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Under appropriate conditions, community-based fisheries management can support sound resource stewardship, with positive social and environmental outcomes. Evaluating indigenous peoples' involvement in commercial sea cucumber and geoduck fisheries on the central coast of British Columbia, Canada, we found that the current social-ecological system configuration is relatively ecologically sustainable according to stock assessments. However, the current system also results in perceived inequities in decision-making processes, harvesting allocations, and socioeconomic benefits. As a result, local coastal resource managers envision a transformation of sea cucumber and geoduck fisheries governance and management institutions. We assessed the potential robustness of the proposed institutions using Elinor Ostrom's common-pool resource design principles. Grounded in the region's legal, political, and historical context, our analysis suggests that greater local involvement in these invertebrate fisheries and their management could provide more benefits to local communities than the status quo while maintaining an ecologically sustainable resource. Our research highlights the importance of explicitly addressing historical context and equity considerations in social-ecological system analyses and when renegotiating the institutions governing common-pool resources.

While it may seem that the efforts of local governments have only a marginal impact on the global issue of climate change, local action can spread to generate large-scale change. Local action can inspire other communities to adopt policies, creating the potential to expand and form regional action on climate change. Furthermore, local policies can influence state and federal policies. This guide will walk you through a five-step framework that was developed from the results of a qualitative research study that explored how three Utah cities, Salt Lake City, Park City, and Moab, successfully adopted 100% renewable electricity resolutions.

Without widespread and immediate changes in human values and activities, massive tracts of natural habitat will be degraded to the detriment of those ecosystems, ecosystem services, and many threatened taxa—in the oceans and elsewhere. Despite this, the conservation movement has yet to devote much attention to the intentional project of widespread norm change. By one logic, the ecosystem services concept offers a means of integrating meaningful conservation into decision-making by diverse government and corporate actors, potentially normalizing conservation. But normalizing conservation would require not only the uptake of ecosystem-services concepts but also widespread changes in conservation practice and stewardship values—on a scale that far exceeds what we have witnessed to date. The concept of ecosystem services has potential for assisting such a societal transformation because it effectively puts a human face on environmental change, thereby enabling the extension of responsibility and morality into environmental arenas at all scales. Furthermore, cultural ecosystem services merit particular attention because of their contribution to the formation of attachments to particular places and to identities rooted in nature and conservation, which presents an opportunity to consolidate and shape deep motivations for lasting conservation. Realizing these two opportunities in a way that is both appropriate and effective, however, will require several important innovations and new institutions, which we propose here. One key step is to enlist a broad base of consumers and corporations in the funding of actions to mitigate the environmental impacts associated with their participation in global supply chains, via funding vehicles that are conspicuous, easy, enjoyable, and not too expensive. We describe a new initiative called CoSphere that strives to create such structures. With consolidated effort and explicit attention, conservation can become normalized—to the benefit of current people, future generations, and life on Earth. ; Science, Faculty of ; Non UBC ; Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES), Institute for ; Unreviewed ; Faculty ; Postdoctoral ; Graduate