Ventures works at the interface of marine protection and poverty alleviation, developing locally led approaches to marine conservation that benefit people and nature alike.
Alasdair holds a PhD in marine ecology and an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh. He is an Ashoka fellow, Skoll Awardee, and TED fellow.
Links https://blueventures.org/
https://www.unitedworldschools.org/News/launching-in-madagascar
This episode is sponsored by EdenTree Investment Management
https://www.edentreeim.com/
Alasdair Harris is Founder and Executive Director of the marine conservation organisation, Blue Ventures.
With a mission focused on rebuilding tropical fisheries with coastal communities, Alasdair talks about how developing an impact model that was truly by communities, for communities, has been transformative in sustaining locally led conservation.
We discuss approaches for achieving impact at scale, including Blue Ventures’ partnership with United World Schools. The collaboration is aimed at developing an education programme in order to provide holistic support to fishing communities in the poorest regions of Madagascar.
Alasdair shares insights learned on his leadership journey, going from biologist to social entrepreneur to human rights advocate!
We also talk about his hopes and aspirations for the global climate conference, COP26.
Recorded October 2021.
Guest Biography
Alasdair Harris is the Founder and Executive Director of Blue Ventures.
Blue Ventures works at the interface of marine protection and poverty alleviation, developing locally led approaches to marine conservation that benefit people and nature alike.
Alasdair holds a PhD in marine ecology and an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh. He is an Ashoka fellow, Skoll Awardee, and TED fellow.
Links https://blueventures.org/
https://www.unitedworldschools.org/News/launching-in-madagascar
This episode is sponsored by EdenTree Investment Management
https://www.edentreeim.com/
Recommended
Transcript
Mission-Driven Advocacy
00:00:00
Speaker
One is propelled by the mission, by the sense of belief that this is an emergency and that we are advocates for a cause that is urgently needed, is underrepresented, and we just have to get out there and do it.
Season 3 Launch and Growth
00:00:24
Speaker
This is Season 3 of the Charity CEO Podcast, the podcast for charity leaders by charity leaders. I'm Divya O'Connor, and I never imagined that this show that I started as an experiment during the pandemic would turn into a number one ranked global podcast with thousands of listeners all across the world. It is truly humbling to know that the show's content is valued by so many.
00:00:47
Speaker
And, thanks to our Season 3 sponsor, Eden Tree, I will continue to bring you inspirational and engaging conversations with a host of leaders who are all truly driving change in the non-profit space. Eden Tree themselves are owned by a charity, and have led the way in responsible and sustainable investing for over three decades. Thank you to Eden Tree. Now, on with the show.
Blue Ventures' Conservation Model
00:01:09
Speaker
My guest today is Alistair Harris, founder and executive director of the marine conservation organization Blue Ventures. With a mission focused on rebuilding tropical fisheries with coastal communities, Alistair talks about how developing an impact model that was truly by communities for communities has been transformative in sustaining locally-led conservation. We discuss approaches for achieving impact at scale, including Blue Ventures' exciting new partnership with United World Schools
00:01:39
Speaker
developing an education program to provide holistic support to fishing communities in Madagascar. Alistair shares key insights learned on his leadership journey going from biologist to social entrepreneur to humanitarian activist as well as his hopes and aspirations for COP26.
Alistair's Early Jobs and Aspirations
00:01:57
Speaker
I hope you enjoyed the conversation.
00:02:02
Speaker
Hi, Alistair. Welcome to the show. We're really pleased to have you with us today. Thanks very much. Great to be here. So we always start the show with an ice break around and I have five hopefully fun questions for you. So if you're ready, we can get started. Great. Please do. So question one, what was your first job?
00:02:19
Speaker
My first job was stacking, was a paper round. I used to do a paper round before school. It was quite hard work, £3.50, double paper round on Sundays. Sunday papers were a nightmare. And then I moved on to stacking pet food in Waitrose. Brilliant. And as a child, what did you dream of being when you grew up?
00:02:39
Speaker
I was always a bit of an entomologist, naturalist. I kept jars full of insects, few of which I'm sorry to say survived, and I had a great interest in natural history. My dad's a vet and has a great interest in anatomy and
00:02:59
Speaker
draws a lot of animals as well as working with them.
Perseverance and Ambitions
00:03:04
Speaker
And I think that inspired in me an interest. And then I got aware of the tropical diversity of life. I'd never been to the tropics. I couldn't imagine what the tropics were. But the fact that there seemed to be an awful lot more going on at lower latitudes than what I'd ever experienced in suburban gardens in England and Scotland.
00:03:28
Speaker
probably the start of your professional career in the conservation space. Yeah. Yeah. So question three, what would you say is your professional superpower?
00:03:39
Speaker
I think my professional superpower is probably energy and perseverance. I only say that because I've been doing the same thing since I left university or since I was a student. And I seem to be able to keep getting up in the morning, even after not much sleep and when the going gets tough. So I'm often relieved that I can keep doing it. It can be quite tough to be pulled in a lot of directions and working on a mission that seems at times so
00:04:09
Speaker
hopeless as what we're up against battling twin emergencies of climate and ecological breakdown, as well as the related social and justice issues. So question four then, if you could wave a magic wand and change one thing in the world right now, what would that
Interviewing Oceanic Migrants
00:04:30
Speaker
be? That's a really good question.
