| Summary: | Wetland Management Plan, a Hope for Sustainable Artisanal Fisheries in Protected Areas (PA)?. As Africa is home to a wide variety of ecosystems with high endemic biodiversity, the creation and management of protected areas (PA) is a widely used means for their conservation. And yet the inventory indicates that many factors cause the continued degradation of these spaces and their biodiversity which induce national and international important supports and expensive measures whose effectiveness is questionable. In addition, most of these PA have wetlands that often contribute significantly to their biodiversity and ecosystem services. Thus, the fishery resources are being exploited more and more intensively by fishermen populations that have often not been the subject of any follow-up or any accompaniment on the part of the managers who focus mainly on the forest resource, its large terrestrial fauna and its poaching. And yet, for a sustainable conservation of biodiversity, it is necessary to organize and supervise this world of artisanal fishing that lives in or around the PA. During various missions to assess the importance of fishermen's interactions with the sustainable management of PA in Central Africa, we met all the stakeholders in these PA with a particular attention to their wetlands and the fishermen with which we did the state of the premises. Almost in all cases, we have been struck by the negative or even aggressive attitude of fishermen towards their protected areas and the local authorities that manage them, obviously in an unsustainable way. From the outset, the finding is a lack of knowledge of the aquatic biodiversity of PA, most of which do not even have a taxonomic list of fish species that are often exploited or over-exploited. As for the number of fishermen likely to fish in the PA, well above the number of poachers otherwise inventoried, it is rarely known. How to properly manage the biodiversity and ecosystem services of a PA without knowing the aquatic species and their interactions with terrestrial flora and fauna and ignoring the population that exploits them? Therefore, during many participatory meetings, in the form of workshops of all stakeholders, we have tried to develop a Master Plan for Development and Sustainable Management of the Wetlands, integrated in the Global Plan of the protected area when it exists, which is far from being the general case. The most sustained and significant efforts have resulted in a wetlands master plan, officially endorsed by all stakeholders. In each case, the stakeholders defined their general and specific objectives, developed an action plan in 4 points: return to a sustainable exploitation aiming at maximum sustainable yield, reinforce the operational capacities of the co-management bodies, valorize the products through better conservation, processing and marketing and diversifying the livelihoods of artisanal fishermen by promoting alternative activities such as agro-fish farming. This participatory bottom-up strategy better integrates these actors in the field into a sustainable exploitation and aims to better reinforce the maintenance of these protected areas for present and future generations. For a true sustainable conservation of the PA, it is essential that the local and national authorities, the regional organizations (COMIFAC, etc.) and the Technical and Financial Partners allow to really and concretely increase the participation of the rural populations bordering and in particular the fishermen in the planning and sustainable management of the wetlands they use to contribute to their well-being, while moving towards the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.
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