PT Hatfield Indonesia awarded The Nature Conservancy’s Indonesia Mapping Ocean Wealth initiative

Dec 24, 2015

 

PT Hatfield Indonesia has been contracted to collaborate with scientists from the Agricultural Institute Bogor (IPB) in support of completing The Nature Conservancy – Indonesia’s Mapping Ocean Wealth (MOW) project. TNC’s MOW initiative aims to inform decision makers about the benefit of protecting and practicing sustainable use of coastal and marine resources. In Indonesia the visions of MOW are:

• To demonstrate how pelagic habitat features in the Lesser Sunda Eco-region (e.g., eddies, upwelling, fronts) provide important services, such as pelagic fisheries and tourism, via their links to the distribution of particular species; and

• To generate information that could be used for decision making, e.g. inform current efforts in marine spatial planning and/or sectoral management such as fishery.

Indonesia lies at the nexus of the Pacific and Indian Oceans where currents collide within a complex mix of islands and archipelagos, creating a dramatic upwelling of nutrients that support stocks of commercially-important species of tuna, including skipjack, yellowfin, bigeye, albacore and southern Bluefin. For example, Indonesia harvests 15 percent of the world’s skipjack tuna and over a quarter of the large valuable tunas (yellowfin, bigeye, albacore and southern Bluefin tuna combined) caught in the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Council and has a very significant fleet operating in the Indian Ocean. Moreover, Indonesia’s waters provide ‘ecosystem services’ to other nations, where tuna fleets target adult tunas that were born and raised in Indonesia’s waters.

PTHI will focus on using cost-effective methods to identify and model spatial patterns in tuna distribution and productivity as these are linked to pelagic habitat features in the Lesser Sunda Eco-region. Specifically, by mapping pelagic habitat features together with fisheries utilization patterns and combining this with catch composition information, management relevant recommendations can be provided in support of ecosystem based tuna fisheries in the else that will also support requirements for compliance with Indonesian regional an international policies and conventions. PTHI will work closely with IPB to support The Nature Conservancy with the production of policy brief(s), presentation and communication materials pertaining to MOW’s fishery component and participate in technical meetings or conferences.

For more information:
Bambang T. Sasongko Adi
President Director
PT. Hatfield Indonesia
Email: hatfindo@hatfieldgroup.com
Telephone: +62 (251) 832 4487