Cross the border at Tijuana and Mexico hits you like a burst of distilled chaos. Ensenada has all the features of a lively fishing port anywhere, with a big dash of Mexican fun thrown-in.

Head south past El Rosario and the highway will keep you away from both the Pacific and The Gulf of California, but fishing communities dot coastal Baja on both sides–within reach of those who are curious enough to manage their fuel supply in order to get there.

The Road to Cabo Pulmo

Continue through the magnificent, hard-scrabble desert landscape and eventually, you will find yourself in Southern Baja–Baja California Sur. The coast around Bahia Concepcion presents frame after frame of picture perfect, red vs. blue, desert and ocean view, and the waters of the Gulf provide refuge to a multitude of species great and small. Loreto embraces the sea, a picturesque town with a strong history of fishing and a few hours later, the gritty but deceptively sophisticated port town of LaPaz appears. Soon after that, you’re heading to the very southern tip of the peninsula.

Cabo Pulmo is a tiny place. Barely a village, partway along a dirt road that hugs the coast between La Ribera and Punta Gorda where the Pacific Ocean becomes the Gulf of California, but it is host to Cabo Pulmo National Park, a 71 square kilometer Marine Protected Area (MPA) and UNESCO World Heritage Site that has seen the ocean biomass in the area stage a massive recovery. It is also where I met Professor Octavio Aburto.

Dive operators dominate the main dirt street where it meanders towards the beach and turns into sand. An occasional bar, restaurant or souvenir store can be found. A small but organized interpretive center with an open-air seminar area is located about half a kilometer away on the way into the village.

Five Hundred Percent

I was privileged to see a presentation by Professor Aburto at that seminar area on one of my first nights in Cabo Pulmo, an event, incidentally where I found myself, in an audience comprised of visitors and locals, sitting next to Marcus Eriksen, co-founder of 5 Gyres. The professor gave a detailed presentation about how successful the park has been. The audience watched with interest, the questions after the presentation were pertinent, well-informed. Visitors and locals alike engaged with the data concerning the park’s progress.

The picture that Octavio presented is one of optimism based upon the astonishing success of the recovery at Cabo Pulmo and the conviction that the lessons learned there can be transferred elsewhere.

Born in Mexico City, Octavio moved to LaPaz at seventeen where he later completed a master’s degree and became a professor at the university there. A Ph.D. at University of California San Diego followed and he is now a professor at the university’s Scripps Institute of Oceanography, Director of the Gulf of California Marine Program, a National Geographic explorer and a member of the International League of Conservation Photographers. He was also one of the team responsible for the creation of the national marine park encompassing the Revillagigedo archipelago off the coast of Mexico south of Baja.

He has been diving and conducting research in the area of Cabo Pulmo since the nineties and the transformation he has observed is significant:

“… in the nineties when we used to come here, we used to see half of the species that now you can see… so in just two decades the biodiversity of this place has doubled, and also the biomass… the number of fish and size of the fish, has increased in the order of 500%.”

Just Transition

There is a phrase in common use in social science right now–just transition. It’s an important idea pointing to the need to provide just-meaning fair-and equitable solutions for people whose livelihoods are put in jeopardy by the needs of a changing world–people put out of work due to a decline in the use of fossil fuels for instance.

In Cabo Pulmo it’s like they took that phrase and read it like you would read a Nike advertisement. The word ‘just’ used in its alternate meaning as in ‘just get on with it’, ‘transition’ toggled from noun to verb.

The village of Cabo Pulmo was always a fishing community. The rocky coast gives way to a beach that is relatively easy to access, and the ocean is a kind of vivid, deep, almost sapphire blue. Fragile, rocky reefs estimated to be 20,000 years old extend along the ocean floor and schools of bigeye trevally congregate in large numbers almost asking to be gathered-up in nets. Biodiverse at every scale, its position making it a place where particular coastal and pelagic species could be relied upon to visit.

A site of natural abundance then, but one that was relatively easy to break, and break it did–by the time the nineties rolled-around, locals who could remember the huge abundance of their youth were shocked to realize that the area had been all but fished-out.

It’s important to grasp that this realization didn’t come from outsiders but from the villagers themselves. Their community was dying, and they knew it.

This was the beginning: In a situation reminiscent of what we saw in Lamlash Bay in Scotland-the site of another small but successful community-driven marine protected area (MPA)–it was the locals that rang the alarm bell.

The village of Cabo Pulmo was always a fishing community. The rocky coast gives way to a beach that is relatively easy to access, and the ocean is a kind of vivid, deep, almost sapphire blue. Fragile, rocky reefs estimated to be 20,000 years old extend along the ocean floor and schools of bigeye trevally congregate in large numbers almost asking to be gathered-up in nets. 

