Messages from the Field

The Coastal Zone is very rich in environmental resources such as lagoon fisheries, mangrove swamps, shrub forests, brackish wetlands with particular biodiversity, agricultural land and dynamic beach environment, etc.

Coastal resources play an important role in the social and economic well being of the people in terms of livelihood, economic output and food production.

However, these ecosystems are also extremely susceptible to degradation; they are fragile and highly vulnerable to many dynamic processes.

The combination of these processes and unsustainable extractive practices has resulted in a number of critical environmental and social issues in the coastal water bodies of Sri Lanka.

One of the major problems is competing water interests, in particular conflicts between lagoon fisheries and agricultural stakeholders.

As a policy response to the above situation, the Coast Conservation Department of Sri Lanka initially placed great emphasis on adopting more technically oriented strategies, especially to control lagoon outlets.

With the realization of increasing capital expenditures on these engineering solutions, with a low level of positive results, the Coast Conservation Department shifted its policy approach from engineering solutions to Integrated Coastal Resources Management: strengthening institutional, legal and management capacities, and devolving responsibilities to stakeholders to manage their own ecosystems.

This policy has been implemented through Special Area Management Projects.

This is an attempt at capacity building and empowerment at the grass roots level of rural communities by engineers & planners of the Coast Conservation Department, most of whom were trained at IHE since 1964.

The following true story is one example of the experiences of a team of professionals who adopted a soft solution to resolve user conflicts by applying the transfer of knowledge gained from IHE training programs.

..read further in the PDF file..