The Ninth Larkin Lecture is a free lecture followed by a reception, both open to the public. On Wednesday March 25, at 11 am, Dr. Parma will lead a question and answer seminar in AERL 120, also open to all. The Q&A will be followed by a pizza lunch in the foyer. |
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Dr. Ana Parma
Ana Parma is an expert in fisheries modeling, assessment and management. She earned a PhD in Fisheries in 1989 from the University of Washington, and worked for 10 years as a stock assessment scientist at the International Pacific Halibut Commission in Seattle. In 2000 she returned to Argentina, her home country, to become a research scientist with the Argentina’s National Council for Scientific and Technological Research, working at a research center in Patagonia. With this move, the main focus of her work shifted from assessment and modeling of industrial fisheries to small-scale, sedentary reef and shellfish fisheries. She has been involved in the evaluation of spatially explicit management approaches in several artisanal fisheries in South America, with support from a PEW Fellowship in Marine Conservation and, currently, as a Guggenheim’s Fellow. Ana is also interested in fostering the implementation of transparent, science-based decision-making processes in fisheries management. In Patagonia, she is involved in advising the government on the management of shellfish and reef fisheries. She has participated as an independent scientist in many scientific and policy advisory groups, panels, and review committees in different countries and international organizations. She is currently a member of the Scientific Committee of WorldFish Centre, and of the advisory panel of the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna.
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Sustainability in small-scale fisheries: no recipes but one – play with the full deck.
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On the one side, assessment scientists have begun to investigate stock-assessment methods and harvesting strategies for data-limited situations. On the other, social scientists have advocated co-management to involve fishers in monitoring, decision-making and enforcement, provided that incentives are in place to promote a genuine interest in the long-term health of the resources. Clearly the management framework has to attend to both –the resource and the people. It is less clear what kind of institutions and management strategies will be most effective, under what conditions and at what scales. Co-management experience in small-scale fisheries comes mostly from tropical reef fisheries, in which local communities have been engaged in establishing marine protected areas. These fisheries differ sharply from the small-scale, export-oriented shellfisheries which predominate along the temperate coasts of Latin America. Yet, even within this cohesive subset, fisheries are so diverse that blanket solutions are unrealistic. In this lecture I will illustrate a variety of approaches by contrasting some commercial diving fisheries from Chile and Argentina. Although none of them is fully successful, progress has been achieved by introducing some radical changes in the assessment and management institutions. Mistakes have been made along the way, and in most cases their ecological consequences have been more easily reverted than their social consequences. Major lessons do not pertain to the specific tactics, but rather to some general principles: solutions need to be tailored to the specific nature of the resources and social dynamics, and institutions need to be established to provide regular feedback at the local and larger scales, not only about resource status but also about how humans respond to management interventions.