News

OceanCanada has just released a video of Dr. Natalie Ban, University of Victoria, speaking about the importance of ocean sustainability for coastal communities.

This paper reviews the major themes and contributions of this Special Issue in light of a broader social science literature on how to conceptualize small-scale fisheries, the role of the state in facilitating or limiting neoliberalism, and the failure of neoliberal policies to improve conservation. It concludes with a look at ways in which neoliberalism is being undermined by emerging alternatives.

The Coastal Ocean Research Institute and the Vancouver Aquarium are pleased to invite nominations for the 2017 Coastal Ocean Awards.

Recipients are honoured for their invaluable contributions to understanding, conserving, and communicating the diverse and irreplaceable coastal ocean ecosystems of western Canada and the species that inhabit them.

University of Winnipeg award-winning academic filmmaker and Associate Professor (Geography) Dr. Ian Mauro is heading to Marrakesh, Morocco later this week to speak at an international conference on Indigenous Knowledge and Climate Change. The conference is hosted by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the French National Centre for Scientific Research in partnership with the Indigenous Peoples of Africa Coordinating Committee (IPACC) and Tebtebba. It will bring together Indigenous peoples, scientists and policy-makers from around the world to engage in a dialogue about Indigenous knowledge and climate change impacts, mitigation and adaptation.

Rashid Sumaila and Fraser Taylor will represent OceanCanada at DFO's "Building an Ocean Science Alliance Workshop" - February 22 and 23, 2017, Ottawa

Why should we all care about the sustainability of the Global Ocean? In a nutshell, we need to care because in many ways our ocean and the animals living in it are our lives. Our current interactions with the ocean are, in general, not sustainable, and this lack of sustainability is very costly. Why are people interacting in an unsustainable manner with the Global Ocean and what can we do about it? What are the economic and equity consequences? Come learn more about the problems confronting the Global Ocean, hear suggestions on how to get our oceans on to a sustainable pathway and engage in a community discussion about this critically important topic.

Marine eutrophication refers to an ecosystem response to the loading of nutrients, typically nitrogen (N), to coastal waters where several impacts may occur. The increase of planktonic growth due to N-enrichment fuels the organic carbon cycles and may lead to excessive oxygen depletion in benthic waters. Such hypoxic conditions may cause severe effects on exposed ecological communities. The biologic processes that determine production, sink, and aerobic respiration of organic material, as a function of available N, are coupled with the sensitivity of demersal species to hypoxia to derive an indicator of the Ecosystem Response (ER) to N-uptake. The loss of species richness expressed by the ER is further modelled to a marine eutrophication Ecosystem Damage (meED) indicator, as an absolute metric of time integrated number of species disappeared (species yr), by applying a newly-proposed and spatially-explicit factor based on species density (SD). The meED indicator is calculated for 66 Large Marine Ecosystems and ranges from 1.6 × 10−12 species kgN−1 in the Central Arctic Ocean, to 4.8 × 10−8 species kgN−1 in the Northeast U.S. Continental Shelf. The spatially explicit SDs contribute to the environmental relevance of meED scores and to the harmonisation of marine eutrophication impacts with other ecosystem-damage Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) indicators. The novel features improve current methodologies and support the adoption of the meED indicator in LCIA for the characterization of anthropogenic-N emissions and thus contributing to the sustainability assessment of human activities.

Canadian Technical Report of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 3179

Under what conditions can an aboriginal fishing community keep a commercial fishery closed because of persistent low stock abundance when the federal government insists on opening it to commercial fishing? This paper explores a decades long effort by the Haida Nation to protect local herring stocks on Haida Gwaii through a precautionary approach to commercial fishing, recently resulting in a Federal Court-granted injunction that prevented the Canadian Minister of Fisheries and Oceans from opening a commercial herring fishery on Haida Gwaii in 2015. The successful effort by the Haida Nation to protect herring stocks ultimately required a combination of strategies involving confrontation, negotiation and litigation that occurred across two management scales (local and coast-wide) and two levels of dispute resolution. Strategies were successful as a result of four key factors: (a) ongoing conservation concerns about probable harm to herring populations, (b) the existence of aboriginal rights that raises standards for federal government consultation and accommodation, (c) an existing negotiated co-management agreement between the Haida and Canada about the area where most herring stocks are located, and (d) strategic interactions among local and coast-wide forums where herring closures were debated.

This article compares the law and policy frameworks for protecting marine species at risk in Australia and Canada. The sea of practical challenges is examined, including achieving listing of threatened commercial species; attaining timely and effective recovery planning; and identifying and protecting critical habitats.