SEAwise report on social indicators to evaluate the social impacts of management strategies

The SEAwise project works to deliver a fully operational tool that will allow fishers, managers, and policy makers to easily apply Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management (EBFM) to their own fisheries. Human behaviour changes in response to management measures and understanding how management influences human behaviour is key to this aim. Further, the resulting social impact of management measures or other changes affecting the ecosystem are key to implementing EBFM for the full social-ecological system. This report demonstrates the topics necessary to cover in a comprehensive analysis at different, especially higher scale levels in the EU. For ecosystem based fisheries management, it is crucial to understand that fishers respond to management measures with their behaviour and that management measures impact different fleets and communities in different ways. The better we are at anticipate this before measures are taken, the better unintended consequences can be prevented. Modelling of fleet behaviour with adequate behavioural sub-models and linked fleet-fishing communities allow for such foresight which will help improve the effectiveness of policy while collecting and incorporating social data on stakeholder perspectives enhances the legitimacy and acceptance of fisheries policy and management processes and allows for the development of policies that are equitable and inclusive.

This deliverable demonstrates how these issues can be approached to derive a better understanding of social dynamics of fisheries and the way to full social impact assessments providing information about social and cultural factors that need to be considered in management decisions. We investigated the following topics in a case-by-case approach:

• ways to improve understanding of fisheries behaviour,
• ways to identify fishing communities and connecting them to fleets.
• how community profiles can be developed
• how to make use of other social census data and link that with data on fleets and coastal and fisheries communities to develop social vulnerability indices, fishing engagement and reliance of coastal communities indices.
• how social impact can change and how people are affected by asking people via different methods

By addressing these topics, this report contributes to a better understanding of how society is and can be impacted by fisheries.

Read more about the SEAwise project at https://seawiseproject.org/