Innovative approaches for reducing by-catch in small-scale fisheries (Workshop)

The ocean provides around 170 million tonnes of fisheries and aquaculture products for human use each year, accounting for 17% of animal protein consumed globally. Unfortunately, this high dependency on fisheries resources creates a threat to marine megafauna – such as turtles, whales, dolphins and sharks – which are frequently caught as non-target catch in global fisheries. There is a need to find innovative solutions for balancing marine conservation objectives with the important role of fisheries in food security and livelihoods.

This 90-minute interactive workshop will explore this issue, bringing in a diversity of voices from researchers and practitioners working at the front-line of these fisheries management challenges in India, Indonesia and Bangladesh. We will open with a series of short presentations to introduce the by-catch problem. This will be followed by a group exercise in which participants will be given real-world fisheries case studies and asked to explore creative solutions for reducing by-catch. Participants will be encouraged to think inter-disciplinarily about novel approaches that explore socio-economic issues, ecological constraints and technical measures. We will wrap up with feedback and conclusions, with a focus on models for success for scaling-up action in 2020 and beyond, and can be applied for similar challenges across different sectors.

Speakers in this session are:

• Hollie Booth, University of Oxford/WCS
• Trisha Gupta, Dakshin Foundation
• Benaya Simeon, WCS Indonesia
• Vidlia Rosady, Manta Watch
• Alifa Haque, University of Oxford