Background

The coastline of Mumbai stands at the precarious nexus of urban expansion and marine degradation, whereby decades of rampant urbanization have pushed vital ecosystems towards the brink of collapse. It is reported that if authorities do not address the city’s carbon emissions, the it’s coastline could face the greatest risk of submergence by 2050. Fishing communities along the coast of Mumbai have been impacted significantly by the combined historical and modern-day effects of urbanization, particularly in the case of the Koli people, the indigenous fishing people of the coastline who have stewarded these waters for generations, and who witness the degradation of the conditions that their ancestors thrived upon. The traditional livelihoods based upon fishing have been exposed to pressures from urbanization and myriad forms of habitat destruction, whereby the city has lost approximately 40 percent of its mangroves from 1991-2001, or about 9,000 acres of important marine nursery habitat permanently covered by concrete and urban expansion.

Mumbai's coastal communities and fishing-dependent families have also lost a substantial portion of their income over the years as disruption from coastal development projects has leveled entire ecosystems. Traditional artisanal fishers find themselves caught between the rapid expansion of large-scale commercial trawling activities and the shrinking surface of fishing areas, which are contaminated by industrial spills and urban waste.

Fishing communities, despite having generations of indigenous and scientific knowledge of coastal conservation and the management of fisheries, have little opportunity for meaningful participation in formal environmental decision-making processes. As a result, there are no conceivable collaborations taking place that ultimately combine the power of traditional ecological knowledge and philosophies around conservation with the conservation proxy developed from responsible, shoreside business practice. Due to the scarcity of different youth engagement programs to help protect marine biodiversity, valuable community-based conservation knowledge can be disjointed from larger environmental movements, allowing coastal environments to remain vulnerable to further degradation.

Tide Turners wishes to initiate ripples of change that will take a multi-faceted approach through awareness campaigns, community walks, and systematic forms of knowledge sharing and distribution through a multimedia project.