Fisheries management of the Arabian Peninsula region with special emphasis to the Sultanate of Oman: perspectives of climate change adaptations

The use of limited-access privilege programs (LAPP’s) in fi sheries management offers an incentive for collaborative management while also addressing economic incentives. This paper provides an overview of the development and use of limited access privilege programs by looking at a review of potential benefi ts and the arguments against them. It focuses on examining Introduction A catch share program is a generic term associated with fi shery management strategies that allocate a specifi c percentage of the fi shery catch to individuals, cooperatives, communities, or other entities. It includes more specifi c programs such as Limited Access Privilege Programs (LAPP’s). The Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976 (later renamed Magnuson Fishery Conservation and Management Act and then Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act) created a new national program for the conservation and management of marine fi shery resources. Fishery Management Plans (FMP’s) were to be developed by eight regional fi shery management councils and implemented by NMFS. In 2006, Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Reauthorization Act (hereafter referred to as the Reauthorization Act), urged regional councils to use more LAPP’s in federal fi sheries management (NMFS, 2007). LAPP’s had also been specifi ed as a priority in the U.S. Ocean Action Plan1 and Executive Order 12866, signed by President William J. Clinton in 1993, which established the guiding principles agencies must follow when developing regulations. In 2005, under President George W. Bush, NMFS pledged to double the number of fi sheries managed under LAPP’s (from 8 to 16) by 2010. In 2010, the Obama administration solidifi ed its commitment to catch shares by issuing a Catch Share Policy (NOAA, 2010) to provide guidance and support on the design, implementation, and monitoring of catch share programs. This policy provides a foundation for facilitating the widespread consideration of catch share fi shery management plans (FMP’s) while enabling local fi shermen and communities to be part of the process. This article explains what LAPP’s are, how they work, and what benefi ts and costs can be expected from their implementation. First, a brief history of fi sheries management helps explain how LAPP’s evolved. This is followed by an explanation of the economic incentives behind LAPP’s, in the context of two fi sheries in the U.S. Mid-At1The plan, subtitled The Bush Administration’s Response to the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy, is available online at http://www.cmts. gov/downloads/US_ocean_action_plan.pdf. lantic Region—the Atlantic surfclam/ ocean quahog, Spisula solidissima/ Arctica islandica, fi shery and the tilefi sh (also known as the golden tilefi sh), Lopholatilus chamaeleonticeps, fi shery. Limited-Access Privilege Programs Prior to 1976, U.S. marine fi sheries were managed in a completely openaccess environment, with few restrictions placed on foreign or domestic fi shermen or their activities. Competition among fi shermen under open-access conditions creates incentives for the industry to expand, over-exploit, and eventually deplete the resource (as described by the popular phrase “tragedy of the commons”), resulting in overcapacity and overfi shing (Anderson and Holliday, 2007). With the passage of the Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976, fi sheries management began to evolve, using various combinations of input and output controls. Input controls were put in place to restrict vessel activity in various manners, by regulating the type and/or amount of gear, or by restricting fi shing areas or fi shing times. Output controls were also established that aimed to limit the amount of catch or harvest in a fi shery, such as limits on a total allowable catch (TAC) or individual trip catch. These too had a downside. A hard TAC (a predetermined catch level that is paired with a within-season closure provision) implemented for a fi shery as a whole often leads to heightened competition to catch as much fi sh as possible before the annual limit is reached; a “derby fi shery” in which there is a “race to fi sh.” Gear restrictions and trip limits the historical context of two specifi c applications in the Mid-Atlantic—the Atlantic surfclam, Spisula solidissima, and ocean quahog, Arctica islandica, fi shery, and the tilefi sh, Lopholatilus chamaeleonticeps, fi shery. Structural components of these programs are presented along with a description of notable changes in these two fi sheries since the implementation of LAPP’s.

Funding coastal and marine fisheries projects under the climate change regime

The current research is devoted to highlight the past, present and future status of groundwater characteristics over the Arabian Peninsula (AP) and west region of Iraq. The Umm er Radhuma, Rus Dammam and Neogene deposits are the major hydrostratigraphic units supplying the main groundwater resources in the AP. Water shortage is still a major problem for many countries in the world, including oil-producing countries such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia (SA), the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Oman and Bahrain. The withdrawal of groundwater has been reflected in salinization of agricultural soils, leading to an increase in high-cost technologies such as desalination of seawater to provide suitable water for diverse sectors. Hence, the use of seawater desalination as a major source of water is unavoidable, and country development requires the use of renewable energy as protection of the environment. The need to conserve and use groundwater resources efficiently is highly essential owing to the fact that it is the only natural source of water in such developing countries of global importance. The review comprises various essential components related to groundwater variability including the hydrogeological aspects, climate change, drawdown and abstraction, rainwater harvesting, desertification and population increment. Based on the reviewed perspectives, various practical visions are discussed for better groundwater management and sustainability. This research is presented as a milestone for diverse future works and investigation that might be conducted for better water resources management over the AP region.

