How to Fish: Combining Indigenous, Traditional and Scientific Fishery Advisories to Preserve Marine Provisioning Ecosystem Services of Odisha, India

Many marine fishing villages in India are transitioning into centres of industrialised fishing where the marine fishers are forced to choose between the use of indigenous and traditional knowledge (ITK; perceived to be outdated, resulting in low turnovers) and the use of accurate scientific advisories (Marine Fishery Advisories; MFAs) disseminated by ESSO-INCOIS (limited by a lack of awareness or practice) to locate potential fishing zones (PFZs) in the open sea. The present investigation provides a ground-level assessment of the existing methods of ITK across 14 fish landing centres (FLCs) in Odisha towards delineating the PFZ by non-motorised (NM) and motorised (MR) crafts fishers of 163 respondents in total. The relative advantages and limitations of the ITK versus the MFA approaches as reflected in the net profits of marine fishers across NM and MR crafts were evaluated through various statistical techniques, for example, correlation matrix, Kruskal–Wallis test, etc. The investigation revealed that a combination of the two approaches significantly correlated with an increase in the profits, providing opportunities to plan for the preservation of the provisioning ecosystem services for marine fish by conforming to stock preservation and diversification through the traditional knowledge of the spawning seasons and the use of MFAs to plan “non-intrusive” routes/windows for fishing with the enhancement of modern technology. The study illustrates that the multiple co-benefits of the ITK + MFA method to delineate PFZs can be useful to achieve the targets of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14b, promote responsible consumption, and enhance health through sustainable human–environment relationships on a long-term basis.