AFI-32806 Marine Resources Management

Course

Credits 6.00

Language of instruction:

English

Contents:

Living renewable resources in marine, coastal and large freshwater ecosystems provide food, income and employment in many parts of the world and have many non-consumptive use values. Impacts on these resources and ecosystems occur through fishing for food and income. But there are also direct and indirect impacts as tourism, sport fishing, wind energy parks, conservation measures such as Marine Protected Areas and pollution. Effective management of the use of marine ecosystems requires a social–ecological systems approach to analyse the problems arising from the interactions between the ecosystem and the decisions of resource users and managers. In this course management is treated as a continuous decision-making process. Based on realistic problem formulations by those involved in management ecologically sound, economically feasible and socially acceptable objectives are formulated. A strong focus of the course is on the collection and presentation of adequate information on fisheries, fish stocks, ecosystems and their biophysical and economic drivers. This requires both good science as well as good communication to help stakeholders to make sense of the available information. A final part of the management cycle is the analysis and evaluation of the effectiveness of management measures. You will obtain basic and advanced insights into fisheries, marine ecological and environmental-economic concepts and tools of analysis and apply these on specific management problems. You will practice these ecological and economic concepts and tools to resource use problems aided by a social-ecological systems framework, and apply them in case studies about distinct resource use problems in different ecosystems: oceans, tropical and temperate coastal ecosystems and large lakes. In these case studies you will analyse the problems, review information and design management advice considering the perspectives of users and other stakeholders with different objectives related to issues around exploitation and (biodiversity) conservation of marine living resources and their ecosystems.

Learning outcomes:

After successful completion of this course students are expected to be able to:
- apply the concept of the management cycle (a continuous decision-making process based on uncertain information) to problems arising from the use of marine and freshwater living resources;
- apply the main economic and ecological concepts, tools and models used in management of marine and freshwater living resources;
- apply the social-ecological system framework to analyse problems around the use of marine and freshwater living resources;
- analyse the trade-offs between conflicting objectives in marine resources management;
- identify strategies and measures to reconcile conflicting objectives;
- evaluate the effectiveness of measures taken to change and adapt marine resource use and management;
- assess a marine resources management problem and design, present and defend a potential solution.

Activities:

- follow lectures;
- perform tutorial exercises;
- analyse case studies.

Examination:

- written test with ca. 10 open questions on lectures and tutorials (65%);
- group report on case studies (35%).

Literature:

- course guide with de tailed study objectives;
- course book for both lecture and tutorials;
- internet site with lecture handouts and additional background information;
- assignments and self-test questions.