Publications

Lindahl, T., Jarungrattanapong, R. 2022. Avoiding catastrophic collapse in small-scale fisheries through inefficient cooperation: evidence from a framed field experiment. Environment and Development Economics. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1355770x22000171

Small-scale fisheries (SSFs) are significant for poverty alleviation, but are threatened by over-exploitation and climate change effects such as drastic drops in regrowth rates. How will fishers adapt? To shed light on this, we ran a common-pool resource experiment with SSF fishers in Thailand. Our results show that groups confronted with a potential abrupt drop in the regrowth rate are more likely to form cooperative agreemen...

Pereira, LM., Ortuño Crespo, G., Merrie, A and Homewood, C. (2022). Operationalising the Nature Futures Framework in the High Seas. Nereus Workshop report, Stockholm

The perceived remoteness and vastness of the ocean has inadvertently created a psychological and cultural barrier between people and the global ocean, particularly in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ); which accounts for >64% of the ocean and >45% of our planetary surface. After decades of commercial fisheries exploitation by a small number of nations this once untouched part of our planet and its biodiversity and ecos...

Uusitaloa, L., Blenckner, T., Puntila-Dodda, R., Skyttäa, A. et al. 2022. Integrating diverse model results into decision support for good environmental status and blue growth, Science of The Total Environment, Volume 806, Part 2. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.150450.

Sustainable environmental management needs to consider multiple ecological and societal objectives simultaneously while accounting for the many uncertainties arising from natural variability, insufficient knowledge about the system's behaviour leading to diverging model projections, and changing ecosystem. In this paper we demonstrate how a Bayesian network- based decision support model can be used to summarize a large body o...

Kininmonth, S.; Blenckner, T.; Niiranen, S.; Watson, J.; Orio, A.; Casini, M.; Neuenfeldt, S.; Bartolino, V.; Hansson, M. 2022. Is Diversity the Missing Link in Coastal Fisheries Management? Diversity, 14, 90. https://doi.org/10.3390/d14020090

Fisheries management has historically focused on the population elasticity of target fish based primarily on demographic modeling, with the key assumptions of stability in environmental conditions and static trophic relationships. The predictive capacity of this fisheries framework is poor, especially in closed systems where the benthic diversity and boundary effects are important and the stock levels are low. Here, we presen...

Woodhead, A. 2021. Capturing change in ecosystem service delivery from coral reefs. Faculty of Science and Technology, Lancaster Environment Centre. Lancaster University. https://doi.org/10.17635/lancaster/thesis/1284

Ecosystems around the world are changing due to interacting local and global stressors. These changes are likely to affect ecosystem services - the benefits that ecosystems contribute to human wellbeing - but the complexity of social-ecological processes underpinning these services limits our understanding change. In this thesis, I examine changes in ecosystem services associated with climate-impacted tropical coral reefs and ...

Björkvik, E., W. J. Boonstra, and J. Hentati-Sundberg. 2020. Why fishers end up in social-ecological traps: a case study of Swedish eel fisheries in the Baltic Sea. Ecology and Society 25(1):21.https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-11405-250121

Unsustainable fishing can be surprisingly persistent despite devastating social, economic, and ecological consequences. Sustainability science literature suggests that the persistence of unsustainable fisheries can be understood as a social-ecological trap. Few studies have explicitly acknowledged the role of historical legacies for the development of social-ecological traps. Here, we investigate why fishers sometimes end up ...

Blasiak, R., Wynberg, R., Grorud-Colvert, K., Thambisetty, S., et.al. 2020. The ocean genome and future prospects for conservation and equity. Nature Sustainability, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-0522-9

Life has evolved in the ocean for 3.7 billion years, resulting in a rich ‘ocean genome’, the ensemble of genetic material present in all marine biodiversity, including both the physical genes and the information they encode. Rapid advances in sequencing technologies and bioinformatics have enabled exploration of the ocean genome and are informing innovative approaches to conservation and a growing number of commercial biotech...