Small-scale fisheries (SSF) play a crucial role in the EU from a biological, economic and social perspective. Even though they account for 76% of all fishing vessels in the EU and 81% in the Mediterranean Sea, fishing vessels below 12 meters are exempt from the obligation to carry a vessel monitoring system under the current Fisheries Control Regulation. Hence, it is difficult to know where, when and how much they fish. Small-scale fishers are extremely dependent on the health of the marine ecosystem and the abundance of the species they target. Lack of monitoring is thus a challenge to safeguarding long-term sustainability of fish stocks and of the entire sector itself, even more so when artisanal vessels compete with larger semi-industrial vessels on the same fishing grounds.
However, monitoring SSF cannot be a simple replication of the decades of experience with Large-Scale Fisheries monitoring. A bottom-up, more inclusive approach is needed to adjust to the specificities of SSF communities, empowering fishers to be actors of their own management for positive socio-economic and environmental impact. Further, SSF operators tend to be older than LSF, and traditionally less open to digital practices.
All of this was perfectly clear to CLS, a global company and a subsidiary of the French Space Agency (CNES) and CNP, a European investment firm. CLS has been operating as a value-added supplier of products and services to the fisheries sector, using satellite communication systems and earth observation data since 1990.
In 2017, CLS launched the development of NEMO, an affordable, a robust and simple Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) with long autonomy. With a compact and handy design, fitting to the smallest boats with no power onboard, NEMO was specifically conceived to adapt to the lifestyle and budget of SSF. Key enabling innovations include solar energy to power it, Near Field Communication for tamper-proof and secure removal, Galileo satellite navigation services (red button) to get high-accuracy positional data and support tracking and safety alert services, and an affordable hybrid satellite/cellular communication system. Mobile Apps for Fishers and a fisheries-monitoring web-app complete the end-to-end solution.
The initial idea of developing an affordable VMS to equip small boats was to make working conditions at sea safer and their practices more sustainable, while protecting fishing grounds from illegal fishing, a critical need raised by CLS customers in Africa and by the FAO in the Small-Scale Fisheries Guidelines issued in 2014.
When in October 2018 an EMFF-funded call for proposals was launched by EASME (now CINEA) to support demonstration projects based on innovative technologies, the time was ripe for CLS to pioneer a “co-design approach”, with a view to obtaining a product fully tested and approved by fishers when it entered the market.
This is pretty much the genesis of STARFISH 4.0, a demonstration project which run from December 2019 to November 2022, with an aim to test and deploy NEMO to SSF communities operating in the coastal areas of Greece and Mauritania. The overarching objective of the project was to refine the new product and services through user feedback facilitated by local partners (APC s.a. in Greece and ECR in Mauritania) and advance the new solution towards commercialisation before a new EU Fisheries Control Regulation might enter into force, which would make VMS and e-logbook mandatory for all EU fishing vessels, whatever their length.
We have to estimate and monitor fish stocks. It is necessary to have a system, a simple one, that can report the catches daily so we can control fish resources.
Niki Matzafleri, Regional Fisheries Department, Magnesia and Northern Sporades Islands
Through a bottom-up approach, 110 fishers took part in the project on a voluntary basis and tested the NEMO system over 24 months, and STARFISH 4.0 local partners collected their feedback regularly through interviews and workshops.
The fishers tested the robustness of the system, battery life, ease of use and accuracy of data. This helped refine the product and services with ancillary digital tools developed to improve the user experience.
At the onset of the project, CLS’s capitalisation strategy was assuming that the legislative train schedule of the EU Fisheries Control Regulation, and the subsequent implementing acts, would be consistent with the initial business plan, thus unlocking significant NEMO sales in EU Member States by the end of 2022. However, soon enough CLS revised its time-to-market strategy and scaled down NEMO’s commercial ambitions in the EU. Behind this decision was a strong resistance to change from the sector, which significantly slowed down the interinstitutional negotiations until May 2023. The project confirmed that the level of acceptance of tracking by artisanal fishers is very low: more than lack of familiarity with digital technology, this seems to be a cultural and social issue.
Therefore, the capitalisation strategy shifted to find additional EU-funded Innovation Actions to replicate the NEMO demonstration project in other EU Member States, to concentrate efforts on upgrading the fisheries monitoring centre component with AI-based insights and build synergies with traceability applications.
But somehow STARFISH 4.0 was bound to be a successful project. The extensive testing carried out during the project made it possible to improve general aspects of market readiness and contributed to closing export sales of the NEMO VMS and Web App services, in particular in Gabon in July 2021 and in Oman in March 2022. The EMFF grant gave STARFISH 4.0 very high visibility among influential stakeholders, thus providing NEMO with the necessary credibility for a new product to unlock sales with potential customers worldwide.
National fishing management authorities and fishers who ended up buying NEMO weren’t the only ones to recognise the value of STARFISH 4.0. The project won the WestMed 2021 Best Project Award in the category “Sustainable Fisheries, Aquaculture and Coastal Community Development”.
And the story doesn’t end here: together with other partners, CLS received a new grant under Horizon Europe to develop Fish-X, a project that integrates VMS and e-logbook app for SSF with electronic monitoring technologies, a cornerstone of the EU Common Fisheries Policy. Fish-X builds on STARFISH 4.0’s results in Greece and enhances the value of its data with advanced insights through machine-learning algorithms. Demonstrations of the NEMO VMS system are replicated with volunteer fishers in other EU Member States, such as Porugal and Croatia.
When asked what was key to STARFISH 4.0’s success, Sylvie Giraud from CLS highlighted:
“Uptake is faster with young generations and when technological solutions can also contribute to increasing fishing efficiency. Setting up an individual and at the same time collective incentive structure has tremendous potential for driving responsible fishing. NEMO value proposition is “Keep stock healthy and Prove your catch is legal”, highlighting VMS is a traceability-enabling technology. Change is not just about new systems, new requirements, new costs, but also about cultural change”
Useful links
STARFISH 4.0: improving the safety and sustainability of small-scale fisheries