A New Chapter for Fisheries Science in the Philippines

With $24 million in fresh US State Department funding, the University of Rhode Island’s Fish Right Program returns to some of the most contested fishing grounds on earth, this time with local fishers at the centre of the science.

Off the western seaboard of the Philippines, where the country’s waters meet the South China Sea, the small boats of the industrial fishing fleet work grounds that are getting harder to fish and harder to reach. Catches are thinning. Access is narrowing. And the politics of who is allowed where have turned a day’s work into something closer to a negotiation. Into that complicated stretch of ocean, the University of Rhode Island is returning with $24 million and an idea that puts the fishers themselves at the centre of it.

The money comes from the US Department of State, announced on 15 June, and it extends one of the longer-running fisheries partnerships in the region. URI’s Coastal Institute has worked in the Philippines under the banner of the Fish Right Program since 2018, when the US Agency for International Development backed it with an original $24 million grant and, later, an $8 million extension. URI’s involvement in Philippine coastal management actually runs back to the 1980s. What changes now is less the place than the emphasis.

The new phase, which runs through 2028, leans hard into something the program calls maritime domain awareness: knowing, in close to real time, what is happening across a given stretch of sea. Who is fishing. What they are catching. What the water and the reefs are doing. The interesting part is who does the knowing. Rather than treat fishers as the problem to be managed, the program is building a network of them to document and report what they encounter on the water, from vessel activity to environmental conditions.

“Through the Fish Right Program, we hope to empower these fishers as trusted observers at sea while improving real-time coordination, reporting, and access to information for those working at sea,” said Elin Torell, director of the Coastal Institute and one of the initiative’s principal investigators. Her colleague Sarah Gaines, who directs international programs at the Institute, frames it as a trade rather than a favour: fishing communities help ground-truth the data through their observations, and in return they get tools and technical support that make their working lives a little less blind.

The stakes are not abstract. The Philippines is one of the planet’s great centres of marine biodiversity and among its largest fishing nations, landing roughly four million metric tonnes a year. Fish is food and income for millions of Filipinos, and the stocks that supply it are under pressure from illegal and unregulated fishing, climate change, and the slow degradation of coral reefs and mangroves. Layered on top of all that is the West Philippine Sea, where developments have already changed where and how some Filipino fishers can operate. The program is concentrating on exactly these small-scale commercial fleets along the western seaboard, a region the State Department and URI both describe, with some understatement, as strategically important.

None of this is being run from Rhode Island. The in-country effort is led by Chief of Party Nygiel Armada, a fisheries scientist with decades on similar programs, supported by a Manila-based team and by PATH Foundation Philippines Inc. Philippine government agencies including the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources and the National Maritime Center are partners, as is the Palawan Council for Sustainable Development. The arrangement is built so that the Philippines keeps ownership of its own data and its own decisions, a point the team is careful to make.

There is a teaching dimension too. Six graduate students start at URI this autumn on the program’s support, working as a cohort across seafloor mapping, fisheries ecology, and ocean governance. “It is a tremendous opportunity for students to learn about navigating intercultural and political dynamics, in addition to their academic work,” said Tyler Pavlowich, the assistant research professor sharing the principal investigator role with Torell.

The neat thing about the design, if it works, is that it does not ask fishers to choose between catching fish and protecting them. It asks them to keep doing what they already do, with a clearer view of the water and a reason to write down what they see. Whether a network of observers can hold together across contested seas and shifting budgets is the open question. For now, the eyes are going back on the water.

This article is adapted from materials provided by the University of Rhode Island Coastal Institute.