00:04:34
Speaker
Oh, wow. Well, if I could change one thing in the world right now, it would be very self-interested and it would relate to sleep. I have an eight week old baby. She needs to learn to sleep because I'm suffering. Beyond that, I mean, it would be some kind of great big carbon sucking machine that could create awesome reef structures underwater that would lock away the emissions of the last 200 years.
00:04:58
Speaker
Love that. And our final icebreaker question, if you had the opportunity to interview anyone in the world dead or alive, who would it be and what one question would you like to ask them? Wow, that's a really, really difficult one.
00:05:12
Speaker
I would like to interview and learn from the oceanic migrants that radiated out of Southeast Asia on both directions across the Indian Ocean and the Pacific.
Origins of Blue Ventures
00:05:28
Speaker
How did they do it?
00:05:29
Speaker
Why did they do it? What were they doing embarking in these rafts that cross distances that are bigger than Europe or North America with no instruments for navigation? Purely a knowledge of the stars, the sky, the shape of the ocean, the winds, and enabling our species to cover so much of the globe. But navigating from Pimprick Island to Pimprick Island,
00:05:54
Speaker
with accuracy. How did they know something was out there and how did they get there? That's something that I often wonder about.
00:06:02
Speaker
Yes, it's incredible how much we can indeed learn from history, but I don't think we always put it into producing good practice in modern day times. Al, you are the executive director of the conservation organization Blue Ventures, a charity that you set up about 18 years ago, I believe. So tell us about the origin story of Blue Ventures and the vision you had when you first founded it.
00:06:27
Speaker
It's been an evolving vision. I was an undergraduate student in Scotland and had an unhealthy relationship with the ocean. I was a very keen scuba diver and weekends would be spent driving to the west coast of Scotland and jumping in the cold northeast Atlantic and exploring kelp forests.
00:06:46
Speaker
finding conga reels and getting really, really cold. And I was studying zoology and I was aware of coral reefs and interested in them. And I decided to try to take a group of fellow zoologists and divers to a country called Madagascar, about which I'd read an enormous amount, but of course, about which I really knew nothing.
00:07:10
Speaker
to try to do some science and very basic ecology on coral reefs in the Mozambique Channel, which hadn't been documented to my knowledge for a number of years. And it was a foolish plan. It was doomed to failure.
Eco-Tourism and Funding
00:07:24
Speaker
We raised enough money by shaking buckets outside nightclubs in Edinburgh and doing all kinds of sponsored events to get ourselves there with a bunch of rusty wonky dive kit. And we learned a lot about how not to lead a trip. And
00:07:35
Speaker
It taught me a huge amount about how not to lead, but it also opened my eyes to the iniquity of education systems. I was coming from this absurdly wealthy university in Scotland and I was working with colleagues from a university that didn't even have the internet, didn't have an engine to put on their boats and they were
00:07:53
Speaker
a marine institute with Malagasy colleagues who had astonishing knowledge of the local ecology and taught me an enormous amount, but some of whom couldn't swim. I realised how ineffectual we were and we couldn't really do anything to document these ecosystems properly, but we returned to Scotland with a bunch of data and over subsequent years we repeated the exercise and gradually built up equipment and resources that we were able to leave behind.
00:08:15
Speaker
And gradually i became aware that the science that we were trying to do and doing very badly had very little consequence or meaning to the changes that were taking place in these incredibly important ecosystems yes they were biologically interesting but from a human perspective they underpinned
00:08:34
Speaker
cultures and economies that were absolutely fundamental to the lives and futures of hundreds of thousands of people in that country. And these were ecosystems that were on the brink and my science was not really going to do anything to change that.
00:08:49
Speaker
So Blue Ventures began largely as a result of me trying to find out more. And so I stayed in Madagascar and needed to be funded as I was an undergraduate. So it needed to be funded somehow when I left university. And that idea was an eco-tourism social enterprise. So we launched a business that sold holidays, effectively long-term educational conservation trips
00:09:11
Speaker
taking people from all over the world to learn to scuba dive to learn how to identify all those hundreds of species of fish and coral and invertebrate to carry on collecting data and we subsidised or provided free places to many many Malagasy colleagues that were able to join us and get some training through these trips but of course collecting data was fairly meaningless in retrospect given the enormity of the threats that
Fisheries Management
00:09:33
Speaker
we're up against.
00:09:33
Speaker
but the business provided the cash flow crucially to keep the lights on to keep a small team on the ground and to start to explore some of the more complex dynamics between and relationships between people in the ocean on that coast and gradually we embarked on conversations around management and trying to see how coastal fishes who were struggling with dwindling catches and extreme poverty how things could perhaps be different how fisheries management because fisheries are some of the most
00:10:04
Speaker
responsive, resilient, elastic resources we have available to us. We can catch so much more by fishing just a little bit less and recovery times can be really quite short. So we explored some of these ideas with a village that the business was based in. We hit upon some extraordinary results and those results gradually grew and Blue Ventures began.
