On small islands across eastern Indonesia, coastal communities are reviving customary rules, seasonal fishing closures, turtle protection and mangrove stewardship to protect marine ecosystems threatened by blast fishing, turtle hunting and habitat loss.
Their efforts are the focus of Jejak Wallacea, a new documentary produced by Burung Indonesia and Arise! Indonesia as part of the Wallacea Partnership Program II, a conservation initiative supported by the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund.
The film follows communities in the provinces of East Nusa Tenggara, South Sulawesi, Southeast Sulawesi and Central Sulawesi that use locally rooted systems to manage coastal ecosystems. These include customary sanctions, community patrols, octopus fishing closures, coral reef restoration, turtle hatcheries and mangrove-based livelihoods.
For Burung Indonesia, the local affiliate of BirdLife International, the film is also an attempt to show that conservation in the eastern Indonesian islands that make up the Wallacea region, one of the world’s richest marine biodiversity regions, cannot depend only on formal protected areas or top-down enforcement.
“The Wallacea Partnership Program is essentially aimed at strengthening the capacity of civil society in site-level conservation,” said Angga Yoga, a terrestrial program specialist at Burung Indonesia. “That’s why the NGOs are not very visible in the film, because the communities themselves are the ones we empower.”
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The next challenge is how to ensure community-based conservation initiatives are adopted more widely, connected to government programs and policies, remain sustainable, and are strengthened through collaboration.
Wahyu Teguh Prawira, team leader, Wallacea Partnership Programme
Angga contrasted the approach with more exclusionary conservation models, saying the initiatives featured in the film were designed by communities themselves through customary systems rather than imposed mainly through prohibitions.
“Instead, it works through customary systems, meaning the communities themselves design the mechanisms,” he said.
Wallacea spans roughly 1,680 islands, and forms a transition zone between Asian and Australasian biota. It’s long been known as a living laboratory for the study of evolution.
Its marine ecosystems are part of the Pacific Coral Triangle and include coral reefs, deep-sea basins, mangroves and seagrass beds that support rare and threatened species. But these ecosystems remain under pressure from destructive fishing practices, including blast fishing and poison fishing, as well as the capture of protected species such as sea turtles.
During filming, director Sam August Himmawan said the crew unexpectedly witnessed blast fishing while interviewing the leader of a fishers’ group. The explosion happened about 200 meters (660 feet) away, he said, underscoring how persistent destructive fishing remains even in areas where communities are trying to restore reefs and fisheries.
Sam said the incident also showed the social and economic pressures behind destructive fishing. According to him, some fishers said there was demand for very fresh fish from visitors from big cities, while others collected small fish from the blast because they had little else to eat.
The Wallacea Partnership Program II ran from 2020 to 2024 and focused on sustainable coastal resource management across seven priority marine corridors in the region.
Solor: Marine granaries and turtle protection
One of the first places featured in the film is Solor, one of many volcanic islands in East Nusa Tenggara province.
There, communities, with support from local foundation Yayasan Tanah Ile Boleng, have worked to reduce blast fishing while restoring and maintaining coral reefs as fish breeding grounds. They call these areas kebang lewa lolon, or “marine granaries.”
“What we chose was conservation, but based on local wisdom,” Vero Lamahoda, a Solor resident and director of Yayasan Tanah Ile Boleng, said in the documentary.
Village officials, customary leaders and religious institutions jointly discussed where the marine granaries would be located, who would manage them, how they would be managed, and what sanctions would apply to anyone damaging them.
The communities also established turtle hatcheries so the protected animals would no longer be hunted and consumed. Mus, a local initiator of the effort, independently patrols nesting areas and educates fishers not to catch turtles, whether intentionally or as bycatch.
Wabula: Customary law and marine protection
In Southeast Sulawesi province, the film focuses on Wabula, a village in Buton district where customary marine governance remains central to coastal resource management.
Wabula is part of the Wabula Key Biodiversity Area, or KBA, which Burung Indonesia and other organisations have supported through a program to strengthen small-scale fisheries management based on customary institutions.
The program sought to provide data on fisheries resources, strengthen the capacity of Wabula’s Indigenous customary community, and support local policy for village-based marine resource management.
The customary system is known as Kaombo, in which communities regulate access to marine areas, including coral reefs, seagrass beds and mangrove forests. These function as spawning, nursery and feeding grounds for marine species, and have long been designated by Wabula’s customary community as traditionally protected areas.
According to the documentary, the communities here have established boundaries for marine resource use that cannot be crossed. Violators can be subject to the customary Kaombo rule, including a fine of 5 million rupiah (about US$290).
The documentary also refers to a ritual known as Kaleo Leo, for when suspected violators deny responsibility. In such cases, they are dunked into the sea, and whoever surfaces first is considered the offender.
Tely Dasaluti, head of the Indigenous peoples and local communities working team at Indonesia’s Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries, said formally recognised Indigenous communities have the right to act against illegal fishing in their customary marine territories.
“Violations categorised under customary law will be resolved through customary mechanisms,” she said.
A community monitoring group helps guard Wabula’s marine resource areas, with support from the NGO Destructive Fishing Watch Indonesia. The group also records biodiversity conditions to build a local data bank, giving the community a clearer profile of the ecosystems it manages.
