Social-ecological timelines to explore human adaptation to coastal change

Through the construction of a socio-ecological timeline for the Porsanger fjord ecosystem, this article illustrates the different ways in which environmental and social–ecological changes have influenced the adaptations of rural households in coastal Sami communities in Finnmark, north Norway. The main finding is that, although environmental change in the form of seal invasions and dwindling fish stocks directly impacted the fisheries, the introduction of a new vessel quota system decisively changed adaptive capacity and coastal Sami household adaptation strategies. These changes represented a tipping point for the social–ecological system in the period between 1986 and 1990. It is thus important to discuss the ways in which governance systems may facilitate actions to adapt to climate and biodiversity change and foster sustainable rural livelihood systems in coastal Norway. Based on traditional and local ecological knowledge on the state of the ecosystem prior to the tipping point, two relevant actions to increase the resilience of the system were identified: ensuring the possibility of re-entry into fisheries as part of rural livelihood combinations, and ecological restoration of kelp beds. Flexible diversification of livelihoods allows exploitation of a range of adjacent species without large investments in a fossile fuel-driven fisheries economy. Investing in regrowth of macroalgae to foster cod nursery areas and increase carbon sequestration can be a relevant alternative for communities that are interested in contributing to climate change mitigation on a larger scale.publishedVersio

Found in translation: identifying ecosystem services through public consultation statements in a marine spatial planning process

There has been a widespread push to incorporate ecosystem services (ES) in research and policy-making, yet ES have remained an expert-driven discourse not well integrated into hands-on planning and management, particularly at the more local levels. We carry out a retrospective investigation of an inter-municipal marine spatial planning (MSP) process in Northern Norway, where the allocation of new aquaculture locations was a core issue. At this local/regional scale, the concept of ES is hardly known. Thus, our approach is to investigate the documents of public consultation, where different stakeholders operating at different scales respond to the proposed planning document. By analyzing and ‘translating’ the consultation statements into the ES nomenclature, we find a rich and diverse basis for ES identification especially at the local level and within cultural and supporting services. More than 208 different ecosystem services were identified, two-thirds of the total number of services at the local scale. This supports the debate in the ES-science community, which has suggested greater inclusion of plural and context-specific perspectives on people’s relationship to the environment. Our findings show that by doing so in MSP, municipal coastal planners may obtain tools that strengthen local democracy and include greater ES diversity and sustainability

New directions in Maritime and Fisheries Anthropology:

Maritime and fisheries anthropology is a mixture of different themes couched under various theoretical frameworks that straddle the humanities and the sciences. In this subject survey, I explore different thematic and theoretical strands of maritime and fisheries anthropology and illustrate broader changes in this subdiscipline since around the mid‐1990s. I also review developing and future thematic and theoretical research frontiers, and discuss their potential contribution to a public and actionable anthropology/scholarship that can better inform fisheries management and conservation. This is important because in the twenty‐first century, coastal peoples are facing socioeconomic and environmental challenges that are increasingly becoming hazardous. To create a more actionable discipline, anthropology needs to be more accessible, inform innovation, and recapture a more pluralistic scholarship that champions interdisciplinary work. This will require the consilience between the humanities and natural sciences for studying human–marine interactions more broadly and for protecting the marine environment