Climate change will pose new challenges to conserving Earth's natural ecosystems, due to incremental changes in temperature and weather patterns, and to increased frequency and intensity of extreme climate events. Addressing these challenges will require pragmatic conservation actions informed by sitespecific understanding of susceptibility to climate change and capacity of societies to cope with and adapt to change. Depending on a location's environmental susceptibility and social adaptive capacity, appropriate conservation actions will require some combination of: (1) large-scale protection of ecosystems; (2) actively transforming and adapting social-ecological systems; (3) building the capacity of communities to cope with change; and (4) government assistance focused on de-coupling communities from dependence on natural resources. We apply a novel analytical framework to examine conservation actions in five western Indian Ocean countries, where climate-mediated disturbance has impacted coral reefs and where adaptive capacity differs markedly. We find that current conservation strategies do not reflect adaptive capacity and are, therefore, ill prepared for climate change. We provide a vision for conservation policies that considers social adaptive capacity that copes with complexities of climate change better than the singular emphasis on government control and the creation of no-take areas.
Globally, fisheries are challenged by the combined impacts of overfishing, degradation of ecosystems and impacts of climate change, while fisheries livelihoods are further pressured by conservation policy imperatives. Fishers' adaptive responses to these pressures, such as exiting from a fishery to pursue alternative livelihoods, determine their own vulnerability, as well as the potential for reducing fishing effort and sustaining fisheries. The willingness and ability to make particular adaptations in response to change, such as exiting from a declining fishery, is influenced by economic, cultural and institutional factors operating at scales from individual fishers to national economies. Previous studies of exit from fisheries at single or few sites, offer limited insight into the relative importance of individual and larger-scale social and economic factors. We asked 599 fishers how they would respond to hypothetical scenarios of catch declines in 28 sites in five western Indian Ocean countries. We investigated how socioeconomic variables at the individual-, household- and site-scale affected whether they would exit fisheries. Site-level factors had the greatest influence on readiness to exit, but these relationships were contrary to common predictions. Specifically, higher levels of infrastructure development and economic vitality - expected to promote exit from fisheries - were associated with less readiness to exit. This may be due to site level histories of exit from fisheries, greater specialisation of fishing households, or higher rewards from fishing in more economically developed sites due to technology, market access, catch value and government subsidies. At the individual and household scale, fishers from households with more livelihood activities, and fishers with lower catch value were more willing to exit. These results demonstrate empirically how adaptive responses to change are influenced by factors at multiple scales, and highlight the importance of understanding natural resource-based livelihoods in the context of the wider economy and society.
Highlights► addresses the socio-economic impacts of aquaculture ► identifies why there is the gap in available knowledge and policies ► identifying the role of framing conditions for aquaculture development ► development of multi-dimensional assessment framework
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