13.9 State of the World Fisheries and Aquaculture – FAO

The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2014 208 and production scales. The key features of the EAFEAA process as proposed in FAO Technical Guidelines 10 are: • Develop a management plan for a specific areasystem with operationally defined boundaries. • Envisage stakeholder participation at all levels of planning and implementation. • Consider all key components of a fisheryaquaculture system ecological, social-economic and governance while also taking external drivers into account. • Identify and prioritize sustainability issues through a formal process e.g. risk assessment. • Reconcile management objectives related to environmental and social economic aspects, including explicit consideration of trade-offs. • Establish an adaptive management process to adjust the tactical and strategic performance based on past and present observations and experiences. • Use “best available knowledge” as the basis for decision-making, including both scientific and traditional knowledge, while promoting risk assessment and management and the notion that decision-making should take place also where detailed scientific knowledge is lacking. • Build on existing management institutions and practices. As part of this process, managers and stakeholders should identify, discuss and agree on the broad objectives and values that the management system is to address. This step is important as different stakeholders have different values, which can lead to conflicts and inefficient management systems. Values should be nested and coherent across scales and sectors. The sections below examine some of the main model assumptions and how to enhance the ability of the fisheries and aquaculture sector to meet the demand for fish. The international community has to reconcile environmental sustainability objectives with the growth in fish production that is expected to occur as a result of market forces while enhancing food security and alleviating poverty. Although widely recognized at high political levels e.g. Rio+20, in practice these objectives remain only loosely and superficially linked. Capture fisheries and aquaculture operate at different scales, from local production systems to the global marketplace, and their institutional and legal frameworks also exist at different scales. Often, there is very poor policy coherence across scales and between stated policy goals and market-driven processes. Resource managers will also face increasingly competitive use of aquatic ecosystems and having to choose among options for the greatest good for the greatest number of people. An ecosystem approach facilitates the incorporation of multiple objectives into resource management through a risk-based framework. It can also create the enabling environment necessary for the sustainable production and governance of aquatic ecosystems. Sustaining capture fisheries production There is a concern that the current stable global catches may not be sustained. Trends show that the percentage of overfished stocks is increasing and that the percentage of underfished stocks is decreasing see Figure 13 on p. 37. Thus, what is commonly referred to as “stability” in global catches is the result of fisheries moving to underfished resources as others become overfished and depleted. This is happening at various scales, including at the global scale where long-distance fleets move to new fishing grounds as the old ones are depleted. A recent trend has been for open-ocean fishers to move into deeper waters as near-shore stocks decline. 11 Marine capture fisheries on conventional resources have apparently reached their aggregate maximum level of contribution at the price of sequential overfishing. The concern is that if this trend is not halted, there could be a decline in global catches as new fishing grounds become exhausted. None of the outlook studies conducted to date has considered this aspect.