Statement of Purpose for Fisheries
The Open World project aims to better understand systemic problems in fisheries management by developing new multi-scale perspectives. Fisheries collapse is a global concern, affecting world food supply and economic prospects for fishing communities and impacting ecosystem services and endangered species. Management structures have struggled with the perverse economic incentives, multiple scales of uncertainty, and unintended policy consequences. Policies and dynamics at regional scales, including climate, trade, and migration networks, have a complicated relationship with local choices and behaviors. By improving our understanding of how scales and systems interact, we hope to reveal opportunities for more sustainable management.
This analysis starts with a spatially distributed and institutionally disaggregated model. For fish ecosystems, we hope to build models at both ecosystem and regional levels, allowing these to interact and each to inform possible scenarios. To model fisheries management, we will consider decision-making at the fishing community level, regional policy-making level, and the influences of various institutions and their decision-making procedures. To build these models, we plan to engage with fishing groups, scientists, policy-makers, and other stakeholders.
One goal of this research is to identify and understand potential policy leverage points. By unraveling the systemic forces which make fisheries management so intractable, we hope to also find opportunities for policy approaches that avoid opposition or counterproductive side effects. The work will start with a particular region and fishery, but the framework we build will allow models representing different fish species and policy mechanisms to be easily "plugged-in" to explore different contexts.
Our first goal is to compose an application for the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems grant as a Large CNH Interdisciplinary project, due November 20. More information is available at http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=13681