Climate change poses unprecedented challenges for fisheries management systems. Increased environmental variability and uncertainty due to climate change are creating shifts in productivity and distribution of fished species, and subsequent social-ecological impacts that require timely implementation of adaptive management strategies. Yet many proposed “climate-ready” fisheries actions – such as integrating climate factors into stock assessments and increasing flexibility in decision-making – either complicate or add to existing responsibilities of fishery managers and strain existing institutions. In the United States, many fisheries management agencies have explicitly acknowledged certain capacity shortfalls and institutional limitations to addressing current and projected impacts of climate change on marine fisheries. Many resource and capacity gaps across the adaptive fisheries management cycle could be filled through more effective fishery partnerships among management agencies, fishing industries, private sector, and academia. Partnership approaches are key to unlocking capacity for achieving climate-ready fisheries yet expanded implementation may require a shift towards a model that empowers and obligates fishery stakeholders to take on expanded roles with appropriate guidelines and oversight, while establishing increased roles for agencies as facilitators and auditors for certain tasks. Building and institutionalizing more effective fishery partnerships to achieve climate-ready fisheries will require clear guidance and enabling conditions.

Despite a complex management landscape and decades of overfishing, Red Snapper (Lutjanus campechanus) stocks have grown substantially in the Gulf of Mexico and restrictions on the fisheries that catch them are being loosened. This year, annual shrimping effort was allowed to increase by 21% after National Marine Fisheries Service scientists concluded that the resulting bycatch of Red Snapper would only reduce the annual allowable catch in other fisheries by ∼1% and have no impact on population growth. Nonetheless, the recreational fishing sector intensely campaigned against this rule, fueled by wild mischaracterization of shrimp trawl bycatch in media outlets targeting anglers. Here, we aim to elevate the debates surrounding Red Snapper management by presenting scientific and historical context for the potential impacts from shrimping. We discuss our views of the current problems facing Red Snapper and key ecological questions to address for more effective management of this resource.

Generating the evidence for marine fisheries policy and management

Marine capture fisheries are an important source of protein globally, with coastal and oceanic fish providing a rich source of essential fatty acids, vitamins, and minerals. Fisheries also support economies and important social structures in many nations, particularly developing nations (Allison et al., 2009). Marine fisheries are under increasing threat from climate change, with climate change now identified as the latest threat to the world's fast declining fish stocks (UNEP, 2008; Cochrane et al., 2009). Marine fisheries will be exposed to increasing sea surface temperatures, ocean acidification, sea level rise, increasing storm intensity and altered ocean circulation, and rainfall patterns that will affect target species through a range of direct and indirect mechanisms. The sensitivity of fish stocks to these changes will determine the range of potential impacts to life cycles, species distributions, community structure, productivity, connectivity, organism performance, recruitment dynamics, prevalence of invasive species, and access to marine resources by fishers. Many fisheries are already experiencing changes in target species diversity and abundance, species distribution, and habitat area, as well as loss of fishing effort due to intensifying storms (Johnson and Marshall, 2007; Hobday et al., 2008; UNEP, 2008). Using a vulnerability assessment framework, we examine the level of vulnerability of marine fisheries to climate change and the factors that will temper vulnerability, such as adaptive capacity. Assessing fisheries vulnerability to climate change is essential to prioritize systems in greatest need of intervention, understand the drivers of vulnerability to identify future research directions, and more importantly, to review current fisheries management with the view to develop management responses that will be effective in securing the future sustainability of marine fisheries.

