Several decades ago, the efforts of public administrations were concentrated on developing fisheries and aquaculture and ensuring growth in production and consumption. Then, in the 1980s, as many resources became fully or overexploited, the attention of policy-makers began to focus instead on fisheries management, in addition to development of aquaculture. Aquaculture continues to expand, while marine capture fisheries – when summed together worldwide – seem to have reached a ceiling.

It is generally recognized that the ongoing availability of good quality natural resources and skilled work force are the two central pillars of a modern economy. This fact is recognized by senior decision makers every where and especially those managing the economies of the industrialized nations. But because of historically much stronger ties to the vast Canadian land mass and traditionally a resource-based economy, people and the governments in Canada, have been more aware of the direct linkages between a healthy biophysical environment and the good quality of life.

Given incontrovertible evidence that humans are the most powerful agents of environmental change on the planet, research has begun to acknowledge and integrate human presence and activity into updated descriptions of the world’s biomes as “anthromes”. Thus far, a classification system for anthromes is limited to the terrestrial biosphere. Here, I present a case for the consideration and validity of coastal anthromes. Every coastal environment on Earth is subject to direct and indirect human modification and disturbance.

A new report by IDMC and Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) offers the most comprehensive analysis to date on Israel's lethal enforcement of Access-Restricted Areas - (ARA) - live-fire zones imposed by the Israeli military forces on large swathes of the Gaza Strip.

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Continuing population and consumption growth will mean that the global demand for food will increase for at least another 40 years. Growing competition for land, water, and energy, in addition to the overexploitation of fisheries, will affect our ability to produce food, as will the urgent requirement to reduce the impact of the food system on the environment. The effects of climate change are a further threat. But the world can produce more food and can ensure that it is used more efficiently and equitably.

The increased integration of ecosystem service concepts into natural resource management places renewed emphasis on prediction and mapping of fish biomass as a major provisioning service of rivers. The goals of this study were to predict and map patterns of fish biomass as a proxy for the availability of catchable fish for anglers in rivers and to identify the strongest landscape constraints on fish productivity.

Addressing global fisheries overexploitation requires better understanding of how small-scale fishing communities in developing countries limit access to fishing grounds. We analyze the performance of a system based on individual licenses and a common property-rights regime in their ability to generate incentives for self-governance and conservation of fishery resources. Using a qualitative before-after-control-impact approach, we compare two neighbouring fishing communities in the Gulf of California, Mexico.

River ecosystems are driven by linked physical, chemical, and biological subsystems, which operate over different temporal and spatial domains. This complexity increases uncertainty in ecological forecasts, and impedes preparation for the ecological consequences of climate change. We describe a recently developed “multi-modeling” system for ecological forecasting in a 7600 km² watershed in the North American Great Lakes Basin.

Granting property rights in fisheries is assumed to provide incentives for sustainable resource exploitation. These rights might also open other income options for fishers, including some that go beyond the original objectives intended by authorities establishing the right. The opportunity for alternative uses is especially high if the details of these rights are not clearly identified.

Marine protected areas (MPAs) and spatial property rights (TURFs) are two seemingly contradictory approaches advocated as solutions to common property failures in fisheries. MPAs limit harvest to certain areas, but may enhance profits outside via spillover. TURFs incentivize local stewardship but may be plagued by spatial externalities when the TURF size is insufficient to capture all dispersal. Within a numerical model parameterized to a California marine species, we explore the economic and ecological effects of imposing MPAs on a TURF-regulated fishery.