Community Ownership
00:10:24
Speaker
So that was back in 2003, so yeah, 18 years ago.
00:10:28
Speaker
Wow. Al, you talk there about Blue Ventures being a social enterprise and really bringing business-based solutions to conservation. And I'd like to hear a bit more actually about this concept of conservation entrepreneurship and how it really characterizes your approach at Blue Ventures, particularly in terms of working with communities and also having a very communities-based approach. Like you mentioned, they're rooted in the relationship between people and the ocean and that whole dynamic.
00:10:56
Speaker
Can you give us some examples of how that manifests practically on the ground?
00:11:01
Speaker
Well, I think classically that an ecotourism model underpinning an NGO is of course entrepreneurial and it's an interesting, albeit not particularly innovative business model. We've subsequently pioneered a number of other revenue generation initiatives, including aquaculture, which communities are able to diversify their livelihoods by reducing their reliance on fishing, kept by growing sustainably products like seaweed and sea cucumbers or producing honey and mangroves.
00:11:31
Speaker
pioneered some of the world's first mangrove blue carbon projects, which are exploring the potential of using climate and carbon finance to reward and incentivize local protection of critical carbon rich marine vegetation, particularly forests, blue forests of mangroves, for example. So in terms of a classic interpretation of what we mean by social enterprise, yes, those are interesting revenue models, but I think
00:11:57
Speaker
The real disruption in our work has come about as a result of our impact model, which I think is turning conventional approaches to conservation upside down and grounding management of the sea in secure local tenure management, governance, access rights by communities for communities so that communities have access to and control over the marine environment on which they depend. And only by ensuring that communities have that tenure
Empowering Fishers
00:12:27
Speaker
Do we really arrive at a point where populations, fishermen and women can manage the sea in their own interests? And what we've seen time and again is that's really the only way that conservation can work and can sustain itself. When it's imposed from outside, whether by governments, NGOs or businesses, it only feeds this widespread
00:12:51
Speaker
tragic history of marginalisation and dispossession of communities by environmentalists. And yet we've seen that when we can ground conservation in that local ownership, in that local management and governance using traditional or customary or legitimate local institutions to make those decisions led by data that communities have perhaps collected themselves and own,
00:13:15
Speaker
then we really embark on something quite extraordinary that can scale. So I guess Blue Ventures approach to entrepreneurship is really to see that human dependence on the ocean, which is enormous of course, there are perhaps 50 to 100 million so-called small scale fishes in the world feeding
00:13:35
Speaker
well over a billion people, that dependence on the ocean isn't so much a threat as an opportunity because if we can align incentives and help demonstrate to those people how much they have to gain from effective ocean stewardship, then we can mobilize an enormous global constituency to take action to reverse the current collapse we're seeing in ocean ecosystems and fisheries.
Adapting Conservation Models
00:14:02
Speaker
I love how you describe that there, Al, in terms of the impact model being really by communities for communities, and that that is really at the heart of how you achieve impact at scale. And I'd like to perhaps unpick a bit more the work that I know you've done in terms of developing scalable solutions, but particularly around
00:14:22
Speaker
de-contextualizing models in order to apply them in different countries and what you have learned by doing that in terms of the challenges faced transferring a model that works in one country to another and your advice to other charity CEOs who may be operating in similar contexts or international development space who may also be looking to scale their organizations.
00:14:44
Speaker
Sure. The work that we do is not rocket science, and I wish that there were hundreds, if not thousands, of other organizations operating in this massive sector that we call small-scale fishing, which is conspicuously devoid of support and investment and civil society and engagement. So firstly, I wish that we weren't so alone and that to be working in small-scale fisheries would be seen as no different to, for example, working in smallholder farming and agriculture. Tragically, unfortunately, this is a sector that, as I say, is
00:15:12
Speaker
is devoid of the investment it so urgently needs. But within this relatively small space of actors, the work we do is not particularly unique. We are focused on helping communities in whatever that jurisdiction is to, number one, secure their access rights to the sea.
00:15:28
Speaker
helping communities manage in a way that is legally watertight so that they do not see or experience threats from incursions from, for example, destructive industrial bottom trawl vessels or land grabs or commercial land clearance of, for example, mangrove forests.
00:15:47
Speaker
for agriculture or aquaculture. Number two, equipping those people with the information that they need, often the data systems that they need to manage the sea in a way that works for people and for ecosystems and nature. Number three, helping address a pernicious threat that is
00:16:05
Speaker
in many of the contexts that we work in, which is financial exclusion, a lack of access to credit, iniquitous markets, scarcity, a lack of confidence or certainty in what will be caught from one day to the next that really hampers long-term planning and decision-making in so many coastal communities and hinders a community's often ability to support or engage in a longer-term plan like a conservation initiative.
