The importance of place: Unraveling the vulnerability of fisherman livelihoods to the impact of marine protected areas
Introduction
Globally, fishermen1 are experiencing a broad array of complex environmental, social, economic, and political pressures and changes. These can range from shifts in global economic markets, changes in climate patterns, environmental degradation, and increases in fishing competition and regulatory constraints. In California, these changes and mounting pressures have serious implications on the state's 6,828 registered commercial fishermen (CDFW, 2012)—many of whom earn the majority of their livelihood from fishing. Fishermen are a particularly vulnerable population group as they rely upon fish populations—a common pool natural resource—as their income source. Harvesting fish is rife with uncertainty such as the incertitude in maintaining access to fishing grounds or fish stocks and uncertainty in environmental patterns or events that affect the abundance and quality of fish in local waters. As scientists, policy makers, and managers work to address the changing environmental and socioeconomic landscape within which fishermen must operate, there is great need to understand the particular vulnerabilities of fishermen. This is important to not only understand the socioecological system of fishing but also to effectively target and promote socially and economically responsible management and conservation interventions.
This case study is situated within the California Marine Protected Area (MPA) network planning process which was completed in 2012 and mandated by the Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA). Specifically, we utilize a vulnerability assessment termed the Livelihood Vulnerability Index (Chen, López-Carr, & Walker, 2014) to measure the relative potential impact the proposed MPA network may have upon fisherman livelihoods. As marine spatial plans are developed worldwide in response to conservation and climate change mitigation initiatives, there is an urgent demand to develop and refine approaches and methods to assess how MPAs and other spatial management measures may impact fisherman livelihoods (Blount and Pitchon, 2007, Freudenburg, 1986, Hall-Arber et al., 2009, McShane et al., 2011, Voyer et al., 2012).
Vulnerability assessments have been gaining popularity particularly in management and planning applications as methodologies have advanced to provide vulnerability maps, indices, and rankings that aid in quantitative and spatial trade-off and prioritization analyses (Brooks et al., 2005, Cutter et al., 2003, Engle, 2011, Hahn et al., 2009, Kelly and Adger, 2000, O'Brien et al., 2004, Schröter et al., 2005, Tuler et al., 2013). In particular vulnerability assessments are actor-centric and focus on characterizing and measuring the level of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity the actor or set of actors have to a particular stress (Adger, 2006, Nelson et al., 2007). However, despite the growing research surrounding vulnerability assessments, the field remains relatively nascent and disaggregated in the sense that vulnerability assessments are often designed specific to the particular stress and actors under study.
Nevertheless, it has been argued that a diversity of approaches and methods are required to study the full complexity of vulnerability in socioecological systems. Eakin and Luers (2006) highlight that what may seem to be disjointed vulnerability studies are indeed complementary in that each advances knowledge on a particular aspect of vulnerability assessments. In their review, the authors organize the existing empirical literature into bodies of literature and present common core components to vulnerability assessments. The purpose of this study is to implement a previously developed vulnerability assessment (the Livelihood Vulnerability Index) and explore this assessment's contribution in two core components of vulnerability assessments identified by Eakin and Luers (2006): 1) Ranking and comparing vulnerability and 2) Explaining attributes of vulnerability.
Section snippets
The Livelihood Vulnerability Index
The vulnerability assessment instrument we utilized in this study is named the Livelihood Vulnerability Index (LVI) (Chen et al. 2014) developed for the California commercial sea urchin fishery. This framework defines vulnerability as “the state of susceptibility to harm from exposure to stresses associated with environmental and social change and from the absence of capacity to adapt” (Adger, 2006) and evaluates vulnerability as a function of three factors—exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive
Study area and population
Long-standing concerns over the status of California's marine ecosystems and inconsistencies between existing MPAs led the state legislature in 1999 to enact the California Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA). The MLPA directed the state of California to design and manage a network of MPAs with the stated objectives of “protecting marine life and habitats, ecosystems, and natural heritage, as well as [improving] recreational, educational, and study opportunities provided by marine ecosystems” (
Ranking and comparing vulnerability
At the state level (Table 2), on average fishermen in the north coast ports of Fort Bragg, Albion, and Point Arena received higher vulnerability scores than fishermen in south coast ports. Albion received the highest average vulnerability score, with a mark of 0.83. The port with the lowest mean vulnerability score was Oxnard/Ventura in the South Coast.
At the regional level, North Coast differences in average vulnerability scores are much more pronounced than at the state level. For example,
Conclusion
This paper presents findings yielded by a novel index we constructed to assess fisherman vulnerability. Although we do not directly assess the impact of MPAs upon commercial urchin fishermen livelihoods, the index can be used as a tool for future assessments and the results can inform future research regarding the vulnerability of fisherman livelihoods to certain stressors such as the establishment of MPAs.
Firstly, we have shown how the historical and current conditions fishermen experience in
Acknowledgments
Funding for this research was provided by the University of California, Santa Barbara and Ecotrust. Our deepest thanks is extended to all the fishermen who participated in interviews and graciously contributed their time and knowledge to this project. We'd also like to thank the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and our colleagues for their review of drafts, advice, and continued support of this work.
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