Evolution and future of the sustainable seafood market

The sustainable seafood movement is at a crossroads. Its core strategy, also known as a theory of change, is based on market-oriented initiatives such as third-party certification but does not motivate adequate levels of improved governance and environmental improvements needed in many fisheries, especially in developing countries. Price premiums for certified products are elusive, multiple forms of certification compete in a crowded marketplace and certifiers are increasingly asked to address social as well as ecological goals. This paper traces how the sustainable seafood movement has evolved over time to address new challenges while success remains limited. We conclude by exploring four alternative potential outcomes for the future theory of change, each with different contributions to creating a more sustainable global seafood supply

Secure sustainable seafood from developing countries. Require improvements as conditions for market access

Demand for sustainably certified wild-caught fish and crustaceans is increasingly shaping global seafood markets. Retailers such as Walmart in the United States, Sainsbury's in the United Kingdom, and Carrefour in France, and processors such as Canadianbased High Liner Foods, have promised to source all fresh, frozen, farmed, and wild seafood from sustainable sources by 2015 (1, 2). Credible arbiters of certifications, such as the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), require detailed environmental and traceability standards. Although these standards have been met in many commercial fisheries throughout the developed world (3), developing country fisheries (DCFs) represent only 7% of ~220 total MSC-certified fisheries (4, 5). With the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reporting that developing countries account for ~50% of seafood entering international trade, this presents a fundamental challenge for marketers of sustainable seafood (see the photo)

Animal rationality and implications for resource management: the case of biological reserves for moose and pine

Forest management, Animal behavior, Animal rationality, Q29,

Efficiency, costs and trade-offs in marine reserve system design

With marine biodiversity conservation the primary goal for reserve planning initiatives, a site's conservation potential is typically evaluated on the basis of the biological and physical features it contains. By comparison, socio-economic information is seldom a formal consideration of the reserve system design problem and generally limited to an assessment of threats, vulnerability or compatibility with surrounding uses. This is perhaps surprising given broad recognition that the success of reserve establishment is highly dependent on widespread stakeholder and community support. Using information on the spatial distribution and intensity of commercial rock lobster catch in South Australia, we demonstrate the capacity of mathematical reserve selection procedures to integrate socio-economic and biophysical information for marine reserve system design. Analyses of trade-offs highlight the opportunities to design representative, efficient and practical marine reserve systems that minimise potential loss to commercial users. We found that the objective of minimising the areal extent of the reserve system was barely compromised by incorporating economic design constraints. With a small increase in area (< 3%) and boundary length (< 10%), the economic impact of marine reserves on the commercial rock lobster fishery was reduced by more than a third. We considered also how a reserve planner might prioritise conservation areas using information on a planning units selection frequency. We found that selection frequencies alone were not a reliable guide for the selection of marine reserve systems, but could be used with approaches such as summed irreplaceability to direct conservation effort for efficient marine reserve design

Agricultural landscape structure and invasive species : The cost-effective level of crop field clustering

Invasive pests in agricultural settings may have severe consequences for agricultural production, reducing yields and the value of crops. Once an invader population has established, controlling it tends to be very expensive. Therefore, when the potential impacts on production may be great, protection against initial establishment is often perceived to be the most cost-effective measure. Increasing attention in the ecological literature is being given to the possibility of curbing invasion processes by manipulating the field and cropping patterns in agricultural landscapes, so that they are less conducive to the spread of pests. However, the economic implications of such interventions have received far less attention. This paper uses a stochastic spatial model to identify the key processes that influence the vulnerability of a fragmented agricultural landscape to pests. We explore the interaction between the divergent forces of ecological invasion pressure and economic returns to scale, in relation to the level of clustering of crop fields. Results show that the most cost-effective distances between crop fields in terms of reducing food production impacts from an invasive pest are determined by a delicate balance of these two forces and depend on the values of the ecological and economic parameters involved. If agricultural productivity declines slowly with increasing distance between fields and the dispersal range of the potential invader is high, manipulation of cropping structure has the potential to protect against invasion outbreaks and the farmer can gain benefit overall from maintaining greater distances between fields of similar crops