Sustainability Of Capture Fisheries Research Articles

Recognize fish as food in policy discourse and development funding

The international development community is off-track from meeting targets for alleviating global malnutrition. Meanwhile, there is growing consensus across scientific disciplines that fish plays a crucial role in food and nutrition security. However, this ‘fish as food’ perspective has yet to translate into policy and development funding priorities. We argue that the traditional framing of fish as a natural resource emphasizes economic development and biodiversity conservation objectives, whereas situating fish within a food systems perspective can lead to innovative policies and investments that promote nutrition-sensitive and socially equitable capture fisheries and aquaculture. This paper highlights four pillars of research needs and policy directions toward this end. Ultimately, recognizing and working to enhance the role of fish in alleviating hunger and malnutrition can provide an additional long-term development incentive, beyond revenue generation and biodiversity conservation, for governments, international development organizations, and society more broadly to invest in the sustainability of capture fisheries and aquaculture.

Sustainability of Capture Fisheries and SDG 14: Life Below Water

Unlike the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the new United Nations (UN) post-2015 Global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) include a goal related to conserving and sustainably using the oceans, seas and marine resources—Sustainable Development Goal 14: “Life Below Water” (SDG 14). Inter alia, the goal aims to increase the sustainability of capture fisheries. For the most part, the sub-goals and targets emerging from this process are not new. Still, for the first time, fisheries have moved toward the center of the sustainable development discourse and the high profile of the SDGs may contribute to increased accountability. However, unless rhetoric translates into the political will to set measurable targets and enforce them, the goal alone cannot generate sustainability in capture fisheries.

Sustainability of Capture Fisheries and SDG 14: Life Below Water

Unlike the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the new United Nations (UN) post-2015 Global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) include a goal related to conserving and sustainably using the oceans, seas and marine resources―Sustainable Development Goal 14: “Life Below Water” (SDG 14). Inter alia, the goal aims to increase the sustainability of capture fisheries. For the most part, the sub-goals and targets emerging from this process are not new. Still, for the first time, fisheries have moved toward the center of the sustainable development discourse and the high profile of the SDGs may contribute to increased accountability. However, unless rhetoric translates into the political will to set measurable targets and enforce them, the goal alone cannot generate sustainability in capture fisheries.

The Ethics and Sustainability of Capture Fisheries and Aquaculture

The global seafood industry (capture fisheries and aquaculture) is a vital source of food, income, livelihoods, and culture. Seafood demand is steadily rising due to growth in the global human population, affluence, and per capita consumption. Seafood supply is also growing, despite declining wild fish stocks, with phenomenal advances in aquaculture, that is, the cultivation of aquatic organisms. Aquaculture supplied 42 % of the world’s fish in 2012 and is forecast to eclipse capture fisheries production by 2030. The balance between these two seafood production systems has profound implications for global food security, income distribution, and ecological sustainability. Here, a qualitative analysis of the ethics and sustainability of capture fisheries and aquaculture is presented. An innovative practical ethics approach is introduced which adapts the ethical matrix, a conceptual tool for analyzing the wellbeing, autonomy, and justice of different interest groups, and Rapfish, a rapid appraisal technique used to evaluate the sustainability of fisheries along six performance modalities, including ethics. Using case studies of global large- and small-scale capture fisheries and generalized carnivorous and omnivorous aquaculture systems, I show that human institutions and social actors interact in complex governance processes to influence seafood ethics and sustainability.

Social sustainability of cod and haddock fisheries in the northeast Atlantic: what issues are important?

Research on the sustainability of capture fisheries has focused more on environmental and economic sustainability than on social sustainability. To assess social sustainability, first relevant and important social sustainability issues need to be identified. The objective of this study was to identify relevant social sustainability issues for cod and haddock fisheries in the northeast Atlantic and to determine the importance of these issues based on stakeholder input. A heterogeneous group of stakeholders was invited to take part in two consecutive surveys on social sustainability issues. The first survey (n = 41) resulted in a long list of 27 relevant social sustainability issues, including six issues that were not identified in previous studies and that address aspects of fish welfare, employees' training and education opportunities, and employees' time off from work. The second survey (n = 51) resulted in a ranking of the social sustainability issues in order of importance. The most important issues are worker safety, product freshness and companies' salary levels. In general, social sustainability issues concerning working conditions, employees' job fulfilment and fish welfare are seen as more important than other social sustainability issues. A main discussion point concerns the relation between the importance of a social sustainability issue on the one hand and the type of need that the issue relates to and the state of the issue on the other hand. From the study it can be concluded that the relative importance of social sustainability issues differs per stakeholder group depending on the relation between the stakeholder group and each particular issue. This demonstrates the importance of consulting different stakeholder groups in future studies on social sustainability in order to get a balanced view on the importance of social sustainability issues. Results on the relevance and importance of social sustainability issues for cod and haddock fisheries in the northeast Atlantic enable the fishing industry and policy-makers to direct improvement efforts towards the more important issues.