Success Stories
Thank you for making a big difference.
“We need to empower fishermen to use their local knowledge and expertise to protect and restore local fisheries in order to support livelihoods for current and future generations.”
— Ashley Sprague, CPAWS NS
Project Profile
This project has been fully funded by LUSH Fresh Handmade Cosmetics and individual donors.
Nova Scotia is the only Canadian province without a coastal Marine Protected Area (MPA). With increasing threats of overfishing, industrial development, pollution and climate change, we urgently need to take steps to protect the productive waters around the province. Through collaboration with fishermen and government, our marine program has made significant progress to advance near-shore protected area planning in Nova Scotia.
This project required face-to-face meetings with fishermen and other stakeholders in order to share information, work through competing interests and uses and develop a common conservation vision for the area.
The generous funding by LUSH Cosmetics was used to cover travel costs for community visits including rental car, gas, accommodation and food. It also covered the cost of renting meeting space, long distance phone and postal charges for mailing out information to fishermen. $5000 covered at least 2-3 multiday trips to each of the two focal communities which has allowed us to make significant progress in the development of community conservation plans.
Our community-based approach has led to strong, trusting relationships with community members and a solid understanding of current and historical local fisheries, ecosystem threats and community dynamics. We are now further engaging fishermen and other stakeholders to identify conservation priorities and develop conservation plans to protect and restore key habitats and local fisheries, which will ensure resources will be available to support livelihoods for future generations.
Thanks to your help, this project has advanced community conservation planning, influence decisions made by government and helped move these sites toward protection more quickly.
The mission of CPAWS-NS is to keep Nova Scotia wild. We protect, conserve, and restore biodiversity. We work towards collaborative and solution-orientated results to ensure the beauty and life-giving forces of wilderness persist into the future.
