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November 13, 2020
sprep-pa

People in wealthy, industrialized countries are used to finding their supermarket shelves fully stocked. Yet for a brief period early in the COVID-19 pandemic, some of those shelves emptied out, as panic drove shoppers to stockpile and supply chains were interrupted.

A global network of marine protected areas for food

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are conservation tools that are increasingly implemented, with growing national commitments for MPA expansion. Perhaps the greatest challenge to expanded use of MPAs is the perceived trade-off between protection and food production. Since MPAs can benefit both conservation and fisheries in areas experiencing overfishing and since overfishing is common in many coastal nations, we ask how MPAs can be designed specifically to improve fisheries yields.

Spawning potential surveys in Fiji: A new song of change for small-scale fisheries in the Pacific

Catastrophic overfishing of small-scale coastal fisheries through the Pacific poses a major threat to regional food security and biodiversity. Globally, approaches to fisheries assessment and management that were developed for industrial fisheries, are failing small-scale data-poor fisheries. The Pacific Community has called for a complete rethink of fisheries methodologies for the region; a “new song” of change for small-scale coastal fisheries. This article describes the application in Fiji of a new approach to facilitating coastal fisheries management reform.