Ecoviability for small-scale fisheries in the context of food security constraints

This paper applies a stochastic viability approach to a tropical small-scale fishery, offering a theoretical and empirical example of ecosystem-based fishery management approach that accounts for food security. The model integrates multi-species, multi-fleet and uncertainty as well as profitability, food production, and demographic growth. It is calibrated over the period 2006–2010 using monthly catch and effort data from the French Guiana's coastal fishery, involving thirteen species and four fleets. Using projections at the horizon 2040, different management strategies and scenarios are compared from a viability viewpoint, thus accounting for biodiversity preservation, fleet profitability and food security. The analysis shows that under certain conditions, viable options can be identified which allow fishing intensity and production to be increased to respond to food security requirements but with minimum impacts on the marine resources.

Managing Fisheries in the context of an integrated policy: the importance of spatial issues

A variety of conservation policies now frame the management of fishing activity and so do also the spatial planning of different sectorial activities. These framework policies are additional to classical fishery management. There is a risk that the policies applying on the marine system are not coherent from a fisheries point of view. The spatial management of fishing activity at regional scale has the potential to meet multiple management objectives, on a habitat basis. Here we consider how to integrate multiple objectives of different policies into integrated ocean management scenarios. In the EU, European Directives and the CFP are now implementing the ecosystem approach to the management of human activity at sea. In this context, we further identify three research needs: • Develop Management Strategy Evaluation (MSE) for multiple-objective and multiple-sector spatial management schemes • Improve knowledge on and evaluation of functional habitats • Develop spatially-explicit end-to-end models with appropriate complexity for spatial MSE The contribution is based on the results of a workshop of the EraNet COFASP.