CESIMAR - CENPAT   25625
CENTRO PARA EL ESTUDIO DE SISTEMAS MARINOS
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Evidence-based fisheries management: challenges and needs to achieve biological sustainability of global fisheries?
Autor/es:
PARMA, A.M.
Lugar:
Roma
Reunión:
Simposio; International Symposium on Fisheries Sustainability; 2019
Institución organizadora:
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)
Resumen:
The ability of fishery management systems to maintainfishing pressure at levels that can sustain productive fisheries depends on:(i) the availability of information on resource status and trends relative todesirable levels, (ii) the capacity to adjust harvest controls in response tochanges in stock abundance, and (iii) the ability to implement and enforceregulations. The approaches that have proved effective in many large-scale industrialfisheries from developed countries have relayed on the use of complex stockassessment methods to determine catch quotas, and a centralized ?command-and-control?model to implement them. Such approaches cannot be expected to work insmall-scale fisheries and/or in regions with limited economic and technical resources,and weak governance systems. The quest for suitable alternatives has often focused on thelimited information typically available in these situations to underpinmanagement decisions. Many new stock assessment methods and harvest controlrules based on simple indicators have been shown to work reasonably well indata-limited situations. However, such technical progress has yet to producepositive on-the-ground impacts at scale. This is because data limitations tendto go hand in hand with resource and technical capacity limitations that hamperall three components of the management system. The design of monitoring programsand suitable harvest control rules, even if they are simple, still requiresexpertise that is often lacking in developing countries. Data sometimes existbut are not standardized and there is limited capacity to analyze them. Inaddition, factors such as remoteness of landing sites or budget restrictions,that make it difficult to collect data at the appropriate scale, commonly also leadto weak capacity to enforce regulations. Thus, the entire management strategyfor monitoring, assessment and harvest regulation needs to be considered withinthe practical constraints of each fishery. The over-riding compounding problem isoften the political difficulty of managing excess access and effort in the faceof poverty and few alternatives for sustaining livelihoods. Integrated frameworks proposed for achieving sustainablesmall-scale fisheries go beyond the specific assessment and management tools toemphasize the institutional processes leading to management decisions. Theseframeworks call for the involvement of the fishing communities in all stages ofmanagement (data collection and interpretation, decision making andenforcement) and contemplate a key role for the agents that provide local technicalsupport, who have to be equipped with appropriate tools, and have goodanalytical and communication skills. Such participatory assessment and management approaches haveresulted in positive outcomes in many places, but no quick fixes exist and the specifictools that have worked are highly context dependent. Thus, local successescannot be scaled up simply by replication. Rather, sustained efforts need to bedevoted to building local technical capacity to collect, curate and analyze data,and to identify and fine-tune suitable harvest control rules for each fishery. Differentorganizations have developed tools to aid in such processes, but sustainedsupport from governments and funding agencies will be needed to maintain long-termengagements with local stakeholders and to foster communities of practice that learnfrom experience across fisheries. Finally, a critical aspect of ensuringsustainable and productive fisheries will be finding suitable alternatives forthe excess fishing capacity.