00:16:33
Speaker
And number four, helping improve the efficiency of what we call small-scale fisheries.
Community Rights and Financial Inclusion
00:16:39
Speaker
For example, reducing the staggering rates of post-harvest loss that we see in many small-scale fisheries, which can exceed 30% or 40% in many places, and helping communities get
00:16:52
Speaker
fairer prices. So typically, small-scale fishers are at the raw end of a highly iniquitous supply chain that may be connecting them to supermarket shelves in Europe, but they're probably only receiving a handful of percent of the end value of that gach.
00:17:08
Speaker
despite themselves playing such a fundamental role in producing what is and managing often what is a very nutritious, high-value, sustainable product. So those are really the four things that we try to do. Tenure, management, trying to tackle some of this challenge of scarcity and falsely looking at those efficiencies and value chains.
Localized Strategies
00:17:29
Speaker
And we'll try to do that and adapt that approach
00:17:31
Speaker
to the ecosystem. So, of course, a mangrove is very different to a seagrass or a pelagic fishery and offshore fishery and the jurisdiction. So, you know, what frameworks we can work within within a country like Timor-Leste will look very different to those that might be present in Tanzania or Comoros.
00:17:50
Speaker
So that's what we try to do. And we try to broadly share what we've done with other communities, what we've learned. We try to learn from others and build networks of like-minded organizations and institutions that are working for similar goals. Al, can you elaborate a bit more on your reflections on the journey to scale? Because I'm particularly interested in how some other organizations who may also be looking to scale can learn from your experience and expertise.
00:18:17
Speaker
We see an enormous global, if you will, market for human rights-based approaches to ocean conservation and fisheries management in which communities can be supported to steward the ocean in a way that will help them improve their catches and at the same time safeguard these critical ecosystems.
Scaling Impact Through Partnerships
00:18:36
Speaker
And yet our ability as an organization to be everywhere, to do everything in the very, very fine, small period of time that we have remaining, given the pace of change, is limited. We have seen in our relatively short journey how creaky we become as an organization, as we get bigger, how much harder it is to do the things aged 18 that we used to do really well, aged four, when we were just working in two or three communities. When we're working in over a hundred, it's much more difficult.
00:19:05
Speaker
and how expensive that is and how slow that is to scale and how there isn't time for us to rebuild Blue Ventures in all of the countries in which we see this need and how neither is it appropriate to do so in a time when we urgently need to reconfigure the way our sector is built. And we don't want to grow this organization into the kinds of big green groups that we see out there that have these offices in so many countries.
00:19:30
Speaker
We've really struggled with this question of scale, given that we see what we call central delivery as very much a finite delivery pathway, because it reaches a point where we start to crumble. And so we've explored various approaches to scale, including through big INGO partners, businesses, through policy, and we settled on an unusual one, which is to
00:19:53
Speaker
collaborate at scale in very close cooperation with locally based partners that we feel exemplify the values that we know underpin effective human rights based conservation. And those organizations look quite a lot like we did in the early days. They're locally present, they're permanent, they're proximate to the communities, to the issues.
00:20:18
Speaker
They have a very good understanding of what's going on. They're generally locally led. But on the flip side, they are often informal. They might not have a legal entity. They probably haven't got an email address, a website or a bank account and they certainly won't have
00:20:33
Speaker
enough years of audited accounts to convince a conventional foundation donor to support the incredibly important work that they're doing, often out of sight.
Education and Community Support
00:20:43
Speaker
They might be small NGOs, they might be community-based organizations, they might be youth clubs or fisher folk organizations.
00:20:50
Speaker
And so we have gone on a journey over the last six years to identify some of these like-minded groups and build a pipeline, if you will, of such organizations and to back them, to share with them some of what we've learned, to share with them some of our technical support, whether it's in fisheries management or MNE or designing a website or fundraising or leadership development.
00:21:12
Speaker
and to stay with them and to give them unrestricted funding only and preferably multi-year and we think it's worked. This year we're going to reach 50 partner organizations in 15 countries and it's really enabled us to decouple the growth of our own
00:21:29
Speaker
income, our bottom line from the growth of our reach. So we're seeing this acceleration in the adoption of these approaches. And crucially, we're not branding this as a Blue Ventures initiative because it's not. We're strengthening the legitimate present organizations that are best placed to do this work and hopefully strengthening civil society's engagement in a sector that has been overlooked for too long.
00:21:57
Speaker
and really building these networks of really, really effective locally-led organizations in countries that need them. For example, in Indonesia, where we had no presence five years ago, we have supported the establishment of this unbelievable network of what we call customary communities that are using traditional local law and village law to establish
00:22:19
Speaker
local management of high priority, critical ecosystem, seagrasses, mangroves, coral reefs and so on. But across a bewildering array of sites, I think now more than two dozen sites across the archipelago, with over a dozen partners engaged, actively engaged. And that is the legacy of what we've supported. And so our job then is to really aggregate this impact and to help show the world that this is highly efficacious, it's cost effective, it's delivering lasting results.
