Towards an Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Management and
Conservation of Marine Living Resources
(Report of an informal brainstorming)
Edward Vander Berge
OBIS Executive Director
Serge Michel Garcia
Ex-Director of FAO Fishery and Aquaculture Resources Division
Marc Taconet
Fisheries Global Information System Information Officer
The marine ecosystem is in continuous evolution as a result of many natural and socio-economic
phenomena that influence it, affecting the functioning and evolution of its human and natural subsystems.
Fisheries are one of the main development sectors impacting the natural subsystem. Others include shipping,
mining, oil and gas, coastal development, tourism, etc. Marine ecosystem management involves scientists
from many disciplines, lawyers, managers, users, etc., with different but overlapping perspectives. These
communities collect, access and produce information through complex processes and with the support of
tools for data processing and analyses used for policy and management advice. Each scientific discipline
works mostly independently employing its own policies, paradigms, terminologies, methodologies, and
tools, and rarely crossing over interdisciplinary boundaries, limiting the exchange of ideas and results with
other communities. The recent depletion of the world’s living marine resources due to natural and man-made
changes has affected the capacity to sustain development. Better interdisciplinary cooperation as well as
integrated regulations and policies on maintenance of marine ecosystem heterogeneous sources are
pressingly demanded.
These actions are at the core of the implementation of the Ecosystem Approach (EA) strategy for the
integrated management of land, water, and living resources. This strategy introduced by the Fifth Conference
of the Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) 1 in 1992, and successively better specified in
the 12 “Malawi Principles” adopted by the CBD in 1998, promotes conservation and sustainable use of
resources in an equitable way. EA has established a general framework within which specializations have
been created, e.g., the Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Management (EAF). EAF specific purpose of is
to plan, develop, and manage fisheries in a manner that addresses the multiple needs and desires of
societies, without jeopardizing the options for future generations to benefit from the full range of goods and
services provided by marine ecosystems. It strives to balance diverse societal objectives, by taking into
account the knowledge and uncertainties about biotic, abiotic, and human components of ecosystems and
their interactions and applying an integrated approach to fisheries within ecologically meaningful
boundaries2,3 . As designed, EAF covers all socio-economic and environmental aspects of policy-making,
fishery assessments, fishing operations, processing and trade.
In parallel, environmental institutions have evolved their strategies for setting conservation and sustainable
use of marine resources through an EA, shifting from protection of a few emblematic or endangered species
to that of entire communities or habitats to maintain the ecosystem structure and properties (e.g., productivity
and resilience). Scientific objectivity has been strengthened, for example, by defining measurable indicators
[1]
[2]
[3]
1
AA.VV.
Conversation
on
Biological
Diversity.
Wikipedia.
[Online]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Biological_Diversity
2
FAO. 2003. Fisheries Management. 2. The Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries. Rome, Italy: Food and
Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. FAO Technical Guidelines for Responsible Fisheries;
4(Suppl.2): 112 p.
3
Garcia, S.M.; Zerbi, A.; Aliaume, C.; Do Chi, T.; Lasserre, G. The ecosystem approach to fisheries. Issues,
terminology, principles, institutional foundations, implementation and outlook. FAO Fisheries Technical Paper.
No. 443. Rome, FAO. 2003. 71 p.
of species’ conservation status, used, inter alia, to update the International Union for Conservation of Nature
(IUCN) ‘red lists’ and help prioritising conservation efforts. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)
COP 10, in Nagoya, Japan (October 2010) stressed again the need for objective scientific information. The
biodiversity community has indeed actively started building data repositories to collect and collate relevant
information from many sources, e.g., Census of Marine Life, OBIS. Agreed scientific criteria have been used
recently by the Global Ocean Biodiversity Initiative (GOBI) for the global identification of Ecologically and
Biologically Significant Areas (EBSAs). Further progress in conservation requires more data and
information systems to support decision making. To increase transparency and trust, the related data must be
made openly available, easily accessible, quality controlled, and well documented.
