Suchergebnisse

The concept of sustainable fishing is well ingrained in marine conservation and marine governance. However, I argue that the concept is deeply flawed; ecologically, socially and economically. Sustainability is strongly related, both historically and currently, to maximum long-term economic exploitation of a system. Counter-intuitively, in fisheries, achieving this economic exploitation often relies on government subsidies. While many fish populations are not sustainably fished biologically, even 'sustainably harvesting' fish results in major ecological changes to marine systems. These changes create unknown damage to ecosystem processes, including carbon capture potential of the ocean. The spatial scale of commercial fishing processes can also lead to social and food security issues in local, coastal communities that rely on fish for dietary needs. A radical alternative proposal is provided to the current situation. Ultimately, offshore fishing should be stopped completely and fish catches should rely instead on inshore fisheries. While such an approach may require a change in thinking and human behaviour regarding fish, I demonstrate that there are many benefits of this approach, including ecological, social and to local coastal economies, and few negatives, although management measures and coastal marine protected areas to protect vulnerable species and habitats would still be required. As such, the approach suggested is much more akin to a holistic definition of sustainability or 'prevention of ecological harm', rather than the maximum long-term exploitation of an ecosystem which is an underlying assumption of much fisheries and conservation research. While the suggestions in the study would benefit from further ecological, social and economic modelling, any movement towards restricting offshore catches should provide some degree of the benefits detailed.

We currently face several interlinked environmental crises, including climate change, habitat destruction and biodiversity loss. However, many governments seem unwilling to take strong and immediate action to address these threats, preferring to promote neoliberal approaches to allow consumers and the general public to make environmentally friendly choices. This is despite neoliberal approaches being much less likely to be successful than government leadership, taxation, subsidies, and legislation in addressing environmental issues. In this study, we examine public perception of environmental threats and solutions to these threats in a survey mainly completed in the UK. Climate change is seen as the biggest issue, likely due to recent activist campaigns and subsequent media attention on the issue. Neoliberal attitudes, such as green consumer choices to environmental concerns, do still dominate in a series of possible presented solutions, and they score more highly than lifestyle changes, such as changing diet. However, when questioned specifically about plastic pollution, government intervention to ban all unnecessary plastic scored very strongly, indicating a shift from a consumer-driven response. Furthermore, most participants think they are at best only partly "doing their bit" to protect the environment. The results demonstrate that the public is aware that not enough is happening to protect the environment and provide evidence that there is willingness for stronger government intervention to address environmental issues; however, there is potential resistance to major lifestyle changes.

Ocean plastic is a contemporary focal point of concern for the marine environment. However, we argue there are bigger issues to address, including climate change and overfishing. Plastic has become a focus in the media and public domains partly through the draw of simple lifestyle changes, such as reusable water bottles, and partly through the potential to provide 'quick fix' technological solutions to plastic pollution, such as large scale marine clean-up operations and new 'biodegradable' plastic substitutes. As such, ocean plastic can provide a convenient truth that distracts us from the need for more radical changes to our behavioural, political and economic systems, addressing which will help address larger marine environmental issues, as well as the cause of plastic pollution, i.e. over-consumption.

Evaluating potential effects of conservation and management actions in marine reserves requires an understanding not only of the biological processes in the reserve, and between the reserve and the surrounding ocean, but also of the effects of the wildlife on the wider political and economic processes. Such evaluations are made considerably more difficult in the absence of good ecological data from within reserves or consistent data between reserves and the wider marine environment, as is the case in much of mainland Ecuador. We present an approach to evaluate the effects of a wide range of possible management processes on the marine ecology of the Machalilla National Park, as well as that of the surrounding marine environments (including recently established reserves) and related socio-economic pressures. The approach is based on Bayesian belief networks, and as such can be used in the presence of sparse data from multiple and disparate sources. We show that currently there are no observable benefits of marine reserves to reef and fish community structure, and that high value (normally predatory) fish, which are sought by fishers and shark finners are frequently absent from reef systems. We demonstrate that there is broad similarity in ecological communities between most shallow marine systems, in or out of marine reserves, and predict there can be a strong effect from actions outside the reserve on what is present within it. We also show that establishing a stronger link between (responsible) ecotourism and the marine environment could reduce the need for income in other more destructive areas, such as fishing and particularly shark finning, and discuss ways that high value, low impact eco-tourism could be introduced.