The second thing that happened was that one local in particular took a stand. Maria Castro, a matriarch of a prominent local family had long been fascinated by the life that teemed below the surface of the waters outside her door. Way before diving masks were readily available in the area, she had one of the men make her a wooden viewing scope that she could look through to observe the reef. Years later she became the voice of change for the community, providing a vision for the future of the village focused on diving and tourism, with a marine protected area to ensure that there was still something in the waters off Cabo Pulmo to see.

A New Baseline

The marine park was created in 1995 at the behest of the local community, and, thanks to the movement created by Maria Castro everyone there agreed to switch the entire economy of the village from fishing to diving. It was a big risk but one that paid off. Over the next 20 years the fish returned. Now bigeye trevally gather in Cabo Pulmo in spectacular numbers to enact their frenetic mating rituals once again, and the fish have brought back the predators. Bull Sharks are a reliable sight in Cabo Pulmo once more–this is good news for the habitat and the economy. Healthy predators are a sign of a healthy ecosystem, and, divers love sharks. This, along with the park’s other attractions has allowed the whole scheme to become a tremendous success.

The role of the kind of geospecifc measures that marine parks offer in the protection of migratory pelagic (deep water traversing) species like sharks is a matter still under intense study. Measures of this kind seem to provide some substantial help to these species depending on whether the MPA is sited in such a way that it protects a habitat that is important to them–e.g. a feeding ground or nursery area–or if the MPA is large enough to cover all or substantially all of the species’ migratory pathways.

At Cabo Pulmo, the sharks come for the same reason that the fishermen once did. In Octavio’s words “All these big animals like sharks, that are the top predators in this ecosystem, they have enough food to maintain themselves, and that is a very good sign of a healthy reef.”

For the village and the people who live there, the focus now is very much on diving, diving tourism and the national marine park that make the area such an attraction. It’s difficult to overstate how low-key and rustic the village of Cabo Pulmo is, but most of what it does have is focused on those three things.

There is still fishing in the area. Head to the beach in the morning and you’ll see four or five dive boats preparing to enter the water. You’ll see a fishing boat or two as well. Baja in general is a top sport-fishing destination by any standard–fishing occurs outside the park, and while I was there, I did hear some people speculating about boats on the water at night in areas that are within the park and not typically dive sites. The success seen here has been the result of a locally supported park-wide ban on fishing, however.

I asked Professor Aburto if this was a key element of the park’s success and he told me that in his view it was.

“We believe the main reason is [that it is] a no-take situation.”

There are geological factors that have likely helped. A canyon in the sea floor in the vicinity creates an ocean upwelling that could make the reef at Cabo Pulmo particularly suited to abundance and perhaps therefore recovery. Having said that, the difference between Cabo Pulmo and other MPAs in the region that are not strict no-take zones is striking.

“We have compared [Cabo Pulmo] [biomass] values with other MPAs… and [found] that other MPAs have… far less biomass… and the reason is that the other marine protected areas are multi-use… that means that the Mexican government allows [people] to fish in these other marine protected areas.”

As such, Cabo Pulmo is becoming a baseline of sorts, even though the actual historical baseline–what full abundance actually looks like-is and perhaps always will be unknown.

For the village and the people who live there, the focus now is very much on diving, diving tourism and the national marine park that make the area such an attraction.

“This level of biomass is an indicator that this area has recovered [but] we don’t have a baseline, we don’t know… the current capacity of Cabo Pulmo.”

As is often the case, there are multiple players in the background. There are partnerships and participation from all sectors–locals, scientists, government and NGOs

“There is a mix of collaborations that make possible to have this park in this way.”

But Professor Aburto is quick to point-out the role that local pride plays in keeping everything going in the right direction.

“It’s very important to create the pride and the connection with what used to be the conditions here.”

A visit to the village by renowned marine biologist and founder of Mission Blue, Sylvia Earle also helped to give the MPA, the village and it’s people a boost during a visit she made to the Gulf of California–an area that has been designated a Mission Blue Hope Spot.

Transferable Lessons

In general Professor Aburto is supportive of strict controls on fishing. He is a passionate supporter of the 30% by 2030 proposal that has been proposed as a strategy to build upon the 10% by 2020 target adopted by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and despairs at his own country’s lack of commitment to the effective management of commercial fisheries, including the forage fish reduction fishery that turns sardines into fish meal and oil.

In response to a question about what concerns him most, he answers “For sure industrial fisheries… [the] sardine fishery that [is] exploiting a huge amount of sardine… just to obtain fish meal and fish oil. And in that transformation, they [lose] 60 or 70% of the total [catch] volume.”

“And then you have the shrimp fishery that destroys many habitats, and they have a huge bycatch… there are very few boats… but the Mexican government until now, they have been subsidizing these kinds of industries.”

