Resource studies in relation to the development of African inland fisheries

The paper discusses relevance of studies on the resources to the decisions that have taken for the development of management of African inland fisheries. Particular emphasis is given to outlining the types of advice that can be provided by the biologist, without which the decisions taken can easily be wrong. The primary information concerns the magnitude of the potential yield from the resource, and how it compares with present catches. From this the possibilities for development can be assessed, or the need for management be determined. Methods of determining the potential, and the data used in their application are briefly reviewed. Because scientific advice on the resource is desirable as early as possible in the development of a fishery, simple but rather rough methods may be equally, if not more, valuable than more precise but more difficult methods

Advice on target fishing rates

Yield/recruit, Catch/effort

Accounting for the impact of conservation on human well-being

Conservationists are increasingly engaging with the concept of human well-being to improve the design and evaluation of their interventions. Since the convening of the influential Sarkozy Commission in 2009, development researchers have been refining conceptualizations and frameworks to understand and measure human well-being and are starting to converge on a common understanding of how best to do this. In conservation, the term human well-being is in widespread use, but there is a need for guidance on operationalizing it to measure the impacts of conservation interventions on people. We present a framework for understanding human well-being, which could be particularly useful in conservation. The framework includes 3 conditions; meeting needs, pursuing goals, and experiencing a satisfactory quality of life. We outline some of the complexities involved in evaluating the well-being effects of conservation interventions, with the understanding that well-being varies between people and over time and with the priorities of the evaluator. Key challenges for research into the well-being impacts of conservation interventions include the need to build up a collection of case studies so as to draw out generalizable lessons; harness the potential of modern technology to support well-being research; and contextualize evaluations of conservation impacts on well-being spatially and temporally within the wider landscape of social change. Pathways through the smog of confusion around the term well-being exist, and existing frameworks such as the Well-being in Developing Countries approach can help conservationists negotiate the challenges of operationalizing the concept. Conservationists have the opportunity to benefit from the recent flurry of research in the development field so as to carry out more nuanced and locally relevant evaluations of the effects of their interventions on human well-being

The development of fisheries and stock assessment of resources in the Southern Ocean

The paper describes the pattern of development of the fisheries in the Antarctic (roughly the area south of the convergence) in the light of statistics available to FAO. This data series starts with the 1969/70 season, but catches were very small before that. Total catches have fluctuated greatly, reflecting several distinct phases in the fishery, initially mainly on fish (Notothenia and Chaenocephalus), but with rapid increases in krill since 1978. Total catches were over half a million t in the 1979/80 season. For recent years complete data are available on catches by species and by subarea, but the more detailed data (including statistics of fishing effort) required for stock assessment are not available for some of the biggest fishing countries. As a result, reliable assessments of the state of the stocks cannot be made, but the historical patterns suggest that the large catches of fish represented the removals of accumulated stocks, and that only a relatively small annual catch can be sustained. No conclusions can be reached from the short period of significant krill catches, although the preliminary reports from the FIBEX surveys suggest that current catches have been only a small proportion of the standing stock. If the fish stocks have indeed been heavily fished, then management measures should be considered. This will require examination of the objectives of the measures (a pattern of "pulse fishing" may be more attractive than a steady but low annual catch), of the arrangements for providing scientific advice, and of the type of measures to be introduced (a limit on the number of vessels operating may be better than attempting to set a Total Allowable Catch)