A 2-day workshop on Social simulation of fisheries and coastal management held in Manchester, 6/7 June 2016.
A 2-day workshop on Social simulation of fisheries and coastal management held in Manchester, 6/7 June 2016
Details at: http://ssfcm.wordpress.com
At the Manchester Metropolitan University Business School, All Saints Campus, Oxford Road, Manchester, UK.
Keynote Lectures:
- Anthony Charles, Saint Mary’s University, Nova Scotia, Canada
- Volker Grimm, Department of Ecological Modelling, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Germany
People worldwide depend on fisheries and coastal ecosystems for their income and subsistence production needs. How these systems are managed and developed is therefore a critical question with sustainability, equity, poverty and health dimensions. Studies of the risks associated with the management of these systems are traditionally led by top-down approaches dominated by scientific and technical experts. However, in many cases opportunities are opening up for including plurality of perspectives in management and for decentralisation of decision-making. Increasingly, there are bottom-up study tools available to support this.
Agent-based models are well suited for applying systems approaches to the study of fisheries and coastal ecosystems and the options for management. Evidence, if it is needed, can be gained from a look at recent publications, work of scientific associations like ESSA and funding of collaborative projects (eg. SAF21) and increasing support from interdisciplinary programmes. Potential applications range across different aspects of fisheries and coastal management including for example: social and legal norms in coastal communities, applications of Ostrom’s suggestions for managing social commons, understanding trade-offs in coastal systems, coupling of social simulations and complex ecological models, simulations and games as public educational tools, participatory simulations of fisheries and coastal ecosystems, and other relevant development orientated research.