00:22:44
Speaker
that are working for people and nature and to ensure that we can get these organisations the support they need. Now had we tried to do that work ourselves through that central delivery pathway the train would never have left the station and that's incidentally also what we saw when we tried to scale the
00:22:59
Speaker
through the INGO approach, through not for want of trying and not for their want of some phenomenal partners in that sector, but there just wasn't the rural infrastructure needed to operate in true proximity to communities at scale.
00:23:15
Speaker
I'd like to highlight something that you said there because I think it's really, really important. I'm really impressed that you have managed to achieve this decoupling of the growth of income or turnover from your growth of reach. And I think in the charity sector, very often organizations fall into this trap of thinking that bigger in terms of income
00:23:36
Speaker
is better but often or sometimes neglecting the growth of impact and reach at the same time. I'm really pleased to hear that you have been able to decouple that and indeed it's really interesting to hear that the way you have been able to achieve impact at scale is largely through this partnership approach and I think that brings us nicely to talk about the partnership with United World Schools and Blue Ventures.
Comprehensive Conservation Support
00:24:05
Speaker
So Al, I am shortly starting as the Chief Executive of United World Schools and I'm delighted to know that United World Schools already has a partnership with Blue Ventures in Madagascar along with the Axion Foundation looking to help establish an education program there. So can you talk to us a little bit about the partnership?
00:24:27
Speaker
As a conservation organisation, we work with communities in predominantly tropical environments and overwhelmingly in low income contexts. And so many of the communities that we work with are living in poverty, often with very little access or no access to essential services.
00:24:44
Speaker
That might be healthcare schools freshwater and we've often as a conservation organization struggled to understand when our work needs to stop what do we not do and in the early years of the ventures growth we rapidly diversified our programming to incorporate
00:25:03
Speaker
a number of additional interventions that were hugely synergistic with our work, including provision of maternal and child health care, water hygiene and sanitation. We've sunk wells, we've built schools, we've done all kinds of things as an organisation, particularly in Madagascar where much of our early work began.
00:25:19
Speaker
We've been struck by the enormous value of the holistic programming, but we've also recognised the inherent unscalability of it. We as an organisation have sought to go to scale internationally, first in coastal East Africa and the Western Indian Ocean, and secondly, then in the Southeast Asian Archipelago into Melanesia. We've really sought to hone in on what our core fisheries proposition is, but at the same time take with us that recognition that where there is a critical unmet need for some of those essential services, we as an organisation have
00:25:47
Speaker
to respond. But increasingly, as we grow, we don't do that by trying to build those services ourselves.
Synergistic Partnerships
00:25:53
Speaker
And so when we're designing programs and partnerships, we really try to bring with us those service providers that are experts in whatever that expressed need is. And our partnership with the United World Schools in Madagascar is illustrative of that. The lack of primary and secondary education in many of these coastal communities really prevents many children from leaving fishing.
00:26:15
Speaker
or getting jobs outside of their communities or in local towns by providing that infrastructure and the specialist resourcing of those schools is something that's far beyond our ability so that's why we're developing those partnerships and not just with educational providers. Increasingly I mentioned our health work but as we scale we don't scale our health work unless we can avoid it because this simply isn't
00:26:37
Speaker
We're not experts in community health service provision in many of the countries that we work in. And so we have to really bring in those partners with us and engineering those partnerships, securing funds for those partners, because of course, often it's quite hard to go the extra mile to get into these communities, but we can collaborate on some of that infrastructure. We can use our logistics, our vehicles, our boats, often to get partners. We've got a phenomenal partnership with Mary Stokes International,
Urgency at COP26
00:27:03
Speaker
for example,
00:27:03
Speaker
Into those communities and then we can start to see some of those synergies that I mentioned the kind of two plus two equals five dimension of Working in a holistic way with these communities
00:27:15
Speaker
Yes, I love that analogy of two plus two equals five. I am a big believer in collaboration in order to really focus, as you said, there for organizations on delivering their core services. And I think there is such power and strength in different organizations partnering and bringing their disparate expertise together in order to provide that holistic support for communities.
00:27:37
Speaker
So I know we are building five schools as a pilot in Madagascar along with you. I'm really looking forward to watching the partnership grow over the next couple of years. Absolutely. We're super excited.
00:27:49
Speaker
I'm very conscious Al that we are recording this podcast in the week leading up to the highly anticipated COP26 climate conference and I know that you are due to be in Glasgow for it as well. So tell us what you are going to be doing in Glasgow and what do you really hope that COP26 will achieve? There have been 25 COPs previously which I think perhaps helps answer
00:28:14
Speaker
Your second question, what do I hope that COP26 will achieve? And yet it has to achieve something. We are looking into a precipice of ecological collapse, of extinction, of a climate emergency that is real, that is happening. We as an organization work with ecosystems that really are on the brink. Coral reefs live at the very upper limit of their thermal tolerance. They can't tolerate sustained temperature increases of 1.5, let alone 3 degrees, and are likely to
00:28:44
Speaker
be wiped out as a result of the temperature rises that we're already committed to, let alone the chemical changes that we're seeing in the oceans.
