Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

SDG14 - Life Below Water: Towards Sustainable Management of Our Oceansdescribes the dependence of human beings on shore and marine resources and highlights how oceanic life sustains the livelihoods of people living in coastal areas, affects global economy and plays a significant role for making earth habitable. Chapters give accounts of human interventions on oceanic life and demonstrate the various ways in which the sustainability of the oceanic system is threatened. Looking to sustainable management and protection of marine and coastal ecosystems, chapters investigate best practices initiated in different countries, address issues such as overfishing and the legal framework for conservation and sustainable use of oceans and their resources.

The problems related to the process of industrialisation such as biodiversity depletion, climate change and a worsening of health and living conditions, especially but not only in developing countries, intensify. Therefore, there is an increasing need to search for integrated solutions to make development more sustainable.

Today, important fisheries have become commercially extinct and others are threatened. The dominant presence of this scientific uncertainty indicates the need to rethink the existing fishery management system. This book examines in detail the underlying root causes of our failure to successfully manage the fishery resources of the world's oceans and offers alternative solutions that will allow human society to maximize the long term benefits form ocean resources. This monograph will be of great interest to academics in economics, business, environmental sciences and sociology, in addition to the core market of natural resources management, environmental policy, resource conservation, economic development and geography. In addition, it is relevant for those working in fisheries management for government bodies and NGOs.

The world's stocks of wild fish continue to decline, making the task of finding innovative, sustainable and socially acceptable methods of fisheries management more important than ever. Several new approaches from around the world have proved to be successful in stemming the decline whilst increasing fish catches, and under the editorship of McClanahan and Castilla this international team of authors have looked to these examples to provide the reader with carefully chosen case studies offering practical suggestions and solutions for problem fisheries elsewhere.