GPIAtlantic report assesses Nova Scotia's fisheries and marine environment Shunpiking Online Vo.6 No.3

HALIFAX (7 January 2009) - A new GPIAtlantic report, Fisheries and the Marine Environment in Nova Scotia: Searching for Sustainability and Resilience, has been issued, along with a media release, on the GPIAtlantic website (www.gpiatlantic.org).

The report updates and extends a previous GPIAtlantic report published in 2002. The new report analyses the direction in which the province's fisheries and marine ecosystems are heading, highlighting key ecological, socioeconomic and institutional factors that must be monitored by government agencies and considered by decision-makers. The report lays out clear trends, concerns and areas in which the authors assert that action is needed to ensure sustainable prosperity along our coasts into the future.

Focusing on a set of nine "headline indicators", the report covers both ecological and human aspects, including economic, social, environmental, and community perspectives.

The study first looks at trends in two standard fishery-related biological indicators: the abundance of fish in the sea (measuring the quantity and value of fish stocks) and the size of fish (as a measure of health and quality of individual fish). A third fishery-related trend is measured for the first time in this Nova Scotian context - the mean trophic level of harvested species (to measure whether we are "fishing down the marine food web - relying more and more on species low in the food chain. The report also assesses two broad ecological indicators: the state of marine "species at risk" (endangered species) and the extent of shellfish closures along our coasts (a measure of marine environmental quality).

One of its key if unsurprising findings is that "The over-fishing that depleted many of Nova Scotia's formerly abundant commercial fish stocks, and led to the infamous cod collapse of the 1990s, has left the province's fishing industry vulnerable to the current economic crisis - as is being seen today in the lobster fishery.

On the human side, "a key indicator of resilience and overall health in the fishery, the age profile of fishers, shows a worrying trend; the average age of fishers has been increasing considerably over time, indicating that young people are finding it hard to enter the industry."

the GPIAtlantic report looks at trends over time in two conventional measures: fishery employment and fishery Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The report also examines two new measures of well-being in fisheries: the age structure of fishers (which relates to fishery and community resilience) and the level of governmental expenditures applied to managing fisheries and improving marine environmental quality.

The report is authored by Anthony Charles, Chris Burbidge, Heather Boyd and Amanda Lavers

The report is available at: http://www.gpiatlantic.org/pdf/fisheries/fisheries_2008.pdf

The media release can be accessed at: http://www.gpiatlantic.org/releases/pr_fisheries_2008.htm