You can come across them on any walk along the beach, small pieces of torn fishing nets. But they are just the tip of the iceberg. There are probably tens of thousands of tons of ghost nets on the bottom of the Baltic Sea or they got stuck on shipwrecks. These nets not only destroy the sometimes historic wrecks with their weight, but are also a deadly trap for fish, porpoises, seals and birds, which get caught in them and die miserably.
This talk dwells upon different research paradigms such as Hypothesis-oriented, Assessment-oriented, Action-oriented, Systems-oriented, Social adaptive (similar to V2V) frameworks. The motivation behind this talk is to discuss research that goes beyond the conventionally defined domains of science; the relevance of non-expert based knowledge to offer solutions to complex social and environmental problems, and the research that can bring significant impacts on people's behavior by small endeavors.
China not only has the largest fishing fleet in the world, but with 1.4 billion people is also a huge market of people who like to eat fish and seafood. Europe as the foremost import market of such commodities clearly has an interest to develop its relations with China in ways that respect the interests of both sides. The Fisheries Committee of the European Parliament gathered to discuss the role of China in global fisheries in its session on Wednesday 25 January 2023.
Big relief and a lot of excitement - those were the predominent sensations for participants heading for the 2023 edition of the 'love your ocean' platform coordinated by the German Ocean Foundation at the international Boot fair in Düsseldorf, Germany. After a two-year break due to the pandemic Mundus maris was happy to be on board together with Quantitative Aquatics, the scientific non-profit running the global databases FishBase, SeaLifeBase and Aquamaps. We were in good company with other organisations committed to ocean literacy, recovery and protection and contributing to the UN Decade for Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, 2021-2030.
In the video available to visitors to the Fiumicino Ship Museum next to Rome's international airport, the archaeologist Renato Sebastiani states that without the ancient port of Ostia the greatness of imperial Rome would not have been possible, a metropolis of about one million inhabitants. Certainly a statement that can be shared, but it is only one side of a coin that seems to have many, well more than two. And here we have to open a necessary digression.
This was the last webinar in the 2022 series of monthly events of the research platform V2V (Vulnerability to Viability) to which Mundus maris is a partner. Dr. Friday Njaya, Director of Fisheries in Malawi, presented the key lessons from the development of Transboundary Fisheries Management (TFM) on Lake Chiuta. The lake is shared between Malawi and Mozambique. Since the mid-1990s, fisheries co-management was introduced on the Malawian side of the lake by establishing Beach Village Committees (BVCs).so as to address any issues through greater participation.
The rotating presidency of the long-standing G7++ gatherings of country representatives interested in the maritime safety of the Gulf of Guinea convened its Plenary session this year in Abidjan under the shared lead of Côte d'Ivoire and Germany. The presidency had invited this time also a few representatives of civil society with particular emphasis on the 'Blue Economy'. The SWAIMS project to which Mundus maris members had repeatedly contributed in previous occasions in the form of presentations and meeting participations had proposed Prof. Stella Williams of Mundus maris as one of those speaking for civil society.
Sustainability at Scale: Connecting Small-Scale Fishers for the Mobilization of Local Knowledge, Solutions and Capital Opportunities - thus is the full title of the V2V November webinar presented by Dr. Maria José Espinosa, CEO of the Mexican non-profit organisation Comunidad y Biodiversidad (COBI). Through their field work, COBI found and documented that small-scale fishers and their organisations are flexible and make daily decisions to adapt to local, national, and international stressors.
"Leading by examples", thus was the motto of the African regional gathering of the 4th World Small-Scale Fisheries Congress convened in Cape Town, South Africa, 21-23 November 2022. This congress concluded the series of five regional conferences, one for each continent, towards the end of the International Year of Artisanal Fisheries and Aquaculture (IYAFA 2022). Hosted by the University of the Western Cape together with the Fisheries Department and organised by the Too Big To Ignore global research platform led by Ratana Chuenpagdee, the congress attracted some 160 participants mostly on site, but also offered online participation. Moenieba Isaacs of UWC (pictured) chaired the opening together with Shehu Akintola of Lagos State University.
Over the past decade, small-scale fisheries in Uruguay have been undergoing a governance transition from top-down management towards co-management, involving the creation of consultative councils composed of fishers and government actors. In this talk delivered in the monthly webinar series of the V2V research platform, 28 October 2022, Micaela Trimble explores the challenges of this bumpy process as well as some multistakeholder participatory processes with transformative potential for the viability of the sector.
The book (in French) covers the West African Economic and Monetary Union - WAEMU - member states and is produced within the framework of a vast programme called the "Concerted Fisheries and Aquaculture Development Plan" adopted by WAEMU in 2007. Its main objective is is to improve the quality of statistical data, an essential factor for sustainable management, based on scientific knowledge, for small-scale maritime and inland fisheries.