Illuminating the multidimensional contributions of small-scale fisheries.
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2025-01
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Sustainable development aspires to "leave no one behind"1. Even so, limited attention has been paid to small-scale fisheries (SSF) and their importance in eradicating poverty, hunger and malnutrition. Through a collaborative and multidimensional data-driven approach, we have estimated that SSF provide at least 40% (37.3 million tonnes) of global fisheries catches and 2.3 billion people with, on average, 20% of their dietary intake across six key micronutrients essential for human health. Globally, the livelihood of 1 in every 12 people, nearly half of them women, depends at least partly on small-scale fishing, in total generating 44% (US$77.2 billion) of the economic value of all fisheries landed. Regionally, Asian SSF provide fish, support livelihoods and supply nutrition to the largest number of people. Relative to the total capture of the fisheries sector (comprising large-scale and small-scale fisheries), across all regions, African SSF supply the most catch and nutrition, and SSF in Oceania improve the most livelihoods. Maintaining and increasing these multidimensional SSF contributions to sustainable development requires targeted and effective actions, especially increasing the engagement of fisherfolk in shared management and governance. Without management and governance focused on the multidimensional contributions of SSF, the marginalization of millions of fishers and fishworkers will worsen.
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Basurto, Xavier, Nicolas L Gutierrez, Nicole Franz, Maria Del Mar Mancha-Cisneros, Giulia Gorelli, Alba Aguión, Simon Funge-Smith, Sarah Harper, et al. (2025). Illuminating the multidimensional contributions of small-scale fisheries. Nature, 637(8047). pp. 875–884. 10.1038/s41586-024-08448-z Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/32345.
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Xavier Basurto
I am interested in the fundamental question of how groups (human and non-human) can find ways to self-organize, cooperate, and engage in successful collective action for the benefit of the common good. To do this I strive to understand how the institutions (formal and informal rules and norms) that govern social behavior, interplay with biophysical variables to shape social-ecological systems. What kind of institutions are better able to govern complex-adaptive systems? and how can societies (large and small) develop robust institutions that provide enough flexibility for collective learning and adaptation over the long-term?
My academic and professional training is based on a deep conviction that it is through integrating different disciplinary perspectives and methods that we will be able to find solutions to challenging dilemmas in natural resources management, conservation, and environmental policy. Trained as a marine biologist, I completed a M.S in natural resources studying small-scale fisheries in the Gulf of California, Mexico. Realizing the need to bring social science theories into my work on common-pool resources sustainability, I earned an MPA and a Ph.D. in Management (with a minor in cultural anthropology) from the University of Arizona and under the supervision of Edella Schlager. Following I spent two years working with Elinor Ostrom, 2009 co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, at the Workshop for Political Theory and Policy Analysis of Indiana University. Methodologically, I am familiar with a variety of quantitative and qualitative approaches and formally trained to conduct Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA or more recently fsQCA), that allows among other things, systematic comparisons of middle range N sample sizes and address issues of multiple-causality.
John Virdin
John Virdin has over twenty years’ experience in studying and advising government policies to regulate human use of the oceans, particularly marine conservation policies to reduce poverty throughout the tropics. His focus has been largely on managing fisheries for food and livelihoods, expanding to broader ocean-based economic development policies, coastal adaptation and more recently reducing ocean plastic pollution.
Virdin directs the Ocean Policy Program at the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability, aiming to connect Duke University’s science and ideas to help policymakers solve ocean sustainability problems. He has collaborated in this effort with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the United Nations Environment Program, as well as regional organizations such as the Abidjan Convention secretariat, the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, the Sub-Regional Fisheries Commission of West Africa and the Parties to the Nauru Agreement for tuna fisheries management in the Western Pacific.
Virdin is an associate professor of the practice in marine science and conservation at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. He co-created and teaches an introductory course for undergraduate students to understand the role of ocean policy in helping solve many of society’s most pressing development challenges on land.
Prior to coming to Duke in early 2015, he worked for 12 years at the World Bank, where his work led to the development of programs that provided more than $125 million in funding for improved fisheries management in six West African states and some $40 million for fisheries and ocean conservation in a number of Pacific Island states.
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