Oracabessa Bay Fish Sanctuary — Jamaican Fishers' Co-Managed Reef Recovery, 470% Fish Biomass Growth in a Decade

Jamaica's north-coast reefs suffered decades of overfishing and coral decline before a small group of Oracabessa fishers partnered with the GoldenEye Foundation in 2011 to declare a no-take fish sanctuary, now co-managed on a 50/50 fisher–trust board by the Oracabessa Bay Marine Trust.

The sanctuary aims to rebuild fish biomass and reef health through no-take protection, coral gardening and sea-turtle conservation, while keeping local fishers as co-managers rather than excluding them.

Since 2013 the Trust has run a coral gardening programme growing coral fragments in underwater nurseries and out-planting them onto reef-enhancement structures, alongside a sea-turtle hatchery programme, and the co-management model has since been extended to four further north-coast sites with US State Department and GEF/UNDP support.

Jamaica's National Environment and Planning Agency recorded herbivorous fish biomass rising from 1,192 g/100m² in 2013 to 6,792 g/100m² in 2020, roughly a 470% increase, alongside about 2,500 coral fragments grown and 500 out-planted, and more than 220,000 sea-turtle hatchlings released since inception.

Independent reporting cautions the recovery is not risk-free: pollution, microplastics, bleaching and algae overgrowth remain regional pressures, and tension persists between the no-take model and traditional parrotfish harvesting that fishers value even though parrotfish grazing supports reef health.