The marine fisheries sector is one of the most important income sectors in South Africa and plays an important role in food security for small-scale and subsistence fishers. Climate-driven impacts have resulted in distribution shifts and declines in abundance of important fisheries targets, with negative consequences to the users dependent on these resources. The sustainability of the sector depends on its readiness to adapt to climate change. The inclusion of climate change impacts and adaptation in fisheries management documents in South Africa is essential to ensure adequate climate adaptation responses are implemented at the short- and long-term. This study aims to 1) determine if the relevant fisheries national management documents address climate change and adaptation, 2) determine if the relevant national climate change documents address climate change and adaptation in the fisheries sector and 3) evaluate the extent to which fisheries management documents address climate change and adaptation. A content analysis of fisheries management and climate change documents was carried out to determine if they incorporated information on climate change impacts and adaptation and marine fisheries respectively. Fisheries management documents were then screened against nine pre-determined criteria (or themes) based on climate change adaptation to determine the level of inclusion of best practice for climate change adaptation. Results indicate that climate change impacts and adaptation are rarely incorporated in the main fisheries management documents, except for the Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation Plan for the agriculture, fisheries and forestry sectors. However, this document is still waiting to be adopted. The only direct reference identified in all the fisheries documents that supports climate change adaptation was ‘conservation and sustainable management of biodiversity’. With regards to indirect references to climate change adaptation, ‘equity,’ ‘participatory management,’ and ‘capacity building’ were most frequently incorporated in fisheries management documents. There is a need to explicitly incorporate information on climate change impacts and adaptation in South African fisheries management documents and increase the human and financial capacity at national institutions to ensure that the fisheries sector can adequately adapt to climate change.

Identifying uncertainties in scenarios and models of socio-ecological systems in support of decision-making

Marine fisheries management strives to maintain sustainable populations while allowing exploitation. However, well-intentioned management plans may not meet this balance as most do not include the effect of climate change. Ocean temperatures are expected to increase through the 21st century, which will have far-reaching and complex impacts on marine fisheries. To begin to quantify these impacts for one coastal fishery along the east coast of the United States, we develop a coupled climate-population model for Atlantic croaker (Micropogonias undulatus). The model is based on a mechanistic hypothesis: recruitment is determined by temperature-driven, overwinter mortality of juveniles in their estuarine habitats. Temperature forecasts were obtained from 14 general circulation models simulating three CO2 emission scenarios. An ensemble-based approach was used in which a multimodel average was calculated for a given CO2 emission scenario to forecast the response of the population. The coupled model indicates that both exploitation and climate change significantly affect abundance and distribution of Atlantic croaker. At current levels of fishing, the average (2010-2100) spawning biomass of the population is forecast to increase by 60-100%. Similarly, the center of the population is forecast to shift 50 100 km northward. A yield analysis, which is used to calculate benchmarks for fishery management, indicates that the maximum sustainable yield will increase by 30 100%. Our results demonstrate that climate effects on fisheries must be identified, understood, and incorporated into the scientific advice provided to managers if sustainable exploitation is to be achieved in a changing climate.

Efficacy of fisheries management strategies in mitigating ecological, social, and economic risks of climate warming in China.

This paper provides a summary from primary and grey literature on the current status of fisheries in Egypt. It also discusses gaps which may impede effective management, and highlights future challenges. Total national seafood production has grown steadily overall in the last 15 years due to the rapid growth of aquaculture, despite a decline in fisheries production (about 23 %) from 1997 to 2012. The total production in 2012 was approximately 1,371,975 tonnes, tripling the 457,036 tonnes obtained in 1997. Fisheries production amounted to 354,237 tonnes (25 %) whilst aquaculture produced 1,017,738 (75 %) tonnes in 2012. Fisheries in Egypt’s northern lakes were the most important (36 %) followed by marine fisheries in the Mediterranean and Red Seas (32 %), which had the greatest variations in catch. The main decline in wild fisheries was due to the reduced landings from both marine and northern lake fisheries. Egypt has a wide variety of marine and freshwater species, comprising Sardina pilchardus, Penaeus japonicus, Mugil cephalus, and Saurida undosquamis, etc.; while Oreochromis niloticus, Clarias gariepinus are the main cultured species. The Egyptian fishing fleet increased by over 40 % from 3415 motorised vessels in 1997–4909 vessels in 2012. Most of these (3046 vessels, 62 %) fish in the Mediterranean, while the rest (1863 vessels, 38 %) fish in the Red Sea. Longlines were the fishing gear most used by the motorised vessels (45 %), followed by trawlers (26 %). Policy during the past few decades has been development-oriented, encouraging investment in aquaculture to ensure sustainable fish production, rather than managing wild fisheries in a sustainable way. Despite vigorous efforts through national legislation to address fishery management issues, the weak enforcement, low compliance and unregulated fishing suggest the need to restructure the fisheries management system. The main fisheries stakeholders (policy makers, scientists and fishery managers) should consider the different scales of these fisheries and the context in which they operate, in order to develop suitable management strategies.

