Sustainable fishery management trends in Philippine fisheries

Abstract

Sustainable production of fish and seafood products contributes to achieving the economic, social, and environmental goals in fisheries. Different sustainability strategies are applied to achieve these three goals. This paper presents a meta-analysis of the status and implementation of various sustainable fishery management strategies in the Philippines over the past 20 years. We identified various management themes and the extent these themes are related to economic, social and environmental sustainability goals using Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta Analyses (PRISMA) and text mining. Six sustainability management themes were identified. The analysis shows that overall, the sustainability management themes appear to be socio-economic in nature based on the relative occurrences of indicators belonging to the three sustainability goals. When comparing the strength of the three sustainability goals in each management theme, the social goal appears to be most prominent in four management themes, the economic goal in one theme, and a balance of the three sustainability goals in another theme. Furthermore, this study shows which fishery management themes are most (dis-)similar based on clustering. Policy makers and other fishery management bodies can use these insights to optimize the sustainability goals in fisheries by not only relying on a single management theme in each fishery, by improving focus on large scale fishers, by incorporating underexplored sustainability indicators, and by adapting current trends and proven-to-be effective management themes.