Linked sustainability challenges and trade-offs among fisheries, aquaculture and agriculture

Abstract

Fisheries and aquaculture make a crucial contribution to global food security, nutrition and livelihoods. However, the UN Sustainable Development Goals separate marine and terrestrial food production sectors and ecosystems. To sustainably meet increasing global demands for fish, the interlinkages among goals within and across fisheries, aquaculture and agriculture sectors must be recognized and addressed along with their changing nature. Here, we assess and highlight development challenges for fisheries-dependent countries based on analyses of interactions and trade-offs between goals focusing on food, biodiversity and climate change. We demonstrate that some countries are likely to face double jeopardies in both fisheries and agriculture sectors under climate change. The strategies to mitigate these risks will be context-dependent, and will need to directly address the trade-offs among Sustainable Development Goals, such as halting biodiversity loss and reducing poverty. Countries with low adaptive capacity but increasing demand for food require greater support and capacity building to transition towards reconciling trade-offs. Necessary actions are context-dependent and include effective governance, improved management and conservation, maximizing societal and environmental benefits from trade, increased equitability of distribution and innovation in food production, including continued development of low input and low impact aquaculture.

Twenty‐first‐century climate change impacts on marine animal biomass and ecosystem structure across ocean basins

“…However, the general trends in biomass change projected in the polar oceans by DBEM did not differ from most of the other ecosystem models, suggesting broad agreement in the direction of projected changes over the coming century despite varying magnitudes. Overall, a general projected increase in total marine animal biomass in the Arctic and Southern Ocean, yet a decrease in the North and South Atlantic and Pacific and Indian Ocean may occur by the end of the 21st century under both emissions scenarios, which corresponds with the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report and other single‐ and multi‐model studies (Blanchard et al, ; Pörtner et al, ).…”

“…Over the coming century, these changes will have significant consequences for marine ecosystem structure and functioning as well as for ecosystem goods and services, such as the provisioning of food from fisheries and aquaculture, the production of oxygen, and storage of anthropogenic carbon (Pörtner et al, ; Vichi et al, ). Several studies have projected future changes in marine animals at the scale of large marine ecosystems (LMEs; Blanchard et al, ), coastal seas (Barange et al, ), and the global ocean (Blanchard et al, ; Cheung et al, ; Galbraith, Carozza, & Bianchi, ; Lotze et al, ), yet how the ecological changes may play out in different ocean basins has not been comprehensively explored.…”

Ecosystems say good management pays off

“…It is possible to go further still and move to fisheries practices more oriented to deliver on sustainable multispecies yields (Garcia et al., ; Jacobsen, Gislason, & Andersen, ). While this is contentious (Burgess, Diekert, Jacobsen, Andersen, & Gaines, ; Froese et al., ; Law, Plank, & Kolding, ; Pauly, Froese, & Holt, ), many of the fisheries in developing nations face the compound problem of: struggling with increasing populations and food insecurity (Blanchard et al., ); relying on mixed fisheries that land hundreds of species spanning the highest through to the lowest trophic levels; and being data‐poor with high levels of illegal or unreported fishing. The performance of the multispecies yield‐oriented approach (strategy K in Figures and ) indicates that total catches can be much higher under this strategy without a notable decline in performance (compared to the other management strategies) for most of the other indicators.…”

“…Given that 59% of all the large marine ecosystems and all the high seas FAO areas are under shared management, and there are already concerns over transboundary species (e.g., Thornton et al., ), these kinds of understandings will be important for managers located on one side or another of a jurisdictional divide. This will be particularly important given that it is likely that there will be jurisdictional differences in terms of food security (Blanchard et al., ), trade policy (Watson, Nichols, Lam, & Sumaila, ), research capacity (as captured by UNESCO statistics on the Researchers in R&D per million people; https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.SCIE.RD.P6?view=map), societal valuation of conservation (Balmford et al., ; do Paço, Alves, Shiel, & Filho, ; Schultz et al., ; Snyman, ), etc. Such differences may well even lead to tension or open conflict (McClanahan, Allison, & Cinner, ).…”

A protocol for the intercomparison of marine fishery and ecosystem models: Fish-MIP v1.0

“…Furthermore, formally-developed global scenarios representing projections of future fishing activity, management, and technological change are beginning to become available (e.g. Maury et al, 2017). When these become operationalized (made spatially-explicit in a format that is suitable for input into marine ecosystem models), such scenarios 15 will likely be used to replace the standardized run with constant 2005 catch or effort in future scenario model experiments.…”