The Spot Prawn Fishery The Spot Prawn Fishery - Basel Action ...

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The Spot Prawn Fishery: A Status Report
considerations, because the vast majority of economic
benefits from the fishery are held in the
future, and cannot be harvested without protecting
ecosystem health and developing sustainable
management systems.
Fisheries can be harvested sustainably or unsustainably.
They can be thought of as a stock of
short-term benefits or as a potentially infinite
flow of benefits. If, in the name of maximizing
profits or the bottom line, we harvest too many
fish or destroy critical marine ecosystems, we prevent
the potentially permanent, sustainable flow
of marine benefits that in the end provides society
with the greatest return. Human activities in the
spot prawn ecosystem must be regulated so as
not to destroy the ecosystem on which spot
prawns depend. It should be regulated to ensure
the sustainability not only of a single species, but
of the system as a whole. To this end, a “sea ethic”
should be adopted and integrated into decisionmaking
systems as a guiding principle (see
“Fostering a Sea Ethic” box).
The need for a discipline like Ecosystem
Health arose because of the
failure of the current economic paradigm
to sustain the natural environment
and the ecological and social
processes dependent on it.This is
disturbingly ironic for practitioners of
Ecosystem Health, as the ecosystem
is the very foundation of our economic
systems. Ecosystem Health is
inherently grounded in a paradigm
of protecting sustainability or restoring
it where it has been compromised.“The
goal of this dynamic
process [sustainable management] is
to protect the autonomous, self-integrative
processes of nature as an
essential element in a new ethic of
sustainability”(Costanza et al. 1992, p.
4). An ecosystem “is healthy and free
from ‘distress syndrome’ if it is stable
and sustainable—that is, if it is active
and maintains its organization and
autonomy over time and is resilient
to stress”(Costanza et al. 1992, p. 9).
“Distress syndrome”is used to
describe the irreversible process of
system breakdown that inevitably
leads to ecological collapse.
According to Ecosystem Health, a
ECOSYSTEM HEALTH
“healthy” system is valuable beyond
simply its consumptive or use values.There
are myriad examples of
where a narrow focus on short-term
economic requirements or strictly
utilitarian ecosystem values has led
to system collapse and inestimable,
often unrecoverable ecological, economic,
and sociocultural costs. Consider
the effects of the New-foundland
cod collapse.This fishery had
sustained coastal communities and
the marine environment in the
region for hundreds of years.The
effect of ecosystem collapse on the
region’s economy and ecology, not
to mention its spirit, was devastating.
Recovery (broadly defined) has
not yet happened, and is not predicted
or expected to occur any time
soon. Ecosystem Health is a vital tool
for avoiding these types of disasters.
It ensures that the complexity and
interconnectedness of the ecosystem
is recognized and evaluated in
a way that reflects and protects overall
system performance, not just a
desired ecological species or service.
Ecosystem Health is an important
characteristic of all natural ecosys-
The limited ecological information about the spot
prawn fishery and its ecosystems increases the risk
of fishery or ecosystem collapse. Avoidance of the
vast and often irreversible costs of collapse requires
a precautionary approach to spot prawn management.
The precautionary approach is discussed in
Section 1. Sound information about the spot prawn,
the ecosystem, fishing technology, fishing behavior,
and markets is an essential prerequisite for reducing
uncertainty and improving management. The
importance of ensuring adequate environmental
information is argued in Section 2. Clearly, sustainable
management requires that critical habitat is
protected and the environmental impacts of fishing
reduced to the lowest possible levels. In the case of
the spot prawn fishery, management must be systemic
and spatial in order to meet these needs.
This is considered in Section 3. The critical role
that marine reserve networks play in achieving precautionary
management, in protecting critical
marine habitats and ecological processes, and in
providing areas for information gathering and
research, is outlined in Section 4.
tems.“Since fast-changing human
cultures are embedded in largerscale,
slow-changing ecological systems,
we must develop policies
that allow human cultures to
thrive without changing the life
support functions, diversity, and
complexity of ecological systems”
(Costanza et al. 1992, p. 4). An Ecosystem
Health approach allows for
the necessary ecological-economic
integration—an acknowledgment
that ecological systems are a subset,
a foundation, of our economic
systems. To this end, five ecological
management axioms have been
offered as a framework for defining
and implementing an
Ecosystem Health approach to natural
resource management. These
include:
•The Axiom of Dynamism:Nature is
more profoundly a set of processes
than a collection of objects; all
is in flux. Ecosystems develop and
age over time.
•The Axiom of Relatedness:All
processes are related to all other
processes.
•The Axiom of Hierarchy:Processes
are not related equally but unfold
in systems within systems, which
differ mainly regarding the temporal
and spatial scales on which