At the Bluedots Living Lab in Milan, Finn van der Aar presented an idea still in development: helping small-scale fishers diversify into sustainable marine wildlife tourism. Her starting point is that fishers already hold much of what the work requires, from knowledge of local waters and weather to seamanship, maritime heritage and the boats themselves.
In this piece, she reflects on how those transferable skills could open new sources of income for Ireland’s inshore fishers, and on what she learned from the Italian tradition of pescaturismo.
By Finn van der Aar, Marine Scientist
Until this year, I had only presented work that was already underway or complete. The Bluedots Living Lab in Milan was different; I found myself standing before peers from across Europe, presenting a project that was still mostly an idea.
The question I was proposing was relatively simple: what if we could build structured pathways for small-scale fishers to diversify, either partially or fully, into sustainable marine wildlife tourism?
It was a question that had been slowly percolating in my mind. Over the past 15 years, I have worked alongside small-scale inshore fishers, coastal communities and marine tourism operators, seeing first-hand how tourism, marine research and conservation can work together.
One of the things that struck me – both during my time working with inshore fisheries fora, and while writing about sustainable wildlife tourism in Iceland – was just how many skills fishers already have that could be relevant to marine wildlife tourism: generational ecological knowledge, navigation and seamanship, an understanding of weather and ocean conditions, knowledge of their local waters, storytelling and maritime heritage, and often the boats and infrastructure to operate from.
Of course, that doesn’t mean someone can simply move from fishing into tourism overnight, or that they’d necessarily want to either. There are new skills to learn, from working with visitors and marketing to different regulatory requirements, business planning and understanding how to operate responsibly around marine wildlife. But my interest was piqued even further when I considered similar retraining initiatives with inshore fishers for the offshore renewables sector.
The Living Lab in Milan allowed me to put these ideas in front of people actually working in sustainable marine tourism and to get feedback while they were still being developed. It was nerve-racking, but I’m glad I took the plunge. Perhaps the most interesting thing I took away from Milan was an idea I hadn’t been considering at all: pescaturismo.
Learning about the long-established Italian tradition of combining fishing with tourism, and meeting pescaturismo fisher-operators, gave me another way of looking at the question. Perhaps diversification didn’t always have to mean leaving fishing behind. Could there be opportunities for Irish inshore fishers to develop additional sources of income that remain connected to the work, knowledge and maritime heritage they already have, based on the Italian model? That could mean developing an Irish approach to pescaturismo, adapted to our own coastal communities, fisheries and regulatory context. It could also sit alongside marine wildlife tourism and other forms of sustainable marine tourism, creating a broader range of options rather than a single pathway for communities to follow.
Of course, any such transition would need to be developed carefully, taking account of animal welfare, environmental sustainability, local and EU regulations, market capacity and the needs of the communities themselves. The aim isn’t simply to create more tourism, but to explore whether tourism can become one part of a more resilient coastal economy.
That question has now followed me home from Milan and into my PhD at Atlantic Technological University in Sligo, where I am exploring how sustainable marine wildlife tourism can support conservation, scientific research and more resilient coastal livelihoods.