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...
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...
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...
Community fishery rights are use rights (the right to take part in fishing) and/or management rights (the right to be involved in managing the fishery) implemented at a local, community level. While by no means a new invention, community rights are receiving renewed attention as a mechanism to improve the...
Subsidies are most often discussed within global fora (such as the World Trade Organization) in terms of concerns over trade distortions, if some countries gain an unfair advantage, through their subsidies, over unsubsidized industry elsewhere. In fisheries, this concern is matched by an environmental argument – that fish stock depletion...
To effectively respond to sustainability challenges, there is a need to find (or re-discover) suitable ways to govern, so as to make decisions that maintain healthy environments and sustainable livelihoods in fishery systems. While efforts to this end are needed at all governance levels, from the global to the local,...
There is increasing recognition that the oceans of the world support a wide range of economic sectors. Managing those multiple uses, within a ‘commons’ environment, is undoubtedly challenging. Approaches of ecosystem-based management (EBM), integrated ocean management (IOM) and marine spatial planning (MSP), with associated aspects of spatial allocation and conflict...
This paper provides an overview of use rights, that sanction fishers, fisher groups and fishing communities to access and use fishery resources. The paper first reviews the various forms of use rights, ranging from access rights (territorial use rights and limited entry) to quantitative input (effort) and output (harvest) rights....
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...