24 January 2006
United States The Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council in Honolulu concluded yesterday a four-day Ecosystem Social Science Workshop involving more than three dozen experts from the United States, Australia and the Pacific islands.
The social science workshop was the second in a series of three being conducted by the Council as it moves toward implementing ecosystem-based management strategies for offshore fisheries of the U.S. Pacific islands.
The overarching goal of the workshop was to identify the social science components needed to effectively support ecosystem-based approaches to marine resource management in federal waters surrounding Hawaii, Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands and the remote islands and atolls of Baker, Howland, Jarvis, Johnston, Midway, Palmyra, Wake and Kingman Reef. Among the workshop findings were the need to integrate biophysical aspects with socioeconomic and cultural aspects; to consider cultural appropriateness; to include social science research as well as communication and outreach; and to consider the ethics of intellectual property rights, e.g., when dealing with traditional knowledge.
The first workshop, held April 18-22, 2005, tasked 60 natural scientists with identifying the most effective ecosystem-based approaches to marine resource management that can be implemented based on current data and to determine what new data or models will required to advance ecosystem approaches in the long term. The scientists also helped to identify key issues pertaining to data, models and ecosystem indicators and provided a series of actions for each of the key issues. For example, they suggested that data will need to address the human dimension as well as environmental and ecological issues; that models will need to include multiple layers, such as hydrodynamics, biological communities, habitats and fishermen behavior; and that local and regional experts will need to develop appropriate ecosystem indicators separately for each geographic area.
A third Ecosystem Workshop, being planned for mid-2006, will synthesize the outcomes of the previous workshops to form Council policies on ecosystem-based approaches to fisheries management.
The Council in December 2005 approved the restructuring of its existing species-based Fishery Management Plans (FMPs) into place-based Fishery Ecosystem Plans (FEPs). While no substantive changes to the existing fishing regulations are being implemented at this time, the structural change will improve the Council's ability to incorporate specific ecosystem principles and strategies into the management of fisheries under its jurisdiction. The Council will be increasingly able to make fishery management decisions based on information about the ecosystem surrounding an area and not from information on the fisheries alone. Because an ecosystem-based management approach shifts the focus of fisheries management from species to places, the involvement of local resource users in the management process-including monitoring, research and traditional fishery practices-will also be enhanced.
This policies developed by the Ecosystem Workshops will provide guidance to the Council as it continues to incorporate ecosystem-based principles into these FEPs.
