Shifting Paradigms and Improving Decision-Making for Marine Systems Under Change

Over 40 million people around the world derive at least part of their livelihoods from fishing, and fish and other marine products are a significant source of animal protein for about 1 billion people. Yet these livelihoods are under pressure as such marine social-ecological systems, defined to include biophysical and human components of marine ecosystems, are expected to be significantly impacted by the combined effects of globalisation and climate change, and their interactions with direct human activities. Anticipated impacts to the biophysical systems include changes in distributions of fish and invertebrates; changes in abundances of marine populations; and changes in the species composition of marine communities. Potential impacts to human fishing communities include pressure to fish more intensively, migrations to follow the fish, and economic and social restructuring. What are the policy and management needs of such coupled marine social-ecological systems that can help them adjust to a world of increasing uncertainty and change? We present these issues in the context of the findings from a 15 year international program: the Global Ocean Ecosystem Dynamics (GLOBEC) program. We review the key concepts and changes in understanding of how marine ecosystems work and respond to environmental and human forcing that evolved during the GLOBEC period (1995-2010). These include increased understanding of how ecosystems are structured and how they function, and of how physical, biological, and human components interact with each other and with changing marine environments and ecosystems. We identify the management implications and policy needs of these findings, taking into account issues relating to policy development such as mis-matches of space and time scales, differences in national approaches, and dealing with (and making decisions under) uncertainty. The overarching goal is to understand the processes affecting, and to develop polices that strengthen, the capacities of coupled marine social-ecological systems to adapt to expected and unexpected future global changes.