By Julia Mason, Nereus Program fellow at Stanford University
There’s a tendency among conservation scientists to attribute the world’s environmental crises to the growing global population. Fisheries science is no exception—the issue of overfishing is often condensed to one of “too many fishers chasing too few fish,” leading to inevitable fisheries declines.
By Guillermo Ortuño Crespo, Nereus Program Fellow at Duke University
Due to their wide-ranging swimming behaviors, migratory fish, marine mammal, seabird and sea turtle species experience a variety, and an increasing amount, of anthropogenic pressures over the course of their lives. These threats, including climate change, overfishing, and marine pollution, combined with conservation strategies that largely fail to consider spatial connectivity over the life cycle, are resulting in declining populations worldwide.
The global oceans provide hundreds of millions of people with livelihoods, food and nutritional security, and are crucial for employment, economic development, and export earnings in many countries and coastal communities around the world. The status of these important ecosystems and its fisheries resources are however rapidly declining, following decades of unsustainable exploitation patterns, overcapacity, and unsuccessful governance interventions.
Caddell delivered his presentation — “After the Thaw: Ice Retreat and the Emerging Regulation of Newly Exposed Marine Areas” — during the first session of the conference. He discussed Antarctic ice shelves, anthropogenic activities and management, as well as future issues with thawing land areas and collaboration on these issues between the Antarctic and Arctic.
The Nereus Program hosted a side event at the 3rd Preparatory Committee Meeting on Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ), March 27 to April 7 at the UN Headquarters, in New York. The side event entitled “Adjacency: How legal precedent, ecological connectivity, and traditional knowledge inform our understanding of proximity” was held on April 4.
The goal of this postdoc is to advance the research agenda on transnational seafood corporations in relation to global stwewardship of marine social-ecological systems, and integrate such developing understanding in the Nereus Program. The candidate will be working in close collaboration with governance scientists from diverse disciplines and is expected to primarily explore ways to integrate data and methods from organisational science and finance.
Dellmuth received her PhD in political science from the University of Mannheim. Her research as part of her fellowship focused on understanding when, how and why advocacy groups mobilize and gain influence in global marine governance. She used political science and economic tools to enhance understanding of the linkages between advocacy groups, domestic politics, and international governmental organizations in global marine governance.
Nereus Director (Policy) Yoshitaka Ota will attend the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Honolulu, Hawaii, from September 1st to September 5th. He will organize a Knowledge Cafe on Governance on…
A new source of publicly accessible data on fishing vessel activity is providing unprecedented insight into the scope of fishing in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ) and governance gaps therein. This emerging source of ocean ‘big data’ can help quantify who is fishing where in ABNJ, can enhance cooperation between competent authorities, and can help States and competent organizations implement policies and management measures related to the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction.
“What has been interesting about the Nereus fellowship right from the beginning is that we are all here, all engaged in this monumental challenge of predicting the future of marine fisheries and the global oceans. My whole PhD has been grappling with that question- how do you say something valuable around the future of the oceans from a governance perspective?” says Andrew Merrie, Nereus Fellow at Stockholm University.
