In light on the new UN ocean treaty, Nereus member Harriet Harden-Davies and other co-authors highlight the need to address questions about capacity building as a key part of the development of new legal instruments under the BBNJ Agreement (United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea).
Nereus member Matilda Petersson & Peter Stoett review articles published in the INEA journal to determine the lessons learnt in global biodiversity governance from 2000-2020. This work paints a picture of the main barriers to efficient biodiversity governance, and brings to light key issues to address in order to accelerate the process of protecting global biodiversity.
Nereus member Julia Mason et al., have developed and applied a novel framework to build climate resilient fisheries worldwide. The authors claim this framework is a valuable starting point for critical application of resilience concepts to fisheries socio-ecological systems.
In November 2021, the WTO (World Trade Organization), drafted and agreement on how to tackle harmful fisheries subsidies. Andrés Cisneros-Montemayor et al., provide a constructive critique to make this draft agreement more realistic and specific, and therefore applicable.
Tyler Eddy and several other Nereus members give yet another reason for the urgent need to meet climate change emission targets. Specifically, to reduce stress on coral reefs and restore their capacity to provide essential ecosystem services upon which millions of people rely on worldwide.
In spite of a pressing Sustainable Ocean Economy plan, Norway seems to be choosing a ‘business as usual’ route expanding oil and gas exploration. Accountability is crucial to attain sustainable ocean management by 2025.
Conservation of fish and other marine life migrating from warming ocean waters will be more effective and also protect commercial fisheries if plans are made now to cope with climate change, according to a Rutgers-led study in the journal Science Advances.
The new Blue Paper “The Human Relationship With Our Ocean Planet”, co-authored by Dr. Yoshitaka Ota, commissioned by the Ocean Panel urges us to recognize the ocean’s role in not just providing material goods, but different forms of wellbeing including cultural identity, knowledge & sense of place and belonging.
Solène Guggisberg was awarded the Gerard J. Mangone Prize 2019 for her article “The EU’s Regulation on the Sustainable Management of External Fishing Fleets: International and European Law perspectives”.
Nereus Network members Katherine Seto and Quentin Hanich co-authored a new ground-breaking study “Illuminating dark fishing fleets in North Korea”, shedding light on illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing by Chinese fleets.
Thomas Frölicher is co-author with a team of researchers on a study analyzing the impact that ceasing atmospheric CO2 emissions could have on global warming. They show that within five decades, temperature increases become essentially zero if emissions are kept within the global human “carbon budget” set within the IPCC AR5.
Principal Investigator Quentin Hanich co-authored a new paper that looks at how openness and accessible information can be used in negotiating and developing international fisheries conservation and management measures, to help ensure their future sustainability.
You can now watch a series of presentations given by Nereus Program research fellows describing their work in Nereus Program’s “Predicting Future Oceans” book. It is an encapsulation of a decade’s worth of ocean research done by Nereus Program, made freely available for the public to watch on YouTube.
Harriet Harden-Davies is lead author with Marjo Vierros and others on a new study published in Marine Policy, “Rights of Nature: Perspective for Global Ocean Stewardship.” In it, they discuss the inherent (and legally recognized) rights of nature and ecosystems, and how this perspective can be applied to global ocean governance.
Research Associate Marjo Vierros is lead author with a research team that includes Guillermo Ortuño Crespo, Daniel Dunn, Director Yoshi Ota, and Andrés Cisneros-Montemayor on a new study published in Marine Policy, “Considering Indigenous Peoples and local communities in governance of the global ocean commons.”
A message from Nereus Program leadership fully supporting the Black Lives Matter, anti-racism, and ongoing anti-police bias and brutality movements.
Andrés Cisneros-Montemayor (UBC) is lead author on a new study published in Advances in Marine Biology that focuses on shark ecotourism, and how it acts as an economic driver for different locations in Mexico.
Director (science) William Cheung is a co-author on a new publication in ICES Journal of Marine Science, “Bioenergetic influence on the historical development and decline of industrial fisheries.”
Principal Investigator Jack Kittinger and alumnus Elena Finkbeiner are co-authors on a new publication in Coastal Management that investigates how the current COVID-19 pandemic is impacting small-scale and coastal fishing. They call on governments, development organizations, NGOS, researchers, donors and the private sector to rapidly mobilize to help these vulnerable communities that are being severely impacted right now.