Global Injustice and Climate Change
00:28:52
Speaker
And many other ecosystems and the shifts in distribution of species will have enormous impacts on biodiversity, but also on those people that depend on the sea, who live overwhelmingly in the tropics.
00:29:02
Speaker
many of whom live in low-income countries, often with very few alternatives to capture fisheries for food, for income, for identity, and who will be on the move as a result of climate breakdown. So these are frontline ecosystems, frontline communities.
00:29:20
Speaker
experiencing increased frequency and severity of tropical storms, sea level rise, mortality events in ecosystems like coral reefs. Today, Madagascar is experiencing a famine which is linked to climate change because of a multi-year drought that is almost unprecedented in the history of the island. Food insecurity is now affecting way over a million people.
00:29:44
Speaker
and many of them are now of course on the move. So climate change isn't a prediction, it's here and now and it's absolutely critical that these issues of environmental justice and climate justice are at the fore in Glasgow because taking for example one country in which we've had a long history, Madagascar, I think has contributed less than 0.1%
00:30:08
Speaker
to global CO2 emissions since the start of the Industrial Revolution. And yet it's 28 million people, a population bigger than Australia, are dealing overwhelmingly with some of those impacts that I've described from a coastal perspective.
Ocean's Role in Carbon Storage
00:30:23
Speaker
And of course there are terrestrial impacts like agricultural failure and drought as well.
00:30:26
Speaker
I think it's also really important that we start to recognise the role that the ocean plays in mitigation as the lungs of the planet, as home to some of these extraordinary carbon-rich ecosystems that sequester, that pull down and store staggering amounts of carbon, more so than upland tropical forests. For example, a seagrass, a tropical seagrass, or a mangrove forest, is locking away five to ten times as much carbon as
00:30:52
Speaker
per unit area as an upland tropical rainforest and i find that staggering when you think that the canopy height of for example a seagrass might just be under a meter compared to a tropical rainforest with trees in the many tens of meters and that's because of the extraordinary ecology of these ecosystems and their carbon rich
00:31:08
Speaker
sediments that are locking down this carbon below ground. So it's absolutely fundamental that we can take action, decisive action to protect these ecosystems, many of which are incredibly threatened. Mangroves, for example, are being lost almost faster than any other forest type on Earth.
00:31:23
Speaker
in some countries that we work they're being lost at rates of three to four percent per annum and that is obviously just not something that can continue. We have a number of specific initiatives related to for example blue carbon in Glasgow. One of them is perhaps unconventional and we're talking increasingly about the impacts of bottom trawling industrial bottom trawling. Bottom trawling is the use of
00:31:43
Speaker
weighted trawl nets up to mobile industrial gear dragged over the seabed to capture whatever's there. And of course, the impact on the seabed environment, the seabed is home to disproportionate amount of the life in the sea, is of course annihilated in that process and reduced from what might have been a complex reef system with all kinds of lifeform sponges and so on into a muddy, sandy rubble field as a result of the part of a trawl, which might work in the short term or might be favorable for certain kinds of
00:32:13
Speaker
invertebrate species that might have some economic value but are absolutely devastating to broader ecology. And, tragically, trawling is one of the main forms of catching fish and invertebrates in the sea. It's largely economically unviable, and it's only able to persist because of subsidies. It has devastating impacts on biodiversity, as well as, of course, on coastal fisheries. And, increasingly, we're seeing trawlers
00:32:37
Speaker
moving into areas that are relied on by coastal fishers, traditional fishers, artisanal fishers who really have no alternative. And that's not just a threat to their livelihoods, it's often a threat to their gear, their fishing gear, and even their lives when these big boats are interacting with very small vessels. But increasingly, we're also learning the impact that these mobile gears are having on these incredibly important carbon ecosystems.
00:33:03
Speaker
and the resuspension of so much of that carbon when the seabed is raked and pulverised, which is likely to be accelerating the climate emergency that we're now facing.
Protecting Coastal Fisheries
00:33:15
Speaker
So we're calling for coastal states to establish inshore exclusion zones from which
00:33:23
Speaker
bottom trawling is prohibited as a strategy to enable the coastal fishes to breathe to give space to those more sustainable inshore fisheries to exist and also for those seabed environments to recover.
00:33:37
Speaker
It seems incredibly unfair in many ways, just using the example that you gave the earlier of Madagascar having contributed less than 1% of global emissions and yet is really at the sharp end of feeling the impacts of the climate emergency in terms of the famine and other impacts of trawling, et cetera. And coming back to COP26, what more do you want to see from governments? What sort of commitments do you think can really move the needle now?
