New book on reef is guide for policymakers

Coordinating people can be hard, but trying to get entire countries to agree on the same goals and how to achieve them is even tougher. But that’s the challenge environmentalists face today during their ongoing efforts to preserve, protect, and sustainably develop our natural resources, like the Belize Barrier Reef. But a book launched in Belize City today is designed to help researchers interpret the reality behind their data and influence political leaders to make better policy decisions. According to co-author Melanie McField, the collaborative effort may be highly academic, but all the information is relevant.

Melanie McField
“The meat of it is fifty-eight environmental indicators, so it’s profiles of these indicators that relate to reef ecosystem structure, function, the drivers of change, threats within the region, and also social well being. So we’re looking at things like human health, good government, economic issues and policies.”

Janelle Chanona
”That seems so diverse, how do you put all of that together?”

Melanie McField
“That’s why its taken two years to really develop the guide and a lot of people contributed to it and it’s a lot of information. And it’s a little daunting, overwhelming, and usually you come away with a bit of throbbing headache when you first get into it. So today’s a handholding, introducing some of the concepts, pretty pictures. We’ve tried to make this user friendly as possible because it is a lot of information, but really when you get down to it, we’ve boiled it down to big clear-cut profiles of these indicators.”

“Part of the problem is one indicator can’t tell you much. Coral cover in terms of reef ecosystems has one of the main indicators that scientists have used, so that’s one indicator that we have some historical data on. Coral cover means the amount of live coral covering the bottom, so in a healthy reef in the Caribbean that would be something like thirty to fifty percent; that would make us happy to have that much of the bottom covered by live coral. And at the moment we have more like eleven to fourteen percent of live coral covering the bottom.”

Five hundred copies of Healthy Reefs for Healthy People have been printed. The publication will also be translated to Spanish and distributed among regional partners. The book is expected to be followed by state of the reef reports and other forms of sustained feedback through the collaborative effort of researchers.