Interview with Professor Pierre Failler, UNESCO Chair in Blue Governance

This interview was conducted in Dakar by Pascaline Odoubourou on Friday 13 May 2022. Professor Pierre Failler explained what the Regional Strategy for the Conservation of Marine Herbariums consists of. He also enumerated the ills from which the African blue economy suffers and proposed solutions.
  • Please introduce yourself to our readers?

Hello, I am Pierre Failler, Professor of Economics at the University of Portsmouth, Research Director and Director of the Centre for Blue Governance at the University of Portsmouth and UNESCO Chair in Blue Governance (Blue Economy).

  • Where did your passion for the sea come from?

I grew up by the sea and have always been involved in sailing, boating and water activities. Then I was lucky enough to be able to do a Master’s degree in Canada in Marine Resource Management in which a multidisciplinary approach was the basic rule. That is to say, I took courses in the marine environment, marine ecology, oceanography, marine biology, economics, law of the sea, etc. This means that I am able to approach the maritime issue, or the blue economy issue, from different angles. This is really the interest of this multidisciplinary approach.

  • What is the purpose of your visit to Dakar, Senegal?

I came to Dakar as part of the validation workshop for the Regional Strategy for the Conservation of Marine Herbariums in West Africa. And my colleagues and I are here together to work with the Réseau Régional d’Aires Marines Protégées en Afrique de l’Ouest (RAMPAO), which is headed by Marie Suzanne TRAORE. We have therefore developed a strategy for RAMPAO consisting of the protection, conservation and improvement of the state of health of West African herbaria.

This may seem a little superfluous, a little anecdotal, because it seems as if we were making a strategy for the grass. But, in fact, seagrass beds are living organisms that absorb an enormous amount of carbon and store it, especially in their roots, up to one metre (1m) deep. They are real carbon sinks that absorb and store a lot of carbon. That’s why it’s quite fundamental for two reasons.

The first is for climate change and the second is that they are very favourable habitats for marine life. Many species thrive in these habitats, especially molluscs, sea urchins and other animals.

Also, these are grasslands that turtles come to visit to moult. There are also dugongs. So we have a habitat that is used both for climate change, for mitigating the effects of climate change, but also for adapting to climate change because it slows down the effect of waves. So we have less coastal erosion.

For example, when you go to Saint Louis, to Guet Nda, coastal erosion is impressive because there are no longer any natural mechanisms in place to slow down wave dynamics. Also, seagrass beds contribute to slowing down wave dynamics by up to 40%. They are also fundamental for climate change and marine biodiversity.

Briefly, the idea of RAMPAO is to develop a strategy that will enable us to move forward on conservation and also to propose restoration actions in the event that the meadows are degraded. Actions, not only on the meadows themselves, but also upstream on the pollution. For example, if there is pollution, you can very well replant the meadows, but they won’t grow back because the pollution is too strong.

  • Apart from Senegal, did you plan to do this in another country?

The Regional Seagrass Conservation Strategy concerns seven (7) member countries of the Sub-Regional Fisheries Commission (SRFC): Cape Verde, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Mauritania, Senegal and Sierra Leone. Also, it is important to know that this is the first regional strategy for the conservation of seagrass beds that will exist. This does not exist in other African regions. It is something quite interesting that will allow us to have quite concrete actions, and I hope this will happen quickly.

  • Apart from the problem of climate change and pollution, what other problems do you encounter here in Senegal in terms of the blue economy?

Senegal is facing several problems in terms of the blue economy. On the one hand, the problems stem from the fact that the Senegalese people are quite sea-oriented. So, they exploit the marine domain a lot. And the problem arises when Senegal’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) is no longer rich enough in resources for all Senegalese fishing boats to return to the quayside with enough fish in their holds. This is the problem we have had for several years and it is a recurring problem.

The strategy of Senegalese fishermen has simply been to go fishing elsewhere. The problem now is that Senegalese fishermen are obliged to go to neighbouring countries, especially Guinea-Bissau, to catch fish. This has led to a situation where Senegal’s exports are not fish caught in Senegal, but are largely caught in adjacent waters.

This is one of the major problems. The problem of pollution is becoming more and more frequent. We see it here, whether in Hann Bay or elsewhere, the quality of the water is becoming increasingly poor over time. And it won’t get any better until we have water purification systems in place.