00:34:06
Speaker
Existing NDCs will get us nowhere near 1.5 degrees. The commitments that we've seen from governments thus far will tragically not get us where we need to go. To coin a phrase from several cops ago, 1.5 to stay alive, that really is the reality for many low-lying coastal nations, for many ecosystems, for many species, the kinds of cuts
00:34:31
Speaker
that we need are of a level of ambition that has not yet been seen by any world leaders. And yet the reality is we absolutely need to get there. So it's a new level of ambition. I'm heartened by what we've seen
00:34:48
Speaker
from governments in domestic reforms through, for example, COVID. We know that we can adapt. We know that we can reshape. We can reimagine our economies. We know that we can invest in sectors to stimulate green recovery. But this needs to happen at scale. There's extraordinary progress happening in some countries and in some sectors, but we're going to need a lot more.
Governmental Climate Commitments
00:35:11
Speaker
And we're now dealing with an hourglass that is fast running out.
00:35:15
Speaker
indeed. And by the time this podcast actually releases, the COP26 conference would have taken place. So let's hope by then we do have some of these ambitious targets set and some more positive news. And of course, as you just mentioned there, COVID has laid a level of complexity on everything.
00:35:35
Speaker
And coming back to the eco-tourism model that you mentioned earlier, obviously income would have taken a real hit under Covid with people not being able to travel, etc. What measures have you been able to put in place in order to rebuild and get back to a stable financial footing for Blue Ventures?
00:35:54
Speaker
So as our philanthropic income grew over the years, it started to exceed and then eclipsed our earned revenue through tourism. So our tourism business at the start of COVID was relatively marginal compared to our charity. And we haven't been able to restart that business, so it's still mothballed. And we've got no plans to start it in our current fiscal year, which ends in June 2022. So to give you a sense of the duration, we'll be talking a lot longer than 24 months of interruption.
00:36:23
Speaker
And that's, I think, true for many of our former partners in the ecotourism sector, many of which have now failed, sadly. I'm less worried, of course, about our own business, but more about the impacts that that will have systemically to communities in so many parts of the world that are reliant on tourism.
00:36:40
Speaker
We were a small tourist business, but we were in some countries putting in tens of thousands of bed nights per year using local services, local infrastructure, homestays rather than hotels, for example. That was a tremendously important provision, livelihood provision in many contexts. Those communities are now, of course, having to turn to fishing or whatever other local livelihoods exist. That continues to be the situation in so many countries, whether we're talking about Kenya or Indonesia.
Philanthropy and COVID Challenges
00:37:08
Speaker
our philanthropic model has managed to continue through COVID and so now carries the organization. Well, delighted to hear that. Al, I'd like to come on now to talk a bit more about you and your leadership journey. Can you tell us a bit more about your background and how you've really gotten to where you are today? You mentioned earlier on that you've been doing this job essentially for the past 20 years and that you need a lot of energy and perseverance to sustain you, but tell us more about that background.
00:37:35
Speaker
I never saw myself as an organizational leader, I just wanted to get stuff done. You know, as I said, I was a keen diver and saw stuff happening that was utterly heartbreaking and gradually realised that the conservation emergency that I'd come to look at was in fact a humanitarian one at heart and all the solutions.
00:37:54
Speaker
what lay in helping those communities change their relationship with the ocean so i guess my evolution has been from biologist to social entrepreneur to human rights advocate within these communities and i think i would never see myself as a particularly effective organizational leader and i'm sure most of my stuff would agree
00:38:12
Speaker
So, yeah, I mean, I've had to keep growing an organization and learn the ropes as I've gone along and the bits of the organization that develop, whether it's your data systems or your HR team or the finance systems. I've generally learned how to do that by failing and getting it wrong for a
Alistair's Journey to Leadership
00:38:28
Speaker
few years. Very recently, just a couple of months ago, we brought on board our first managing director who comes
00:38:33
Speaker
to us from with a much bigger brain and much broader shoulders and more experience in organizational leadership than I do. And it's been amazing to have her working alongside me. We're developing a kind of model of co-leadership and seeing the way that Natasha is able to navigate the kinds of challenges, the leadership challenges that arise. We've got 300 staff in something like 15 countries on a daily basis. I've learned a lot.
00:38:58
Speaker
I could and should have put in systems around me sooner to manage the business but when you're trying to run a very lean operation, our organization is always struggled to keep the lights on and that's true in many environmental organizations that are working in sectors that haven't been the zeitgeist increasingly of course,
00:39:14
Speaker
natural climate solutions and environmental justice and the ocean and the ocean and climate they're all resonating increasingly with politicians here in the UK and overseas and so we are seeing a slight change now in interest in our sector but it has always been the do-it-yourself approach to leadership and organisation building has been as much out of necessity as out of choice there just simply hasn't been the money to get people in with the requisite skills.
Learning and Imposter Syndrome
00:39:40
Speaker
That is such a unique career path from biologist to social entrepreneur to humanitarian activist. I love it. And talking about being an organizational leader and the real do-it-yourself approach to leadership, what advice would you give to yourself on day one of first taking on this challenge and becoming an organizational leader, do you think?
00:40:02
Speaker
I learned in my early 20s when I was dealing with clients who were twice my age and having to negotiate in a language that wasn't my own with ministers of fisheries and so on. For a long time, one feels hopelessly out of one's depth and as if one is an imposter in this world and this sector.
