Category: Round table discussion

To meet Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and secure livelihoods for growing coastal populations in a changing world, it is clear that we must rapidly increase the scale and pace of improvements in sustainable coastal fisheries management. In this session, we will gather experts and stakeholders to discuss current efforts and exchange lessons learned from research, projects, and initiatives aimed at bringing coastal fisheries management tools, approaches, and best practices to scale. The session will feature recent and ongoing work from projects in the Western Indian Ocean region, the West Africa region, the Pacific Islands region, and the Philippines, as well as that of local, regional, and global organizations and initiatives.

Organizer:

Peter Freeman, University of Rhode Island, [email protected]

While global interest and investment in the blue economy accelerates rapidly, our attention to developing that economy in a just and inclusive manner severely lags. The small-scale fisheries sector provides an excellent case study that highlights the need for environmental and social justice considerations to be at the forefront of our minds. This session will bring together diverse speakers from the legal, policy, scientific, and small-scale fishing sector perspectives to set the stage for an open dialogue among all participants regarding key issues that small-scale fisheries face at the intersection of food, water, and energy issues within the global blue economy development. Presentations will focus on how a justice-minded lens can help improve policy, science, and livelihoods. The discussion will aim to draw out both commonalities and differences among geographies and socio-political contexts, with an emphasis on solution development for a more sustainable (socially, environmentally, and financially) global blue economy.

Organizer:

Melissa Garren, ELAW, [email protected]

In Australia, the Southern and Eastern Scalefish and Shark Fishery (SESSF) is a multi-species, multi-gear, multi-jurisdictional fishery, and a key provider of fresh seafood to international and domestic markets.

The Australian Fisheries Management Authority (AFMA) collects information to measure performance against environmental, economic and social objectives. Data collection in the SESSF has historically focussed on species managed under individual transferable quota to support stock assessments required under the harvest strategy. This narrow focus has come at the expense of collecting data to also understand environmental effects and the broader impacts of the fishery on the ecosystem. Understanding environmental drivers has become increasingly important as the impacts of climate change appear to be contributing to the decline of several fish stocks along the east coast of Australia.

We would like to understand challenges faced by other jurisdictions and discuss ways to improve representative data collection to support true ecosystem-based fisheries management.

Organizer:

Daniel Corrie, Australian Fisheries Management Authority (AFMA), [email protected]

This session is intended to explore the challenges and opportunities that exist in providing mobile tools to report activity and capture scientific catch and effort data for both inshore commercial and recreational fishers. The nature of inshore and recreational fishing generally means that the ability to have bulky electronic reporting tools doesn’t exist and alternative approaches need to be found. Using fisher mobile devices has enabled the development of highly sophisticated tools to capture data, submit  activity reports and to educate the fishers aiding them in fishing in a compliant manner. The key point being…. tools using fisher mobile devices rather than specific hardware or technology can provide highly sophisticated  solutions that integrate with existing scientific, administration and compliance systems whilst delivering fishers rich data and educational material for their personal use.

Organizer:

John Heskins, Spatial Vision, [email protected]

This session will discuss the transferability of tools in the sustainable seafood movement, examining the challenges, successes, lessons learned and unsolved problems of implementers. Experts will discuss how systems designed in developed Western nations may challenge implementation in developing countries, non-Western geographies, or outside industrial fisheries. The goals will be to consider how issues that impact inclusion – language, culture, religion, nationalism, corruption, gender, literacy, voice and others, have challenged implementation across diverse systems. Do certain tools face enthusiasm versus resistance and why? How can we consolidate knowledge to make efficient use of resources, more accurately foresee challenges and precipitate wins in the field? This panel and the subsequent discussion will be designed to be an honest, forthright – and we hope also humorous – look at the hard work of designers and implementers who have problem-solved successfully, or continue to innovate, to embrace the diverse realities of sustainable seafood.

Understanding recreational fishers is challenging.  We united experts in social and ecological sciences to produce an edited book focused on disciplinary and interdisciplinary overviews of attitudes and behaviors of recreational fishers.  This book educates users on state-of-the art methods for engaging fishers in support of social sciences, for quantifying and predicting fisher behaviours, for understanding outcomes of fisher behaviours, and for fully integrating social-science data into fisheries management…all in the hopes of better management of complex social-ecological systems.  We will bring together authors in three separate panel discussions (each focused on a distinct section of this book) to help social scientists and ecologists understand how they can engage each other for more meaningful research and deeper understanding of people and recreational activities.  These discussions are suitable for on-the-ground managers without formal training in social science and for research scientists developing programs in human dimensions of wildlife and fisheries.

