A commitment to implementation of Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management (EBFM) is set out across fisheries management policies and strategies. However, as elsewhere, operationalisation of EBFM in Europe has lagged behind, in part on account of gaps in our knowledge surrounding the complex and interlinked social and ecological dimensions of fisheries which EBFM seeks to balance and account for.
To address this, SEAwise has worked to deliver a fully operational tool that will allow fishers, managers, and policymakers apply EBFM to their fisheries. As part of this, this report details a framework for evaluation of the implementation of an ecosystem approach to fisheries – the SEAwise Ecosystem Based Management Assessment Framework for Fisheries.
SEAwise research
Building on the FAO’s “Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Implementation Monitoring Tool”, SEAwise’s framework has been designed to highlight where we have sufficient knowledge and structures in place to reliably guide management and its implementation and where such knowledge and structures are lacking, with aspects of EBFM grouped into three components: ability to achieve, ecological well-being and human well-being.
Utilising this framework, implementation of these components and their subcomponents were scored based on the process to: Identify priority objectives (I), the availability and width of knowledge needed to assess status (A), the ability to evaluate impacts of future drivers and management measures (E), the effective implementation of management measures (M) and the assessment of the degree to which objectives are attained (AO).
Confidence in the results is key to achieve social buy-in and thereby a change in the decisions made. In support of this, here we also suggest methods to link clearly defined objectives to transparent and unbiased assessments with an associated confidence in the results, and divide confidence into two parts: Certainty in the results and coverage of the assessed indicators across important components and proceed to score the confidence within each region and category.
This work has fed into the development of SEAwise’s tools, providing a framework for assessment, in support of EBFM.
Full report here.
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