Conservation impacts, hidden actions & insights for adaptive management from a randomized controlled trial of a marine pay-to-release program

Presentation given at the Society for Conservation Biology International Congress for Conservation Biology 2025.
Large, long-lived marine animals (‘marine megafauna’) are amongst the world’s most threatened taxa, primarily due to overfishing. Small-scale fisheries (SSFs), which are ubiquitous throughout tropical coastal waters in biodiverse ocean reasons, are a significant source of marine megafauna mortality and also characterised by high household reliance on fisheries, where all catches have economic or subsistence value. Therefore, efforts to conserve marine megafauna in SSFs create direct trade-offs between conservation and human wellbeing, with coastal communities often facing inequitable burdens of the costs of conservation. Incentive-based approaches (e.g., paying resource users to engage in conservation) offer a promising yet untested approach for addressing this trade-off in SSFs, and delivering positive outcomes for nature and people. Here we present a design process, preliminary results and lessons learned from the world's first randomised control trial of a pay-to-release scheme for Critically Endangered marine megafauna in small-scale fisheries, which aimed to deliver biodiversity and wellbeing outcomes. Our talk will demonstrate both the promise and pitfalls of incentive-based conservation programs, and offer scalable methods and approaches for designing and testing nature- and people-positive marine conservation interventions elsewhere.