Small-scale Fisheries and Marine Ecosystem Services: Adaptation and Transformation to Secure Human Wellbeing

PITTMAN JEREMY; ORTEGA LEONARDO; LERCARI DIEGO; PIOLA ALBERTO; DEFEO OMAR,; CASTREJON MAURICIO; MÖLLER OSMAR JR.; GIANELLI IGNACIO; MASELLO ARIANNA; LOMOVASKY BETINA J.

Congreso; Congreso Latinoamericano de Ciencias del Mar (COLACMAR); 2019

UNMDP

Oceans play a critical role in human wellbeing due to the multiple ecosystem services they provide (e.g., food, livelihoods). Yet the ocean is currently changing due to several anthropogenic drivers, including climate change. These changes will affect the marine ecosystem services upon which we depend, which brings into question the wellbeing of human communities throughout the globe. In maritime places where observed warming has been greater than the global average ?referred to here as ‗hotspots?? the ecosystem services, and human wellbeing derived from these services, are already under threat. Coastal communities, who draw a significant proportion of their livelihoods from small-scale fisheries, are particularly vulnerable to these changes due to their limited capacities and options for adaptation. Augmenting these adaptive capacities requires multilevel efforts to: (1) ensure national policy and legislation is flexible enough to accommodate change, while supporting livelihood security; (2) align fisheries management decisions with the demands of changing contexts; and (3) develop fisheries practices that are climate-resilient, ecologically-appropriate, andsocially-salient. By working with three small-scale fisheries across four Countries (Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador) and two ocean warming hotspots, our project will help identify and implement adaptation pathways designed to improve the adaptive capacity of small-scale fisheries and coastal communities. Our research draws on longestablished relationships among researchers, practitioners, policy-makers, and resource users in each of our study sites. Through these long-term engagements, we have developed extensive databases of key social-ecological drivers for each focal fishery, which we will augment, analyze, and synthesize throughout the course of our project following a participatory research design. We will work across diverse disciplinary backgrounds and areas of expertise to: (1)merge and analyze unique, longterm social-ecological datasets to identify observed and expected change; (2)engage stakeholders in participatory exercises aimed to contextualize future scenarios; and (3) co-develop multilevel adaptation pathways to effectively maintain human wellbeing in the face of ecosystem service change.