Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
impact on profits and business in general, and may need to be managed to min-
imise impact on employment, local communities and institutional consequences.
So while some improvements may be readily achieved within the short term, others
will be long-term problems that have to be managed within the existing management
frameworks. Also, fishery and aquaculture systems typically have many interlock-
ing facets, and making a change in one aspect may have an impact on other areas,
and be difficult to resolve. For example, in a trawl fishery that has a high level of
bycatch of a protected species (such as a species of turtle, or seal), it may be feasible
to design and implement excluder devices in the nets to either avoid or eject the
bycatch species from the nets (DEH 2003). However, this generally will only be
readily accepted and adopted in a fishery if the excluder devices can be shown to
not greatly affect the catch rate of the target species sought by the fishery or greatly
affect profits and returns that could otherwise drive the more marginal fishers out
of the fishery.
If the returns and benefits potentially available to the industry from securing
certification for their products do not clearly outweigh the costs of complying
with the programme requirements and the cost of assessment, then there will be a
significant resistance to submitting for assessment and certification. To enable such
downsides to be both more acceptable and absorbed into business practices, the
implementation of any changes imposed on ventures that are seeking certification
or ecolabels should be reasonably matched to their capacity for reform, subject to
maximum times not being exceeded.
Conducting, for example, the research on the excluder devices, demonstrating
effects on catch rates, and then revising such rules and procedures that may apply
in a fishery to control all the participants can take many years. It is not sufficient to
simply demonstrate through research projects that bycatch can be constrained, the
fishery management system must itself adopt and apply a set of controls across all
participants to ensure that not only is the excluder device fully utilised in the fishery,
but that the rules are not applied in a partisan way to the benefit of some fishers and
the detriment of others. Securing such agreements may take years in complex or
large fisheries. As a result, the timescales for sustainability improvements that have
major costs associated with them need to be negotiated, but may take years, and
this scale of reform has to be considered in the setting of any expectations about
the capacity of an incentive programme to create environmental change. Assessing
the success of such changes must therefore recognise the balance to be achieved
between the rate of change to be expected by the certification programme and the
capacity of a venture to implement such changes in a way that is effective and likely
to persist.
10.7
Conclusions
Seafood ecological sustainability incentive programmes of all types (certification,
ecolabels, ratings and guides) rely heavily for their success on the technical and
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