The ICES annual science conference 2016 will take place in Riga, Latvia, September 19-23. One of the theme session will cover the ecosystem-based approach to fisheries management (EAFM), which is a topic of major interest to the MareFrame project. One of the members of the MareFrame project, John Pope, a case study leader of the North Sea case study, will be one of three conveners of this theme session.
EAFM is concerned with sustainable ecosystems and human activities, particularly fisheries. Ecosystems and fisheries are typically complex so fisheries administrators and stakeholders need to make difficult trade-offs between a number of possibly conflicting objectives. These require both short and long term considerations of consequences for fish stocks and the wider ecosystem they inhabit, the economic and social impacts on the fishing industry, and realistic prospects that existing and proposed regulations will lead to compliance rather than to circumvention. Successful EAFM will ultimately require that this entire advice stream is integrated. Initially though, this integration needs to include:
- how ecosystems and their interaction with fish stocks are assessed to explain how they might respond to fishing and other anthropogenic drivers
- how the various ecological, economic, and social tradeoffs implicit in regulating human activity can be balanced
- how management can best work with the fishing industry to encourage it to be a beneficial and compliant component of the whole ecosystem
For additional information, please visit the ICES web site.