00:40:18
Speaker
one doesn't have the requisite skills and you know perhaps I need to go back to university and learn that stuff but gradually I've realized that no one has those skills often and everybody's in the same boat in this world and there isn't a degree course that can teach you that can equip you a master's degree perhaps for the kinds of realities that we face and situations that we're
00:40:38
Speaker
navigating on an hourly basis in the world that I work in. And the only real way to get those skills is to jump in and hope you don't sink. And that's kind of what I encourage my colleagues to do because we learn by doing.
Colleagues' Growth
00:40:52
Speaker
Absolutely. And having come through that imposter syndrome phase and actually having lived the experience. I still feel like I hope this imposter, whether you're standing in the backstage at TED, green and about to vomit, because you know, you're not sure why you've got to go and stand in that red dot and deliver your talk or whatever it is, it never leaves you. But one is propelled by
00:41:14
Speaker
the mission by the sense of belief that this is an emergency and that we are advocates for a cause that is urgently needed, is underrepresented, and we just have to get out there and do it. And then you get up on the stage and you do your best. And yeah, the butterflies never leave you, but yeah. Absolutely. And what would you say is most inspiring about being the executive director of Blue Ventures?
00:41:40
Speaker
I am endlessly inspired by the people that I work with. I am watching their careers develop, a colleague of mine, and she was a graduate from the University of Antananarivo in law, and she was my partner in crime when I lived in Tanner in the early noughties in Tanner's the capital of Madagascar. And we did amazing work, I think, at the time in exploring some of the injustices of Fisheries Partnership agreements between Madagascar and the EU. We wrote about this very naively, and we sent all these
00:42:10
Speaker
highly charged articles out and with colleagues in France and it was great fun. And watching her career develop, she is now a world expert on tuna fisheries policy. She spoke at the opening of the World Conservation Congress in Marseille last month. She came top of her class in a master's degree at Cambridge University. She has a PhD from Zurich. I mean, she is
00:42:34
Speaker
She's the future and it's been amazing to watch her career develop and I could say the same for other colleagues in, for example, Mima, a colleague of ours in Timor Leste. She's Timor Leste's first dive master. She comes from a fishing community. She hasn't got tertiary education.
00:42:49
Speaker
and she is one of the most effective outreach technicians in our entire team of 300 and hearing her story and hearing her speak is incredibly powerful and motivating. I think as a team we get that ambition and motivation from one another and I could go on and list many other examples beyond Miali and Lima.
Interconnected Crises and Justice
00:43:12
Speaker
Yes, I think being able to help cultivate talent in others is a huge privilege as a leader in organizations such as ours. And in closing now, Al, do you have any final thoughts or reflections that you would like to share? What is one thing that you would like listeners to take away from this conversation? I think
00:43:31
Speaker
increasingly I'm struck by the, referred to as the intersectionality, the overlap between the alignment that we're increasingly seeing between issues that have previously been seen as distinct and separate and it's a kind of hallelujah moment for me when donors, when funders, when defra, when the government start to recognize that
00:43:56
Speaker
The ecological emergency and the climate emergency and issues of social justice are all related and in some cases the same thing. It's been this extraordinary awakening that seems to have happened over the last two years when
00:44:12
Speaker
we now are waking up to the injustices, the social injustices that underpin the climate emergency and the ecological emergency and that the solutions to both lie in human rights and redressing these historical injustices. So it's amazing from my perspective to see these worlds that we've been trying to connect for so long coming together and
Conclusion and Call for Cooperation
00:44:39
Speaker
I'm sleepless with excitement about not just because I have a seven-week-old daughter who's keeping me awake, but because of what we might see at Glasgow with the force of these social justice movements now speaking about the climate emergency and the ecological emergency. So that is tremendously exciting. Well, thank you, Al. This has been such a fascinating conversation. I've learned so much just in the past 40 minutes talking to you that I didn't previously know. So thank you so much for being a guest on the show. Thank you very much.
00:45:11
Speaker
What a fascinating conversation with Alistair Harris, Executive Director of Blue Ventures. Speaking with him has really brought home that the current climate emergency is much more than an imminent ecological collapse, but actually a much larger humanitarian crisis. One which requires all the countries of the world working closely together in order to avert. As the outcomes and commitments from the global climate conference COP26 emerge, we can only hope that it isn't too late.
00:45:41
Speaker
I hope you enjoyed this latest episode of the Charity CEO podcast. A show that, thanks to you, our listeners, has repeatedly reached the number one spot in Apple's non-profit podcast category. If you found this conversation valuable, please help spread the word. Share or tag us on Twitter or LinkedIn or Instagram, and make sure you subscribe to the show by clicking the subscribe button on your podcast app.
00:46:04
Speaker
And if you're feeling inspired or uplifted by what you have just heard, please share the joy by leaving us a five-star review. Visit our website, thecharityceo.com, for full show details, information on past season guests, and to submit ideas for future guests. Thanks again to our Season 3 sponsor, Eden Tree, and thank you for continuing to listen.