Climate change will have a wide range of impacts on fisheries, other human uses of marine systems, and the coastal communities that depend on the ocean for their livelihoods. This presentation focuses on small-scale fisheries, providing a review of the current state of knowledge on social and economic impacts of...
Transdisciplinary approaches and innovative combinations of social and ecological theory are required to deal with complexity and change in fisheries and other human-ecological systems. This paper examines the interplay and complementarities that emerge by linking resilience and social wellbeing approaches to better understand and govern fisheries. After first discussing the...
Small-scale fisheries are no exceptions to the requirements of staying within the biological bounds of sustainability, by purposively limiting fish harvests, and of maintaining productivity of oceans and freshwater systems, by protecting ecosystem health and habitat quality. However, while these fisheries, like all others, have the potential to pose conservation...
Decades of social science research has shown that fisheries, particularly small-scale, are integral to
community wellbeing. They contribute to food security, men’s, women’s, and children’s livelihoods,
health, community identity, and social cohesion. These contributions need to be well-defined and
contextualized, as well as differentiated between fishing sectors, for better fisheries...
This paper explores how the implementation of appropriate policy measures and underlying institutions can support sustainability and resilience in fishery systems. The policies discussed fall into three categories. First are those relating directly to fishery management, including the development of a management portfolio, application of the precautionary approach, and implementation...
This paper reports on the first comprehensive study of economic and livelihood considerations relating to inland fisheries in common property lands (ejidos) of the Mayan Zone in Quintana Roo, Mexico. Given the data-sparse nature of these fisheries, a fishery assessment approach was used which linked methods from both the natural...
In 2011 the FAO Committee on Fisheries tasked FAO with the development of an international instrument in the form of guidelines for securing sustainable small-scale fisheries (SSF Guidelines). The SSF Guidelines will facilitate the empowerment and mobilization of stakeholders to promote change towards sustainable small-scale fisheries and hence facilitate the...