Climate change is driving shifts in the abundance and distribution of marine fish and invertebrates and is having direct and indirect impacts on seafood catches and fishing communities, exacerbating the already negative effects of unsustainably high fishing pressure that exist for some stocks. Although the majority of fisheries in the world are managed at the national or local scale, most existing approaches to assessing climate impacts on fisheries have been developed on a global scale. It is often difficult to translate from the global to regional and local settings because of limited relevant data. To address the need for fisheries management entities to identify those fisheries with the greatest potential for climate change impacts, we present an approach for estimating expected climate change-driven impacts on the productivity and spatial range of fisheries at the regional scale in a data-poor context. We use a set of representative Mexican fisheries as test cases. To assess the implications of climate impacts, we compare biomass, harvest, and profit outcomes from a bioeconomic model under contrasting management policies and with and without climate change. Overall results show that climate change is estimated to negatively affect nearly every fishery in our study. However, the results indicate that overfishing is a greater threat than climate change for these fisheries, hence fixing current management challenges has a greater upside than the projected future costs of moderate levels of climate change. Additionally, this study provides meaningful first approximations of potential effects of both climate change and management reform in Mexican fisheries. Using the climate impact estimations and model outputs, we identify high priority stocks, fleets, and regions for policy reform in Mexico in the face of climate change. This approach can be applied in other data-poor circumstances to focus future research and policy reform efforts on stocks now subject to additional stress due to climate change. Considering their growing relevance as a critical source of protein and micronutrients to nourish our growing population, it is urgent for regions to develop sound fishery management policies in the short-term as they are the most important intervention to mitigate the adverse effects of climate change on marine fisheries.

Since the 1990s of the last century, the world’s marine fisheries have entered a turning point. In 1990, the global marine catch declined for the first time, and most of the high-value traditional fishery resources were fully exploited or overexploited. Since 2016, there has been a small increase in the production of the marine fishing industry, reaching 84.4 million tons in 2018, but still below the peak catch of 86.4 million tons in 1996. The catch statistics from FAO show that the global marine catch has shown a relative change among different years, in which major changes in the production belong to oceanic species such as Peruvian anchovy or anchoveta (Engraulis ringens) and Pacific sardine (Sardinops sagax) and Ommastrephidae squid such as Argentinean flying squid (Illex argentinus) and jumbo flying squid (Dosidicus gigas); one of the main reasons for these fluctuations in these species is the changes of global climate and marine environmental factors. For this reason, this chapter briefly describes the current state of development of the world’s marine fisheries and the characteristics of the marine environment and the main economic species resources in each sea area, such as the Northwest Pacific Ocean (statistical area 61) and Southeast Pacific Ocean (statistical area 87). The global climate events, such as water temperature rise, ocean acidification, and El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and their impacts on marine fisheries are summarized. In this chapter, the impacts of global climate change and marine environmental change on resources and fishing ground for tuna, Pacific saury (Cololabis saira), Chilean jack mackerel (Trachurus murphyi), Peruvian anchovy, cod, salmon, and cephalopod are analyzed in detail, which will provide some cases for the scientific research of fisheries forecasting and also provide a scientific basis for the sustainable use and scientific management of global marine fishery resources.KeywordsGlobal climate changeMarine fisheriesResources and fishing ground

Fisheries are recognized as important in Mozambique, yet they are increasingly threatened by over-exploitation and climate change. We collate and synthesize the available literature and data on marine fisheries in Mozambique; assess the status of the main fishery species/stocks; give an overview of current management of the fishery, and discuss planning for fisheries resilience in the face of climate change predictions. In Mozambique there is a heavy reliance on marine fisheries. From a food security and local economy perspective, the critical sector is the artisanal fisheries which comprises over 90% of the total landings and provides food and livelihood for millions of people, particularly in the coastal zone. Regarding economic value and earning foreign currency, the most valuable industrial / semi-industrial fisheries are the shallow-water shrimp, the deep-water crustacean and the rocky bottom demersal. Current stock assessment for these sectors indicates that the core stock species are fully- or over-exploited. Limited data are available for the artisanal fishery, but it is likely that the same status applies to this sector. Globally, well-managed fisheries have been among the most resilient to climate change—overall, fisheries best practices confer ecological resilience by providing a portfolio of options to fishers and a buffer against losing target stock. Ideally, best practices include scientifically-informed catch limits, accountability measures, regional flexibility in policy practices, protection of essential fish habitat (Marine Protected Areas), and effective monitoring, control and surveillance. Mozambique has a relatively well-managed industrial/semi-industrial fishery. However, the artisanal fishery, due to its spatial scattering, multi-gear and multi-species nature, presents a huge challenge. Facing the future with climate change will require increased attention to reduce stressors to the social–ecological systems in which fisheries exist and persist. Specific recommendations in this context are presented.