Langkai and Lanjukang: Closing octopus grounds
In South Sulawesi province, the documentary follows communities on Langkai and Lanjukang islands, where fishers have adopted a periodic closure system for octopus fishing with support from the NGO Yayasan Konservasi Laut Indonesia.
Under the system, communities temporarily close parts of their octopus fishing grounds for around three months, giving octopus populations and reef ecosystems time to recover. When the areas reopen, fishers harvest only adult octopi.
The system helps maintain octopus stocks while also improving coral reef conditions during closure periods, according to proponents.
Tely said similar open-and-close systems are found in many coastal communities, particularly throughout the Wallacea region and Papua.
“We believe all Indigenous communities already practice conservation systems. Their knowledge is passed down through generations. They already know which species should be closed off, and which locations should be closed temporarily so fish populations can recover,” she said. “This pattern exists to protect their resources because they want them to continue across generations.”
The South Sulawesi initiative also shows how community conservation can be tied to livelihoods and markets. By improving the management of octopus fisheries, communities can protect the resource base they depend on while strengthening the value of their catch.
Banggai: Mangroves, crabs and women’s livelihoods
In Central Sulawesi province’s Banggai Islands, the film highlights the role of mangroves in sustaining both biodiversity and local livelihoods.
In the islands’ Lipu Akat, designated a “tourism village,” communities have begun protecting mangrove forests because of their importance as habitat for mangrove crabs, a key source of income for local fishers.
At first, villagers viewed mangroves mainly as a source of wood and as crab-harvesting areas. But declining crab populations changed how they saw the forests. Communities began replanting mangroves and restoring degraded coastal ecosystems.
According to the documentary, each community member plants 10-20 mangrove seedlings a day.
To protect crab populations, fishers have also committed not to catch juveniles or egg-bearing crabs, allowing them to mature and reproduce before harvesting them as adults.
Women in Lipu Akat working group have developed another use for mangroves: producing dishwashing soap from mangrove leaves, which are valued locally for their antibacterial properties.
Sam said the change in mindset over mangroves shows how conservation can protect local livelihoods. Mangrove trees here were once cut down for housing and other uses, he said, but villagers later began protecting them after recognising their importance to crab populations.
“If mangroves disappear, then the crabs will disappear too,” Sam said. “The economic multiplier effect is enormous.”
Beyond the film
The initiatives highlighted in Jejak Wallacea also point to a wider policy question: how community-managed marine areas governed through customary or local systems can be recognised and supported by the state.
The fisheries ministry’s Tely said Indonesia’s coastal communities are not all the same. Under the 2014 law on coastal and small island management, she said, the broad category is coastal communities, but within it are Indigenous, local and traditional communities.
For Indigenous communities, formal recognition remains important. Tely said communities can propose that their customary marine territories be included in state zoning plans.
She said the government is trying to ensure local wisdom systems such as sasi in the Maluku islands and ombo in Buton — both forms of fishing closures similar to Kaombo — are written into regional regulations so they’re not lost and can protect resources for future generations.
Tely pointed to an overlap between these traditionally managed spaces and the concept of “other effective area-based conservation measures,” or OECMs. These are geographically defined areas outside formal protected areas that deliver long-term biodiversity conservation even when conservation is not their primary objective.
“OECMs should exist outside formal conservation areas, outside areas managed under conventional conservation schemes, but still produce conservation outcomes even though conservation is not necessarily their primary objective,” Tely said.
The community-managed areas featured in the film have not necessarily been formally recognised as OECMs, but they show why such recognition is increasingly relevant in Indonesia, where many important marine habitats fall outside the network of formal marine protected areas.
A paper by Burung Indonesia researchers on the Wallacea Partnership Program II makes the case that community-based conservation may be especially suitable in areas not yet covered by formal MPAs.
“For areas that have not been covered by a formal MPA network, the community-based conservation approach may become the most suitable approach in conserving biodiversity,” the researchers wrote.
The paper noted that the wider Wallacea program had positive impacts on at least seven key marine species. These include the Banggai cardinalfish (Pterapogon kauderni), green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas), hawksbill turtle (Eretmochelys imbricata), pelagic thresher shark (Alopias pelagicus) and dugong (Dugong dugon).
Not all of those outcomes came from the communities featured in the film. But they show the wider conservation results of the program behind the documentary.
In South Sulawesi, the program helped increase community-led seminatural turtle hatcheries, protecting 41 green turtle nests in Langkai and Lanjukang islands. It also reduced sea turtle bycatch and released 3,943 sea turtle hatchlings in South Sulawesi.
For the pelagic thresher shark, the wider program reduced the number of individual thresher sharks captured by fishers from 233 at the start of the project to 55 by the end.
Although the initiatives have shown positive results, Burung Indonesia said significant challenges remain. The organisation has emphasised the importance of integrating community-based conservation models into national and regional government policies so local initiatives can be identified, supported and sustained beyond the program’s funding period.
“The next challenge is how to ensure community-based conservation initiatives are adopted more widely, connected to government programs and policies, remain sustainable, and are strengthened through collaboration,” said Wahyu Teguh Prawira, Burung Indonesia’s marine specialist and team leader for the Wallacea Partnership Program II.
This story was published with permission from Mongabay.com.
