About this Research Topic

Background

A new horizon arises in the management of fisheries resources worldwide: an approach based on the principles of complexity, when addressing problems whose nature involves different social, ecological and economic perspectives. These new ideas have moved from conventional approaches to the management of natural resources, to the incorporation of components that are integrated into highly complex systems with deep uncertainties. Coupled Socio-Environmental Systems (SSE) are characterized by having very close and diverse connections between social and ecological components, as well as multiple interactions across various scales in the spatial and temporal domains. For this reason, novel strategies are needed to manage them. However, the basic understanding of their nonlinear and highly interconnected behavior is still lacking. It is possible that, of the primary productive systems, the most complex is the fishing system since it involves the use of resources difficult to observe and monitor. This is why the use of mathematical models has been a traditional tool in the management of fishery resources and it is in that sense that it is recognized that there is a long tradition of modeling of fishery resources in the world. However, far from seeking the integrative approach initially proposed for its management, the advances in segmented strategies have remained with few changes for a long time, thus leading to a distance with the sustainability of the activity. This sectorized approach has not been able to reverse the negative trend of many fisheries worldwide, so, as in other primary production systems, a new paradigm in fisheries management is considered necessary, which is the incorporation of the socio-ecological approach, where issues such as nonlinear ecological dynamics and complex human decision making are receiving more attention. The SSE approach is maturing as a discipline within the Sustainability Sciences, incorporating ideas from other interdisciplinary fields such as resilience or complex systems research. In this context, we seek to make a compilation of the results that have been achieved to date on the management of fisheries that mark the meaning of this new approach.

Keywords: sustainability, complex-systems, socio-environmental-systems, new-approach-fisheries, governance-fisheries

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