Zanzibar has welcomed its latest marine reserve – the Changuu-Bawe Marine Conservation Area – around Bawe Island in the Zanzibar Channel. The country’s sixth Marine Protected Area now prohibits all fishing activities and hopes to grant coral reefs better protection to sustain the region’s biodiversity.

A collaboration between the Zanzibar government and the Cocoon Collection – a family-founded luxury travel brand that has a luxury resort on Bawe Island – the conservation area vividly showcases how tourism and conservation can go hand in hand.

Encompassing the entire coast of Bawe Island, all fishing activities are now banned within the reserve to re-establish the ecosystem’s natural balance and allow the area’s once abundant coral cover to regenerate.

Attilio Azzola, founder and corporate sales manager of The Cocoon Collection, said: “For years we have been working on several fronts to reduce our impact and enhance the environment that surrounds us.” This has included the installation of solar panels, as well as the creation of the archipelago’s largest solar plant.

To support local fishers despite the new fishing regulations around Bawe, the government has prompted houses to be built on the island. Equipped with private boat docks, the new accommodation allows easy access to offshore areas – outside the protected area – where fishing is authorised.

The majority of Zanzibar’s coastline is fringed by vast seagrass meadows and productive coral reefs that not only act as a natural barrier, but also provide livelihoods for a large proportion of the population. Over 90% of the fisheries production in the country is artisanal, depending either directly or indirectly on coral reefs.

Traditional low-impact fishing vessels include outrigger and dugout canoes, as well as sailboats, while the most common fishing gears used are gillnets, hand-lines and basket traps.

Some critics therefore argue that the reserve’s new no-fishing rule directly affects local artisanal fishers as their boats might struggle to safely reach offshore areas.

According to a report by the United Nations Environment Programme/Nairobi Convention Secretariat, the Changuu-Bawe Marine Conservation Area, the most common pressures on Zanzibar’s marine ecosystems stem from “both natural and indirect anthropogenic factors (diseases, outbreaks of predators, rough weather, abnormal temperatures leading to coral bleaching), and direct anthropogenic stressors (land-based pollution, over-harvesting, anchor breakage, oil spills and unsustainable and highly damaging fishing practices such as use of drag-nets)”.

Surveyed in 2009, the Changuu-Bawe Marine Conservation Area encompasses 162.9km2 of protected area of sandbanks, coral reefs, seagrass beds and sandy and rocky beaches. As a multiple-use marine conservation area, it is a relatively young Marine Protected Area and therefore “management effectiveness is currently low”, according to the United Nations report. 

It further states that risks and threat to the reserve include conflict of conservation and illegal destructive fishing, pollution from garbage – especially from tourist picnics on the sandbanks, oil spills, anchored boats, sewage pollution from hotels and residential buildings, as well as inadequate law enforcement.

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