By Loretta B Manele
To be able to thrive in the marine ecosystem, healthy fish need healthy oceans.
Dr Eva Plaganyi, Senior principal research scientist and research group leader based at CSIRO Environment, Australia stressed on the sentiment when contributing to a session at the Honiara Summit late last month.
She voiced that healthy fish will need healthy oceans to sustain and this is related to addressing plastic pollution in the ocean and ensuring a healthy habitat so fish can be conserved and sustained.
Plaganyi said one of the programmes they are rolling out is on the amount of plastic pollution there is in the ocean.
“My organisation is particularly passionate about trying to help with managing, assisting, as well as reducing some of that plastic pollution.”
Plaganyi stated that if we don’t look after the habitat for the fish, we won’t be able to specifically conserve them.
She said this on a broader scope, applies to habitat conservation including things like river inputs and estuaries where a number of fish rely on estuaries for their life cycle and to keep generating those sustainable yields.
Moreover, in this case, Plaganyi stated that we’re increasingly getting squeezed in the marine space by conflict between different sectors.
She said this is because of the need for water for different industries whether it is agriculture or mining.
“We need to improve the way in which we holistically look at how can we manage healthy fish stocks in conjunction with some of these other industries.”
She also stated that there needs to be transformation in our food systems so that collectively, we’re optimising the food security benefits and reducing the carbon footprint and the ecological footprint of those food production systems.
Plaganyi pointed out that this is an area where science can help with reducing the waste and helping ensure we’re protecting the habitats for fish species.
“There’s been a big move to ecosystem approaches to fisheries, which considers multi-species components, as well as ecosystem-based fisheries management, which more broadly considers interactions with other sectors.
Those considerations to frame our fisheries management are also really important, given, as I mentioned, the growing blue economy and the need to balance between conservation and sustainable utilisation.
That’s also an area where our scientific models are able to integrate some of the complexity of all of these different interactions and help make transparent what are the trade-offs in different management strategies, which is really important for us to proactively plan how we go ahead into the future.”
Plaganyi pointed out that to support sustainable fisheries going forward, we need to look after the industries and fisheries themselves and with extreme events increasingly impacting fisheries around the world, we don’t yet have mature marine insurance such as parametric methods that can help support those industries and communities to continue focusing into the future.
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