How to better manage the marine reef resource in New Caledonia?

The challenge taken up by these participants made possible to:

- define the typical profile of non-professional fishermen in three communes of the territory (Lifou, Thio, Touho),

- to establish a method for evaluating the harvesting of reef and lagoon marine resources in rural areas.

The participants agreed to follow a method based on a twofold approach:

-the first, ethnographically oriented, is about evaluating the resource harvested at the time of major events throughout the year (weddings, passings, enthronement, feast, fair, etc.). The hypothesis is that most of the annual fishery’s production occurs during these events. 

-the second one follows an approach trough fisheries exploitation which consists in evaluating the quantity of fish that fishermen catch per day.

The combination of these two approaches should allow for a more accurate assessment of rural fishing.

This study is funded by the Conservatory of Natural Areas (CEN) based on Ifrecor fons, with the technical, human and financial support from the New Caledonian Coastal Fisheries Observatory through PROTEGE and the Pacific Community.