After that, we have other problems that are quite significant. This is the problem of plastic. We have seen it on the Langue de Barbarie, where there are monstrous strandings of plastic. So plastic is not only a nuisance for the vision and the landscape, but it is also a nuisance for the species that live there. So we have a whole series of factors that mean that the marine and coastal environment is gradually deteriorating.

  • In your opinion, what are the main problems of the African blue economy?

The main difficulties of the blue economy, we will say that it is first of all to be able to define it correctly. And the difficulty is that countries generally refer to a fairly common definition made by the World Bank, but which is very sectoral. And which consists, as I said at the beginning, of developing economic sectors. And as usual, at the end, they say, “pay attention to the environment“.

But in fact, we should do exactly the opposite. We need to take care of the environment, to ensure that the environment is in optimal health, so that it can then generate all the care, what we call ecosystem services, which allow the different economic sectors and the different components of the blue economy to prosper.

So there is a paradigm shift to be made, but it has not yet been made, and we are still on this logic of excessive development of the different economic sectors. So we are still locked into the development logic of the 1960s and 1970s. So this is the main obstacle. It’s an obstacle, let’s say psychological or perhaps even intellectual, of a difficulty in understanding and integrating the environment into an equation, which is nevertheless quite simple.

That’s it! That’s the challenge. Afterwards, it’s a challenge in terms of coordination. When you want to set up the blue economy, you have to be able to bring together in a coordination unit the people who work on fishing, the people who work on aquaculture, those who work on coastal tourism, those who work on port development, those who work on maritime transport, blue energies, the exploitation of oil at sea, etc. That’s a lot of people to bring together in the unit to take decisions. That’s a lot of people to bring together within the unit to make decisions. This is why we need to set up tools, or use tools such as maritime spatial planning, which enables us to have a vision of the different juxtapositions of activities, but also of the juxtapositions of regulations or jurisdictions.

So that’s the whole point of such a tool, and it also allows investors to secure their investment. If they know that the Bay of Hann, for example, will be dedicated solely to tourism, they can invest in tourism. But if they don’t know this, they won’t invest. Because you can very well have someone who can come and do aquaculture opposite your house, or someone who will use the sand for construction. So you need the tools to coordinate all this.

  • One last word.

We are currently at a turning point, which is quite interesting because for decades we have been fighting against the reduction in biodiversity with little or no results, or with results that are very patchy or so localised that we cannot even use them as an example. So we tried, we tried, we invested, we invested and it didn’t work for several reasons. But the first, I think, is that there has always been a loophole. When I was talking about Senegalese fishermen and there were no more fish here, there were no more fish in Yoff, they went elsewhere.

And this escape route also worked for biodiversity. So, there was no more mangrove wood, so we went and got some from the other side. We continued like that. Except that, after a while, there was no more wood at all, and people left to do something else.

So there is always this mechanism of “we can still do something else and substitute what we had with something else”. And we end up in a situation where this is no longer possible.

With climate change, we are obliged to put measures in place. Otherwise, Dakar will be under water, Saint-Louis will be under water. So the issues have taken on a new dimension, meaning that at first they were confined to one species, a turtle, one of the turtles or other species, or plants, but now we are directly affected.

So the reaction is not at all the same. And the investments that are being made to combat the effects of climate change, if they are well done, and there is an ‘if’ here, will enable biodiversity to be restored. In other words, with what we call nature-based solutions, we will restore mangroves, we will try to restore reefs and the subject of this workshop in Dakar, seagrass beds.

So, you see, we are going to make an effort, but this effort comes through climate change. It does not come through biodiversity. This would have been natural if there were a heightened awareness of the difficulties and problems. Here, climate change directly affects our living conditions. So that’s important.

Whether it’s for the blue economy or for the rest of things, the driving forces are forces that come from climate change and the reaction to this change.

So afterwards, the question is to know how the biodiversity people are going to be able to seize this opportunity, because for me, it is an opportunity, to seize this opportunity to use the money from climate change, for example, on blue carbon to be able to restore the ecosystems that allow the improvement of the restoration of the fisheries biomass and the flourishing of several coastal species.

This is a challenge, because obviously there will be a tendency to try to implement, particularly in nature-based solutions and in all restoration projects, species that are very strong in one or two services.

If, for example, we take blue carbon, we will try to plant trees, to plant grass beds that absorb and store carbon in a very important way. And the danger is that we will end up modifying nature by trying to introduce species that are efficient. But they may perform well for one or two climate change services, but they may not perform well for the rest, especially biodiversity. So this selection of species can lead to a fairly substantial loss.