A global leader in empowering coastal communities and revitalizing coastal waters.
Under-resourced, overlooked and climate-vulnerable
Coastal waters support some of the most spectacular and diverse environments on Earth. They sustain life, provide livelihoods for millions of people worldwide, and are critical to slowing the effects of climate change. However, rural coastal communities are often overlooked and under-resourced, leaving coastal communities without the capacity to sustainably manage local waters. This leaves the waters vulnerable to overfishing and other destructive practices – as well as the impacts of climate change – that threaten their food security, livelihoods, and physical well-being. The collapse of coastal fisheries is an environmental problem that could lead to a humanitarian crisis.
Protecting ocean ecosystems and the needs of coastal communities
Rare’s Fish Forever program is a global leader in reducing coastal overfishing and revitalizing coastal fisheries. Through a global network of 100 staff and over 150 local partners, Fish Forever mobilizes and strengthens community-led management of coastal fisheries. Through a replicable model rooted in behavioral science, Fish Forever promotes responsible fishing behavior among local fishers.
The Fish Forever Target Behaviors
Become a registered fisher
Understanding who is fishing is a core component of managing a fishery. Registering fishers and providing fisher IDs allows us to quantify and understand who is fishing; and it can be used as a management tool to assign rights to fish in certain areas. Registration can also formalize fishing as a profession with a clear identity and highlight fishers’ roles as marine resource stewards.
Our innovative approach empowers communities with clear rights, strong governance, data for decision-making, financial inclusion, and participatory management – helping local communities to effectively sustain production, build coordinated advocacy with government, elevate the voices of coastal communities and give them control over their futures. Today, Fish Forever is engaging over a thousand communities across eight countries where high biodiversity meets high human use.
The Fish Forever Data Portal
Rare’s Fish Forever Data Portal is a digital platform providing real-time data from our partner communities, visualized through dashboards and summarized in reports, and made readily available to support implementing partners, local leaders and practitioners. Explore the data at portal.rare.org.
*Real-time program data. For more details, visit the Fish Forever program portal: https://portal.rare.org.
A partner for Vibrant Oceans
Rare is a proud to be part of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Vibrant Oceans Initiative to protect the ocean from pressing threats, like overfishing, and enable greater ocean sustainability.
The Coastal 500: Local leaders supporting coastal fisheries
The Coastal 500 is a global network of local government leaders committed to working toward thriving and prosperous coastal communities. Made up of mayors and other local government leaders from countries across the developing tropics, the coalition will establish global leadership for small-scale fisheries, influence stakeholders in the fisheries sector, and serve as a valuable platform for peer-to-peer learning, technical and network support, and advocacy development for coastal leaders from all over the world.
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