Suchergebnisse

The Government of Bangladesh resolved its maritime boundaries in 2014, resulting in jurisdiction over ocean space equivalent to 80 percent of the country's terrestrial area. To encourage the development of this area and the resources it contains, the Government embraced the concept of a "blue economy" in its most recent development plan, as a broad label for all ocean-linked economic activities that are environmentally and socially sustainable. To support the Government's effort to translate its blue economy aspirations into operational policies, an accounting exercise was conducted to provide initial measures of Bangladesh's ocean-linked economic activity, as a baseline by which to set targets. The results suggest the contribution of ocean-linked economic activity in Bangladesh in 2014-2015 was just over 3% of national gross value added, derived relatively evenly from tourism and recreation, capture fisheries and aquaculture, transport and energy. The Government's intention to design blue economy policies will need to be supported by extending the analysis in this study to a full ocean economy satellite account, eventually adding measures of the economic value of marine ecosystem services and the costs of environmental degradation, as well as the status of the underlying stocks of natural capital.

The international development community is off-track from meeting targets for alleviating global malnutrition. Meanwhile, there is growing consensus across scientific disciplines that fish plays a crucial role in food and nutrition security. However, this 'fish as food' perspective has yet to translate into policy and development funding priorities. We argue that the traditional framing of fish as a natural resource emphasizes economic development and biodiversity conservation objectives, whereas situating fish within a food systems perspective can lead to innovative policies and investments that promote nutrition-sensitive and socially equitable capture fisheries and aquaculture. This paper highlights four pillars of research needs and policy directions toward this end. Ultimately, recognizing and working to enhance the role of fish in alleviating hunger and malnutrition can provide an additional long-term development incentive, beyond revenue generation and biodiversity conservation, for governments, international development organizations, and society more broadly to invest in the sustainability of capture fisheries and aquaculture. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1007/s13280-020-01451-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.