Enhancing Seafood Ethics and Sustainability: A Values and Ecosystem-based Management Approach

Project Information

eSEAS

Grant agreement ID: 753937

DOI

10.3030/753937

Project closed

EC signature date 14 March 2017

Start date 1 June 2017

End date 31 July 2019

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 208 400,40

EU contribution

€ 208 400,40

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITETET I BERGEN
Norway

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - eSEAS (Enhancing Seafood Ethics and Sustainability: A Values and Ecosystem-based Management Approach)

Reporting period: 2017-06-01 to 2019-05-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The global seafood industry is a vital source of food, livelihoods, culture, and income. Seafood supply is increasing, despite declining capture fisheries globally, due to significant advances in aquaculture, that is, the cultivation of aquatic organisms, which still relies on wild fish for feed. But seafood demand is also increasing, with a growing human population, affluence, and per capita consumption. Thus the sustainability of seafood systems has ethical implications, inter alia, for global food security, resource equity, and ecological integrity. Consumer demand for sustainable and ethical seafood, particularly in Europe and North America, is influencing the global market. But while NGO-driven certification schemes aid consumers in purchasing decisions, their benefits to the environment and small-scale producers are questionable.

The eSEAS project explores new ways of securing seafood sustainability by embedding values and ethics into marine resource management, policy, and governance. Decisions of how to manage, allocate, and reconcile conflicts related to marine resources are problems of both science and ethics. Scientific approaches to fisheries management are well developed, but ethical approaches to reconciling their inherent policy tradeoffs are nascent. Management goals are ultimately statements of values, but their explicit articulation is often absent in management frameworks. However, value considerations can aid decision-makers in resolving trade-offs that emerge at the science-policy nexus. An ethical approach offers an integrated approach to sustainability by making plural human values explicit to resolve ‘wicked problems’ stemming from value-based trade-offs and ethical dilemmas among diverse stakeholders and citizens. This can facilitate more inclusive, transparent, and accountable decision-making. Through public engagement and dissemination of transdisciplinary research, eSEAS is catalyzing a science-society dialogue and collective actions to enhance seafood ethics and sustainability.

eSEAS’ objectives are threefold: 1. to promote cutting-edge, transdisciplinary research in the nascent field of seafood ethics; 2. to develop three innovative multidisciplinary ‘fit-for-purpose’ deliberation and decision-support tools to enhance seafood ethics and sustainability; and 3. to implement ethical approaches to European management challenges, including the complex multi-jurisdictional Norwegian-spring spawning herring fisheries. Seafood ethics is defined as the empirical (descriptive and evaluative) study and normative reflection of values, value-based tradeoffs, and ethical dilemmas of stakeholders and citizens interacting across seafood value chains. By elucidating both facts and values, seafood ethics offers a deliberation and decision-support framework for sustainable and just fisheries management. This also can contribute to more ethical governance, which encompasses participatory, transparent, deliberative, and accountable decision-making that is designed to synthesize diverse sources of knowledge and to reconcile a plurality of values among stakeholders and citizens.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The eSEAS project has made visible the importance of values and ethics in management through its deliverables and dissemination activities. Seafood ethics is elaborated in a book chapter (in The Routledge Handbook of Animal Ethics) and forthcoming monograph (with Wiley) and peer-reviewed publications (in both scientific and ethics journals, notably Food Ethics). Three participatory tools were co-developed towards an ethical framework for management. First, a value- and ecosystem-based management approach (VEBMA) integrates value prioritizations and preferences of stakeholders and citizens with ecological modelling of alternative value-based management scenarios. VEBMA was applied to the Pacific herring fishery conflict in Canada (published open-access in PLOS ONE, Marine Ecology Progress Series, plus two book chapters) and the Norwegian spring-spawning (NSS) herring fisheries in Europe. Second, knowledge quality assessment (KQA) highlights multiple dimensions of uncertainty (e.g. technical, methodological, epistemic, and societal) to assess the quality of knowledge informing fisheries science and policy. The International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) scientific recommendations for NSS herring fishery policy were analyzed with KQA (in consultation with the ICES Secretariat). Third, an ethical framework for management strategy evaluation (eMSE) formally structures values elicitations, deliberations, and trade-off negotiations to inform policy choices among diverse modelled fishery management scenarios. These participatory tools, once refined by an extended peer community, can help resolve policy trade-offs and resource conflicts, enhancing ethical governance. eSEAS’ research results were disseminated to the scholarly community via oral presentations at conferences and seminars, organized workshops, and scientific publications. Public dissemination of eSEAS’ outputs, via the project website, Twitter, and upcoming video, will help raise awareness to catalyze a science-society dialogue and collective actions to enhance seafood ethics and sustainability.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Thus far, research into values from diverse disciplines, ranging from philosophy to biology, has focused on value definitions and categorizations, but not on identifying values and examining the process of valuing in context, where values often conflict and choice decisions are made. Similarly, qualitative fisheries research, largely from the social science community, has specified values to be important, but have not developed valuation approaches that identify stakeholder and citizen values and related them to scenarios of management. As a consequence, fisheries management is largely informed by quantitative metrics provided by ecology and economics, without consideration of broader societal values. That is, the absence of robust deliberation and decision-support tools has hampered progress in fisheries management and policy to sustain marine resources and reflect ethics. The human dimensions of fisheries have been described, but often without normative reflection and ethical analysis capable of reconciling resource conflicts and policy trade-offs. In post-normal science terms, fisheries are a classic case of fact uncertainty, value plurality, high stakes, and decision urgency that needs change.

eSEAS goes beyond the state-of-the-art by examining values in context from a transdisciplinary approach. As a consequence, the ethical tools are co-developed, concrete, and implementable at the science-policy nexus to facilitate ethically informed decision-making. They make explicit the values of marine resources to societal actors and include diverse sources of knowledge, from the natural and social sciences to indigenous and local ecological knowledge. Art and video help to communicate findings broadly to engage scientists, policy-makers, stakeholders, and citizens. Seafood ethics thus offers an integrated framework towards sustainable and just marine resource management by elucidating societal values, structuring deliberation processes, and negotiating policy trade-offs. As climate change induces species to shift ecologically and human populations to stratify socio-economically, practical ethics tools increasingly will be needed to reconcile incompatible values and interests.

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