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

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1.1 Manage According to the Precautionary Approach A recent paper by the Commission of European Communities (2000) argues that the precautionary approach is necessary due to the history of difficult fisheries management decisions being “rejected, delayed or watered down” on grounds of uncertainty as to their necessity. Uncertainty has regularly been used as a stalling tactic that has resulted in the “necessary evidence only becoming available after the event it intended to prevent takes place.” Precautionary management of spot prawns is essential not only because of the uncertainty surrounding biology and management, but also because of: •life history characteristics, such as low spot prawn fecundity •the lack of basic ecological information in most areas •the susceptibility of the species to recruitment overfishing because the catch includes the “entire female size range and the largest males” •the “hierarchical spatial structure of shellfish stocks,” which lends itself to patchy distribution they are organized. •The Axiom of Creativity:The autonomous processes of nature are creative and represent the basis for all biologically based productivity. The vehicle of that creativity is energy flowing through the systems, which in turn find stable contexts in larger systems, which provide sufficient stability to allow self-organization within them through repetition and duplication. •The Axiom of Differential Fragility: Ecological systems, which form the context for all human activities, vary in the extent to which they can absorb and equilibrate human-caused disruption in their autonomous processes. (Costanza et al. 1992, p. 6) The process of defining Ecosystem Health for a given ecological system requires the identification of essential health indicators, endpoints, and parameters.These criteria must reflect the complexity of ecosystems.They must recognize the inherent uniqueness of ecological systems and the fact that natural systems are dynamic—continually changing, shifting, and adapting in response to external, often- times unpredictable, conditions. The development of effective criteria is a challenge. Some guidelines include: •Health should not depend on criteria based on the presence, absence, or condition of a single species. •Health should not depend on a census or even inventory of large numbers of species. •Health should reflect our knowledge of normal succession or expected sequential changes that occur naturally in ecosystems. •While the optimal health measures should be single-valued (monotonic) and vary in a systematic and discernible manner, ecosystem health does not have to be measured as a single number. Single numbers compress a large number of dimensions (one for each type of item) to a point that geometrically has zero dimensions. •Health measures should have a defined range. •Health criteria should be responsive to change in data values but should not show discontinuities even when values change over several decades. •Health measures should have known statistical properties, if The Spot Prawn Fishery: A Status Report and a vulnerability to localized depletions (Orensanz et al. 1998). Precautionary management does not mean a zerorisk management approach but a directive to proceed with caution. The level of precaution applied is a function of the amount of information available; precaution increases as the amount of knowledge decreases. Precautionary management eschews the “resource-by-resource, area-by-area approach” that, according to Orensanz et al. (1998), inevitably leads to reactive, ad hoc management decisions that are unable to predict or prevent serial depletion and recruitment overfishing. While the precautionary approach has been enshrined in international law, it is only in recent years that policymakers and managers have begun grappling with how one would actually go about managing a fishery with precaution. The FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries (FAO 1995c) details how and when the precautionary approach should be applied to a fishery: these are relevant. •Criteria for health assessment must be related and hierarchically appropriate for use in ecosystems. •Health measures should be dimensionless or share a common dimension. •Health measures should be insensitive to the number of observations, given some minimum number of observations. (Costanza et al. 1992, p. 8) The Ecosystem Health approach offers some important and effective tools for ensuring the long-term sustainability of the marine environment. While the health model is an innovative and useful tool for thinking about natural systems, the science is still in its development stages.The Ecosystem Health professional, unlike the health professional, does not have at his or her disposal “a compendium of known diseases and stress with associated symptoms and signs” (Costanza et al. 1992, p. 10). It is important that this type of research is carried out and the work of categorizing ecological stresses and their effects on the ecosystems (symptoms) begun, so that “appropriate treatments” for ailing systems can be determined. 47
48 The Spot Prawn Fishery: A Status Report •States should apply the precautionary approach widely to conservation, management, and exploitation of living aquatic resources in order to protect them and preserve the aquatic environment. The absence of adequate scientific information should not be used as a reason for postponing or failing to take conservation and management measures. •In implementing the precautionary approach, States should take into account uncertainties regarding the size and productivity of the stocks, biological reference points and stock condition in relation to them, the level and distribution of fishing mortality, and the impact of fishing activities including discards, on non-target and associated or dependent species, the ecosystem, and fishing communities and economies. •In the case of new or exploratory fisheries, States should adopt as soon as possible cautious conservation and management measures including catch limits and effort limits. Such measures should remain in force until enough data have been collected to allow assessment of the impact of the fisheries on the long-term sustainability of the stocks, whereupon conservation and management measures based on that assessment should be implemented. The latter measures should, if appropriate, allow for the gradual development of fisheries. •If a natural phenomenon has a significant adverse impact on the status of living aquatic resources, States should adopt conservation and management measures on an emergency basis For each of us, then, the challenge and opportunity is to cherish all life as the gift it is, envision it whole, seek to know it truly, and undertake—with our mind, hearts and hands— to restore abundance. It is said that where there is life there is hope, and so no place can inspire us with more hopefulness than the great, life-making sea—that singular wondrous ocean covering the blue planet (Safina 1998, p. 440). Aldo Leopold, one of the central fig- FOSTERING A SEA ETHIC ures in the history of the conservation movement, recognized the importance of developing an ethical system to guide humans’ interactions with the land. He came to the conclusion that “An action is right when it tends to preserve the integrity and stability and beauty of a living community, and wrong when it tends to do otherwise”(Leopold 1949).“Rightness”implies a sense of balance—a value system that recognizes that there is a limit to what humans can “take”from the land. The fact that humans are land- to ensure that the fishing activity does not exacerbate adverse impacts. States should also adopt such measures on an emergency basis where fishing activity presents a serious threat to sustainability of such resources. Measures taken on an emergency basis should be temporary and should be based on the best scientific information available. The UN FAO Technical Paper 379 (1995a) details the use of precautionary reference points and management systems. The data requirements for establishing precautionary reference points can be considerable. The paper recommends that the following factors be taken into account: •established management procedures and the impact of these systems on the stock •the range of management tools available •robustness of the assessment process •the species’ stock structure •the nature of predator-prey relationships •identification of ecological or environmental relationships that affect recruitment and growth •distribution of the stock with respect to the distribution of the fishery •key spawning, rearing, and juvenile areas •migration patterns •effect of population density on growth and/or distribution •nature of the stock-recruitment relationships •extent of recruitment variability, and factors contributing to that variability •the nature of the fleet—number of vessels, level of effort, species targeted, selectivity, etc. •possibility of catastrophe and the likelihood of recovery dwelling creatures means that our ethical systems have co-evolved with our relationship to the land, and are thus more advanced than our relationship and system of marine values. It is time that we extend ethics beyond the high-tide mark. It is time that our millenniaold relationship to the oceans is honored; it is time that we apply Leopold’s ideas about ethics to the marine realm. In Song for the Blue Ocean (1998), Safina writes,“A sea ethic would allow society to extend its sense of community responsibility beyond the needs of humanity to encompass the whole, living seascape.”
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