Barefoot Ecologist

Dr Jeremy Prince’s life-time challenge has been the near impossibility of assessing and managing the world’s small-scale and data-poor fisheries. Globally, coastal biodiversity and food security for coastal communities is being degraded and threatened by our inability to assess and manage small-scale community-based fisheries.

Traditional age-based assessment methodologies can only be applied to the 10% of large-scale marine resources with the revenue and high-level expertise required to support long term programs of big science.

An international army of Barefoot Ecologists is needed to live and work more simply with the fishing communities that depend on small-scale fisheries; to emulate the Barefoot Doctor Program China used through the 1960 and 1970s to successfully address rural health. That army will need equipping with a broad multi-disciplinary range of methods and materials; community facilitation, change management, data collection, analysis, assessment and management advice formulation. They need a Barefoot Ecologist’s Toolbox.