Organizers:

Kevin Pope, U.S. Geological Survey—Nebraska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, [email protected]
Abigail Lynch, U.S. Geological Survey, National Climate Adaptation Science Center
Len Hunt, MNDMNRF
Brett van Poorten, Simon Fraser University
Robert Arlinghaus, Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

The 2015 global conference, Freshwater, fish, and the future – cross-sectoral approaches to sustain livelihoods, food security, and aquatic ecosystems produced a forward-looking call-to-action characterized by the 2015 Rome Declaration’s “Ten Steps to Responsible Inland Fisheries.”  We would like to facilitate an interactive discussion session with tables for participants would rotate in small groups to discuss each of the Ten Steps and suggest recommendations for indicators of progress.  The aim of this session would be to solicit feedback from the broad audience of the WFC to serve as the foundation for an action plan for global inland fisheries.

Organizers:

Abigail Lynch, U.S. Geological Survey, National Climate Adaptation Science Center, [email protected]
Devin Bartley, Michigan State University
T. Douglas Beard, USGS-NCASC
Steven Cooke, Carleton University
Ian Cowx, Hull International Fisheries Institute
Simon Funge-Smith, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Sui Phang, The Nature Conservancy
William Taylor, Michigan State University

Salmon are central to the economic, cultural, and spiritual existence and identity of peoples who live, work, and play in the temperate regions of our planet. oday, salmon populations distributed in lower latitudes struggle to adapt to rapidly changing environmental conditions in freshwater, estuarine, and marine environments. Concurrently, populations in higher latitudes are shifting their range to compensate for loss of optimal habitat, resulting in reorganizations of trophic pathways and community interactions. The proposed program will feature talks related to salmon ecology, hatchery production, adaptive management, stock assessment, and indigenous knowledge addressing the challenges, opportunities, and case studies needed to ensure persistence of these populations for future generations. In this session, a diverse group of scientists, traditional knowledge keepers, and policy-makers will share their perspectives regarding the what, why, and how we can care for these remarkable species in an increasingly uncertain climate.

Organizer:

Gary Morishima, Quinault Management Center, [email protected]

Aquaculture-aided fisheries enhancement, conservation, and restoration initiatives have long been pursued worldwide and are receiving renewed attention in the context of adaptation to global environmental change. Experience with such initiatives shows that, while some make important contributions to fisheries management and conservation, others are ineffective, damaging, or have not been evaluated, yet continue regardless. Therefore, careful and responsible approaches to developing new and reforming existing initiatives are needed, balancing opportunity and need with appropriate caution, rigorous evaluation, and adaptive management. Rapid advances in scientific understanding and availability of powerful planning and assessment tools put such approaches within reach, but their practical implementation has proved extraordinarily challenging. This roundtable brings together a diverse international panel of aquaculture, fisheries management, conservation, and governance scientists and practitioners to grapple with the question: How can we work towards more effective implementation of responsible approaches to aquaculture-aided fisheries enhancement, conservation, and restoration?

Organizers:

Kai Lorenzen, University of Florida, [email protected]
Seth White, Oregon Hatchery Research Center/Oregon State University
Hannah Harrison, Dalhousie University
Neil Loneragan, Murdoch University

This session invites participants to apply their knowledge to practical problem solving by contributing to a resource that will guide decarbonization planners and policy makers in harmonizing emissions-reductions objectives with the objective of supporting fishery ecosystems and the services that depend on them. Participants will review and assemble input collected through an expert elicitation exercise to develop a synoptic framework that qualitatively assesses the known and potential tradeoffs and synergies between a wide range of decarbonization solutions (e.g., emissions reductions in the energy, transportation, agriculture, and industrial sectors, as well as land-based, ocean-based, and engineering-based carbon removal practices) and the ocean, estuarine, and freshwater ecosystems that support fishery-related ecosystem services (food provision, livelihood, traditional cultural value, and recreation).

Organizers:

Sarah Schumann, Shining Sea Fisheries Consulting, [email protected]
Patrick Sullivan, Cornell University
Jynessa Dutka-Gianelli, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Linda Behnken, Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association
Alison Bates, Colby College