Increasing knowledge on fisheries

Two weeks ago, the LICCI Fisheries Group  presented its new series of fisheries seminars to highlight the work of its team and provided a new forum for discussing research findings in fisheries.

For the first session, the event counted with the presentations of Dr André Carlo Colonese from the Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals (ICTA-UAB) and our teammates, Diego Salgueiro and Iratxe Rubio to discuss the multifaceted aspects of fisheries facing global changes.

Dr. Colonese opened the seminar talking about how cultural heritage can contribute to solve food security in coastal Brazil. This question was addressed by Colonese’s team as part of a collaborative research project supported by the British Academy Newton Mobility Grants (2015). They found that traditional “camboas“, indigenous fish traps, represent a critical source of food for low-income families, thus contributing significantly to the resilience of these coastal communities. However, camboas users often do not identify themselves as indigenous, nor do they use camboas to maintain or reclaim a cultural identity. Overall, the camboas study exemplifies the complex integration of modern techniques and indigenous knowledge in Brazilian coastal small-scale fisheries.

From FOL, Diego and Iratxe presented their research lines in the framework of the CLOCK project on climate adaptation of fisheries. Diego shared his last research study focused on transformations in small-scale fisheries. In this work, Diego Salgueiro Otero, Michele L. Barnes and Elena Ojea explore the presence of livelihood diversification (here understood as an early sign of small-scale fisheries transformation) and identify the potential adaptive capacities that influence the individual transformative behavior of fishers facing climate change. Social ties, fishing experience, inequality and gender are some of the significant determinants of transformation that were discussed in this fisheries seminar. These results highly contribute to the aims of this work : (1) identify when small-scale fishers need to diversify livelihoods, (2) recognize social-ecological enablers and constrainers of transformation and (3) transfer this insights to the policy-making arena in order to facilitate climate change adaptation and promote mechanisms that prevent social-ecological traps.

Iratxe presented her research study about preferred adaptation and transformation responses of skippers to confront catch declines. The Spanish large-scale tuna freezer vessels were used as a case study. In the last 10 years, more than half of skippers used new technology to search for tunas and expanded their fishing area as adaptation actions. Skipper characteristics, such as importance given to intergenerational knowledge, perceptions of change in tropical tuna abundance, and years working in the current job, can explain the adaptation and transformation choices. These findings help understand the potential for adaptation behaviour by skippers involved in fisheries confronting catch declines.

We want to thank LICCI-fisheries team for inviting us to this inspiring event, it was a great experience for knowledge-sharing and building fishing research network.

Click here to see the LICCI post on this event.