CROATIA
Improving the economic and environmental sustainability of a small island community
Sustainable ďŹ shing in a nature park Stakeholders including the ďŹ sheries administration, ďŹ shermen, nature park authorities, and an NGO come together in a project that allows the sustainable exploitation of ďŹ sh resources in the nature park.
Ivica LeĹĄiĂź and his wife Helena have successfully diversified into fishing tourism, which in 2019 accounted for three fifths of his income.
Fishing in nature park is permitted subject to strict rules
T
he island of Lastovo is the most remote of Croatia’s inhabited islands in the Adriatic Sea. The Lastovo archipelago comprises 46 islands that were declared a Croatian Nature Park in 2006, making it the eleventh and youngest nature park in Croatia. WWF, an environmental NGO, calls the nature park one of the ten last treasuries of biodiversity in the Mediterranean Sea thanks to its variety of marine habitats and taxa. 36
Lastovo’s population is less than 800 people, of whom about 40 are full-time small-scale fishermen. Small coastal fishers have vessels less than 12 m and use different static gears (nets, hooks and long lines, traps) and shore seines which are a traditional, relatively small sized fishing gear.
The nature park is managed under the Nature Protection Act of the Republic of Croatia. In 2009, three years after the creation of Lastovo Nature Park, legislation was enacted giving the exclusive right to inhabitants of Lastovo to commercially exploit fish in four different zones of the marine protected area, which extends 500 meters around the archipelago. Park rangers were responsible for enforcing the
rules, i.e. deciding on concession and licences for commercial fisheries. This was strongly supported by the local fishermen, who said they had managed the island’s marine resources sustainably. But in 2013, after an appeal from fishermen from the neighbouring islands who had traditionally fished in the Lastovo archipelago, the Croatian Constitutional Court overruled that decision and permitted other vessels to fish in the
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