Clearly, the complexity of the EA calls for a much tighter collaboration between presently isolated
disciplines or groups of disciplines, and for the global sharing and an efficient use of a broader range of data
and knowledge (to cover the numerous components of the approach and to accelerate social learning and
facilitate adaptive management). By rephrasing the content of a presentation given Serge Garcia at the
D4Science World User meeting [Garcia 2010]4 these needs can be summarises as follows:
“To achieve its objectives the Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Management calls for integration of
information across time and space, disciplines and sources of knowledge. It calls for reconciliation between
facts, values and perceptions and blending of quantitative and qualitative information. It also requires
distinct but communicating processes of science and negotiation. Finally, they call for better integration
between development and management, between sector-based policies, and between them and societal
demand.”
Jointly improving fisheries management and marine living resources conservation
consequently requires coordinated input from a range of scientific disciplines and
stakeholders to inform fisheries and environmental governance about the state of the system components
and the options available for decision-making. At present, however, these governances are loosely coevolving through the Ecosystem Approach that both have formally adopted. Their two largely separate
streams of research, assessment, advice, policy, and management have started to interact but take place in
poorly-connected arenas. Examples are the various Regional Fishery Management Organisations (RFMOs)
and Regional Seas Programmes (RSOs) working groups, the ICES informal group considering the follow-up
to the ICES Conference on Fishery Dependent information (Galway, Ireland, 2010) towards the development
of a Community of Practice on EAF implementation, the ‘High Seas Deep Seas Fisheries’ Discussion group,
the NSERC Canadian Capture Fisheries Research network, The Global Ocean Biodiversity Initiative
(GOBI), etc.
The people that interact in the assessment and decision process come from a broadening set of horizons
(scientists, managers, lawyers, industry leaders, unions, fishery operators). They include a number of smaller
groupings of interests such as ecosystem modelling, ecological economics, small-scale fisheries, spatial
planning, fisheries assessment, coral reefs, MPAs, marine debris, ecolabelling, large pelagic fish, seamounts,
fishing rights, community-based management, common property, etc., presently loosely connected or
unconnected and uncoordinated. These may have developed specialized websites but they are generally not
supported by any formal infrastructure for data and information sharing and integration.
In particular, the fishery and environmental scientists interact quite often, use common concepts, approaches
and methods and are developing some consensus about the state of the fisheries and their environment, the
problems and the solutions potentially available to resolve them. Formal publications represent a powerful
but still too slow instrument of exchange and “integration” and the important grey information (including
policies, plans, legislations) is hardly accessible.
Interconnecting all the above actors around common information services, fostering e-meetings, developing
of knowledge repositories and e-training facilities can largely accelerate their cooperation.
Meeting these requirements requires innovative technological solutions able to foster
cohesion among its members, support the access to multidisciplinary information and to the tasks processing
4
Garcia, S.M. 2010. Potential contribution of internet to a global community of practice on fishery conservation and
management. Paper presented at the ICES Conference on Fishery Dependent Information, Galway, Ireland August
2010. ICES Journal of Marine Science, in press.
and analysing it, and greatly improve the process of social learning while reducing costs. The requirements
are particularly challenging. The implementation relies on a set of knowledge and data sources much broader
than that used respectively in conventional and fishery management and conservation. In both arenas, the EA
requires that monitoring and assessment of target, emblematic, or vulnerable species be broadened to cover
species assemblages, communities, habitats, and ecosystems, and that socio-economic be also broadened to
cover fisheries’ impacts on all goods and services offered by those ecosystems.
The EA also demands better availability of close to real time up-to-date information, much more easily
analysed, and in shorter timeframes. This information is maintained in a large number of repositories,
archives, and databases, either institutional or personal. Thus, these data resources have different histories,
and respond to different policies, practices, and standards. From the technological point of view, they are
represented in a large variety of formats, which range from simple textual documents, to images and other
multimedia content, time series, geospatial data-products, code-lists/hierarchies, etc. They are processed
using a range of specialised tools for data management, analysis, publication, mapping and plotting,
reporting, etc. The overall result is that these multi-disciplinary data sources are scarcely compatible and can
be made interoperable with difficulty, hence their combination remains an ad hoc and painful process.
The above requirements push towards the establishment of an open, dynamically-expandable, and wellregulated data infrastructure able to provide the necessary support to a concrete implementation of the EA
and to the establishment of a multi-disciplinary Community of Practice associated with it. Without the
support of appropriate e-Infrastructure, any effort towards a comprehensive EA to fisheries management and
marine living resources conservation will likely remain too slow to meet even the new deadlines adopted by
the CBD COP 10, in Nagoya in October 2010.