News

Protected areas (PAs) remain central to the conservation of biodiversity. Classical PAs were conceived as areas that would be set aside to maintain a natural state with minimal human influence. However, global environmental change and growing cross-scale anthropogenic influences mean that PAs can no longer be thought of as ecological islands that function independently of the broader social-ecological system in which they are located. For PAs to be resilient (and to contribute to broader social-ecological resilience), they must be able to adapt to changing social and ecological conditions over time in a way that supports the long-term persistence of populations, communities, and ecosystems of conservation concern. We extend Ostrom’s social-ecological systems framework to consider the long-term persistence of PAs, as a form of land use embedded in social-ecological systems, with important cross-scale feedbacks. Most notably, we highlight the cross-scale influences and feedbacks on PAs that exist from the local to the global scale, contextualizing PAs within multi-scale social-ecological functional landscapes. Such functional landscapes are integral to understand and manage individual PAs for long-term sustainability. We illustrate our conceptual contribution with three case studies that highlight cross-scale feedbacks and social-ecological interactions in the functioning of PAs and in relation to regional resilience. Our analysis suggests that while ecological, economic, and social processes are often directly relevant to PAs at finer scales, at broader scales, the dominant processes that shape and alter PA resilience are primarily social and economic.

OceanCanada News​

Lessons for assessing and building adaptive capacity of coastal social ecological systems Charlotte Whitney and Nathan Bennett

On November 19-20, 2015, the OceanCanada Pacific Working Group hosted a workshop on adaptive capacity to climate change, a theme with application to specific OceanCanada research objectives within both the Pacific region and nationally. The workshop brought together several researchers from across the OceanCanada Partnership, including Natalie Ban, Ian Perry, Nancy Turner, Jessica Blythe, Derek Armitage, William Cheung, Elena Finkbeiner, Eddie Allison, Maery Kaplan-Hallam, Rashid Sumaila, Kai Chan, and Lily Yumagulova.

Fishing takes place in the high seas and Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) of maritime countries. Closing the former to fishing has recently been proposed in the literature and is currently an issue of debate in various international fora. We determine the degree of overlap between fish caught in these two areas of the ocean, examine how global catch might change if catches of straddling species or taxon groups increase within EEZs as a result of protection of adjacent high seas; and identify countries that are likely to gain or lose in total catch quantity and value following high-seas closure. We find that <0.01% of the quantity and value of commercial fish taxa are obtained from catch taken exclusively in the high seas, and if the catch of straddling taxa increases by 18% on average following closure because of spillover, there would be no loss in global catch. The Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, would decrease from 0.66 to 0.33. Thus, closing the high seas could be catch-neutral while inequality in the distribution of fisheries benefits among the world’s maritime countries could be reduced by 50%.

International declines in marine biodiversity have lead to the creation of marine protected areas and fishery reserve systems. In Canada, 164 Rockfish Conservation Areas (RCAs) were implemented between 2003 and 2007 and now cover 4847.2 km² of ocean. These reserves were created in response to widespread concern from fishers and nongovernmental organizations about inshore rockfish (genus Sebastes) population declines. We used the design principles for effective common-pool resource management systems, originally developed by Elinor Ostrom, to assess the social and ecological effectiveness of these conservation areas more than 10 years after their initial implementation. We assessed the relative presence or absence of each design principle within current RCA management. We found that 2 of the 11 design principles were moderately present in the recreational fishery. All other design principles were lacking for the recreational sector. We found that 2 design principles were fully present and 5 were moderately present in the commercial sector. Four design principles were lacking in the commercial sector. Based on this analysis, we highlight 4 main areas for management improvement: (1) create an education and outreach campaign to explain RCA rules, regulations, boundaries, and the need for marine conservation; (2) increase monitoring of users and resources to discourage noncompliance and gather the necessary data to create social buy-in for marine conservation; (3) encourage informal nested governance through stakeholder organizations for education and self-regulation (e.g. fisher to fisher); and (4) most importantly, create a formal, decadal RCA review process to gather stakeholder input and make amendments to regulations and RCA boundaries. This information can be used to inform spatial management systems both in Canada and internationally. This analysis also contributes to a growing literature on effectively scaling up small-scale management techniques for large-scale, often federally run, common-pool resource systems.

This episode features Director and Professor at the Fisheries Economics Research Unit at UBC, Dr. Rashid Sumaila. He explained to us the threat of over-fishing and how taxpayer money is currently being used to actually support the over-fishing that is occurring in Canada. Siting recent research he gives a great understanding of where the fishing industry is at and how long we have before things get even worse. Reality check!

There is an urgent need to increase global renewable energy production as a method of lowering greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in order to avoid the more devastating effects of climate change and ocean acidification. The latest figures from the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), suggest that the international community must reduce anthropogenic GHG emissions by 40 to 70 percent from 2010 levels by 2050, and should aim for near zero emissions by 2100. This would likely keep temperature change below 2°C relative to pre-industrial levels, and would therefore reduce the risk of predicted effects of climate change, such as inland flooding, extreme weather events, food security, and the loss of marine and coastal ecosystems and biodiversity.

Marine life is being affected by changes in ocean conditions resulting from changes in climate and chemistry triggered by combustion of fossil fuels. Shifting spatial distributions of fish species is a major observed and predicted impact of these oceanographic changes, and such shifts may modify fish community structure considerably in particular locations and regions. We projected future range shifts of pelagic marine fishes of the Northeast Pacific shelf seas by 2050 relative to the present. We combined published data, expert knowledge, and pelagic fish survey data to predict current species distribution ranges of 28 fish species of the Northeast Pacific shelf seas that occur in the epipelagic zone and are well-represented in pelagic fish surveys. These represent a wide spectrum of sub-tropical to sub-polar species, with a wide range of life history characteristics. Using projected ocean condition changes from three different Earth System Models, we simulated changes in the spatial distribution of each species. We show that Northeast Pacific shelf seas may undergo considerable changes in the structure of its pelagic marine communities by mid-21st century. Ensembles of model projections suggest that the distribution centroids of the studied species are expected to shift poleward at an average rate of 30.1 ± 2.34 (S.E.) km decade−1 under the SRES A2 scenario from 2000 to 2050. The projected species range shifts result in a high rate of range expansion of this group of species into the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea. Rate of range contraction of these species is highest at the Aleutian Islands, and in the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem. We also predict increasing dominance of warmer water species in all regions. The projected changes in species assemblages may have large ecological and socio-economic implications through mismatches of co-evolved species, unexpected trophic effects, and shifts of fishing grounds. These results provide hypotheses of climate change impacts that can be tested using data collected by monitoring programmes in the region.

On August 26, 2014, The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada announced its formal support for the OceanCanada Partnership.