Towards resilience-based management of marine capture fisheries

The world faces major risks in ensuring the sustainability and on-going socio-economic benefits from its marine capture fisheries (MCFs). Key drivers of risks for MCFs include: overharvesting, bycatch, illegal fishing, habitat loss and damage, climate change, and marine pollution. These risks threaten the livelihoods of the hundreds of millions of households and the nutrition of billions of people who depend on fish as a key source of protein. Resilience-based management offers an approach to respond to risks. Here, we review how might resilience contribute to the sustainability of fish stocks and evaluate the implications for net economic returns under alternative management strategies. Our focus is in three parts. First, we review: (1) rights-based management; (2) marine protected areas; and (3) ecosystem-based management. Second, we discuss how resilience-based management complements existing management approaches and describe the findings of emerging resilience research in four different fisheries. Third, we highlight the knowledge gaps and practice gaps that emerge from the review.