Sharing the benefits of sustainable fisheries: from global to local legal approaches to marine ecosystem services for poverty alleviation

This project is a Blue Skies project, funded through the ESPA / NERC Programme.** This inter-disciplinary project, titled “Sharing the benefits of sustainable fisheries: from global to local legal approaches to marine ecosystem services for poverty alleviation”, explores whether and how the legal tool "fair and equitable benefit-sharing," as part of the ecosystem approach, can be integrated with the concept of marine ecosystem services to reduce the systemic poverty of coastal marine societies who depend upon marine resources for both food security and income generation.

In the context of sustainable fisheries management, the international legal concept of "fair and equitable benefit-sharing," provides a useful lens to connect different sources of inequity in the regulation and management of marine ecosystems that lead or contribute to poverty: it allows to look at the links and misalignments between the legal and governance constraints/opportunities for developing States (inter-State dimension) and those for small-scale fishing communities (intra-State dimension) to benefit from marine ecosystem services.

(ESPA: http://www.espa.ac.uk, and
https://www.espa.ac.uk/projects/ne-m007650-1)

In particular this project has resulted in several publications, in particular a Special Issue in Marine Policy Journal, focusing on:
SDG synergies for sustainable fisheries and poverty alleviation.
See: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2017.08.020