Aruna Implements Sustainable Fisheries with a Community Approach

Aruna started as a startup with a big dream—the dream to make Indonesia’s the global maritime axis of the future. This dream was then molded to become Aruna’s main vision. In the beginning, there were a lot of obstacles and challenges on the way, including where the founders of Aruna—one of them being Utari Octavianty, who comes from a fishing family—chose the sustainable fisheries approach as the path towards realizing their dream.

The environment-first mindset of sustainable fisheries seems perfect when considering the empowerment of fishers and the implementation of the blue economy. Coming from remote coastal areas, the founders of Aruna fully understand that in order to make a big impact, one must start small.

Aruna Initiated Concrete Steps to Implement Sustainable Fishery

Local Heroes are Aruna’s field team members that come from local coastal communities where their Aruna Hubs are located. This conscious effort to work directly with the locals are not without reason, since they can be the agent of change to encourage local fishers to apply sustainable fisheries—especially since the locals understand best which methods fit their region’s requirements.

Alfian Hidayat, the Community Development team member for the Surabaya region also says that the most important value that all of Nakama Aruna must remember well is “Making Impact”, so that every day, they would actively contribute to a better tomorrow. In applying “Making Impact” for sustainable fisheries, 3 key ideas come to mind:

• Apply sustainable fisheries practices, starting with small things,
• Be a pioneer of change, so that others can follow in your footsteps,
• Be consistent and never give up, for changes take time and great amount of effort.

Aruna’s mission to make the sea a better livelihood for all now has borne fruit. Thanks to the consistent effort to involve coastal communities to make meaningful changes, they too, can finally reap the rewards of consistent application of sustainable fisheries.

Tangible impacts that are now widely felt by coastal community members in various regions include:

• The increase of their knowledge, regarding not only catching methods but also marine and implementation of technology,
• The increase in quality of catches, as well as their economic welfare,
• Local catches that now reach global markets—directly competing with big-scale industry standards.
• More coastal workforce are now involved in the fisheries industry,
• Improvement in the processing of seafood commodities that increases their value, as well as reducing waste and creating direct sales channels to seafood suppliers.

Other than the impacts mentioned above, there are still other benefits to the implementation of the community-based sustainable fisheries approach that are now felt by everyone. Despite that, Aruna still continues to work hard to improve the fisheries industry that will continue to give visible, real impacts.