Plenary lecture: Sustaining fish and fisheries: diverse approaches for diverse realities and challenges

PARMA, A.M.

Seattle

Congreso; 9th World Fisheries Congress; 2024

Americn Fisheries Society

Fisheries management paradigms have evolved to increasingly embrace the complexity involved in achieving ecological, economic, social and institutional sustainable fisheries. Global data on fish stock status are showing progress, with marked reductions in fishing-induced mortality, followed in many cases by stock biomass recovery, following strong legal mandates to maintain fishing pressure at or below the levels that maximize long-term yields, and to rebuild overfished stocks. Such outcomes have been mainly documented for industrial fisheries in regions where there are effective management systems in place, able to: (i) collect and analyze data to assess stock status, (ii) adjust harvest controls in response to changes in abundance, and (iii) implement and enforce regulations. Such conventional management approaches cannot be expected to work in small-scale fisheries especially in developing countries, which tend to be data and capacity-limited. While much attention has been focused on developing data-limited assessment methods and harvesting strategies, data limitations tend to go hand in hand with resource and capacity limitations that hamper all three components of the management system. Sustained efforts need to be allocated to improve local capacity to collect and analyze information, and to identify strategies that may work given the specific constraints of each fishery. Institutions that facilitate adaptive co-management need to be supported to encourage stakeholder participation.