“There is no real benefit for the nation. Some very few hands receive the economic benefits of this massive destruction…. And of course, the cost of this destruction is charged to the society in general.”

He also laments a global supply chain that masks widespread ecological crises from those with the power to do something about it.

We discuss tuna ranching, a technique where wild tuna are captured and put in pens to be fattened up with fish meal and are then slaughtered for use in sushi bars where this kind of fatty tuna is in high demand.

“You can kill this Tuna is a way that the meat will be preserved, and that tuna is put in less than three hours in a plane, and [flown] across the world… [It arrives] at three or four am… [then] somebody at the fish market picks it up… and delivers it to a restaurant… ”

Octavio sees this kind of supply chain trickery as desensitizing.

“So, you as a citizen, you are not feeling that this planet is falling apart, yes?

As for MPAs, he would like to see the Cabo Pulmo example replicated elsewhere.

“I am convinced, and I am working very hard to use Cabo Pulmo to inspire other communities to follow [a similar formula].”

“I think the diving industry should understand that this could be a great model for coastal development, but the diving community [in Mexico]… it has a tiny voice and [their] political power is also very small. “

“I think there should be efforts [by the] diving industry to request or to push for developments like Cabo Pulmo where you don’t destroy nature in order to get more economic benefits.”

He also acknowledges that the Cabo Pulmo story looks good now but is far from over, and there are limits to the current model.

The first limiting factor is that there are only so many viable dive sites from a commercial perspective. Dive operators need to amaze their customers in order to keep them coming back and to secure the reputation of their area as a diving destination worth traveling to. The park itself is quite small and only 35% of it is reef. This means that the number of viable dive sites is few. Also, there are good reasons from both an environmental and a commercial standpoint to limit the number of divers on any one dive site at any time. Diving like any human activity has an environmental impact, crowding a site out can exacerbate the problem, and can scare away important species. Also, divers hope to see something apart from other divers when they go diving.

“I am working very hard to use Cabo Pulmo to inspire other communities to follow [a similar formula]… I think the diving industry should understand that this could be a great model for coastal development… “

These factors will combine to limit the growth of diving in Cabo Pulmo at some point. Further, the park’s popularity is attracting new dive operators to the village, creating competition that only increases pressure. Octavio hopes that there will be a move to give the locals a more focused voice in the park’s future and that this will be part of the remedy.

“As you can see there is a boat here… over there… why? Because everybody wants to dive here… but again, Cabo Pulmo is very tiny, and if this [growth] reaches a point where we cannot control [it]… the same thing that saved the reef–diving–could be the same thing that destroys [it] again.”

“It’s basically another version of the tragedy of the commons, yes? In fisheries there is a race for the fish. In this case there could be the race for the divers, no?”

“What I think we should do is to start planning the social aspect of the community, so rather than people competing for the divers maybe they can cooperate to [shape] a quality experience [to bring] more economic benefits without [increasing] the services.”

We could also speculate that the more MPAs there are that exist along the same economic lines as Cabo Pulmo, the more the tourist pressure could be spread around. Diving has an environmental impact, but Cabo Pulmo has shown that this impact can be sustained as the exclusive economic driver for a local community during a period of rapid recovery in terms of the area’s biomass–an impressive net gain. Applying the same model to more areas would create new pressures but might be worth it on balance.

Driven to Protect

These days, Octavio is turning his focus to mangrove forests and other coastal habitats that provide nursery environments for many of the species that we need to see repopulating reefs and oceans.

Mangrove in the tropics and subtopics and other coastal plant species such as kelp in temperate areas are under intense pressure from multiple factors-particularly human development along the shoreline,–are a very fragile part of the ecosystem and play an important role in the lifecycle of many marine species. Juvenile coastal and pelagic species often spend the first year or two of their lives in these environments before migrating to deeper waters, so the health of one is crucial to the health of the other.

And, while affected by global warming, they can also play a key role in reducing it if we look after them. One hectare of mangrove sequesters on average the equivalent of 6 to 8 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Describing this new work, Octavio describes an environment where juvenile pelagic species can be seen darting around the submerged floor of the forest and where sampling just one meter down into the sediment is like traveling back a thousand years. It is also an environment that in Mexico is being destroyed at a rate of 3-5% per year.

Practiced in using underwater photography to illustrate his work, Octavio is now including the use of drones to map coastal mangrove from the air.

Overall, the picture that Professor Aburto presents is one where the fight is on, but the forces for conservation, for ensuring that habitats remain viable, for ensuring that biomass levels return to historical levels can win, even while supporting economic prosperity for local people.

He is a driven man. Passionate. Serious. Eloquent. And he knows how big the challenge is. But he’s seen protection work, and now he wants to see a similar change in 30% of the world’s oceans, inspired in part by the success he has measured in terms of tons of biomass per hectare in one part of the Gulf of California.