Ecuador Case Study: Transboundary Marine Conservation and Fisheries Management in Ecuador and Northern Peru

Navarrete-Forero G.; Del-Solar-Escardó A.; Alfaro-Cordova E.; Rodríguez-Escalante L.; Andrade-Vera S.; Willette D.A. · Challenges in Tropical Coastal Zone Management: Experiences and Lessons Learned (2023) · DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-17879-5_15

Resumen

Marine fisheries are an important source of food security, livelihood, and employment for coastal communities around the world. However, their sustainability is undermined in contexts of weak institutions at multiple levels of governance, illegal fishing, and poor seafood traceability. Ecuador and Peru share historical, ecological, social, and economic features in terms of marine affairs, conservation, and fisheries development, and therefore face similar challenges to sustainability. The goal of this synthesis is to provide an overview of the aspects in common and to highlight the relevance of bi-national cooperation in scientific research in times of transformation of seafood systems into more sustainable ones. We show that there are important fishery resources in common, and potentially many more that are poorly known and monitored. At the national-government level, Ecuador and Peru cooperate through international organizations to manage some shared stocks like tropical tunas, dolphinfish and Chilean jack mackerel. At the community level, members of artisanal fishing associations have participated in bi-national workshops around dolphinfish management. We propose that bi-national academic and scientific research networks can also contribute to this process and suggest some lines of research in which the cooperation could develop. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023.

Instituciones: Universidad Científica del Sur