Principal Investigator Larry B. Crowder is part of a research team that recently wrote a review on the role of climate change in regard to marine spatial planning (MSP) and its future, published in Nature Sustainability. You can read the abstract and access it here.
Director William Cheung and Principal Investigator Charles Stock are part of a team of authors that recently published a comment in Nature Climate Change, “Evolution of the Galapagos in the Anthropocene”.
Alumnus Gabriel Reygondeau (UBC/Yale University) is a main contributor to a new High Level Panel (HLP) Blue Paper on critical habitats and biodiversity. You can read the full version and summary for decision makers here.
Congratulations to Daniel Dunn and The Migratory Connectivity in the Ocean System (MiCO) for recently winning the Ocean Awards 2020 Innovation Award from Blue Marine Foundation for their work on migratory marine species, making it easier to work with data.
Research fellow Joey Bernhardt (McGill University) is lead author on a new study published in Philosophical Transactions B that aims to answer how species’ competitive traits evolve in response to limited resources.
William Cheung and Thomas Frölicher recently published a study in Nature Scientific Reports showing the impact marine heatwaves have on fish stock biogeography and biomass in the northeastern Pacific Ocean.
Principal investigator Thomas Frölicher is a co-author on an open access study recently published in Biogeosciences, entitled “Is deoxygenation detectable before warming in the thermocline?”
Principal Investigator Malin Pinsky is a co-author on a new study published in Molecular Ecology, “Using multiple natural tags provides evidence for extensive larval dispersal across space and through time in summer flounder.”
Nereus Program Network Director Andrés M. Cisneros-Montemayor is lead author on a new study published in Natural Resources Forum, “Nature-based marine tourism in the Gulf of California and Baja California Peninsula: Economic benefits and key species”.
Congratulations to principal investigator Larry Crowder for receiving the International Sea Turtle Society (ISTS) Lifetime Achievement Award for his work with sea turtle conservation and biology.
Congratulations to Nereus research fellow Guillermo Ortuño Crespo for successfully defending his Ph.D. dissertation! Here you can read the summary he wrote about his research, as well as his future directions.
Research associate Juan José Alava (UBC) is lead author on a new study published in Frontiers in Marine Science that measures persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and mercury levels in bottlenose dolphins in the Gulf of Guayaquil, Ecuador.
ASU-CI Nexus is hiring a Post-Doctoral Fellow in sustainable oceans to help assess the global prevalence of human rights abuses in the seafood sector, with a focus on wild-capture fisheries. There is a May 1, 2020 deadline, and you can read the full description and access the application portal here.
Seeking a highly motivated postdoc at Memorial University to join a team investigating ecosystem dynamics in Newfoundland, Labrador, and the Arctic. Details and contact information within.
The International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF) awarded Guillermo Ortuño Crespo the runner-up prize for seafood sustainability, for his proposal “Dynamic Habitat Predictions of Two Bycaught Oceanic Shark Species.”
Tyler Eddy is a co-author on a new study in Nature’s Scientific Reports that uses raw video footage of Rangitāhua (Kermadec Islands) filmed for the documentary “Our Big Blue Backyard” to learn more about the remote area’s rich shallow reef biodiversity.
Henrik Österblom and Colette Wabnitz are lead authors with many collaborators on a new Blue Paper for the High Level Panel for the Sustainable Ocean Economy (HLP), “Towards Ocean Equity”, which was also the focus of a recent webinar.
Julia Mason is lead author with Larry Crowder as a co-author on a new study published in Biological Conservation, “Fishers’ solutions for hammerhead shark conservation in Peru.”
Becca Selden and Malin Pinsky are co-authors on a new study published in Global Change Biology, “Cold range edges of marine fishes track climate change better than warm edges.”
Harriet Harden-Davies co-authored an analysis of the current draft text of the UN treaty concerning the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ). The final round of treaty negotiations based on revised draft text are planned for March at the UN headquarters in New York City.
Becca Selden recently appeared as a guest on Your Call’s One Planet Series, for the episode ‘One Planet: The World’s Oceans Hit Record Temperatures in 2019.’ You can access and listen to the conversation here.
Muhammed Oyinlola is lead author with Gabriel Reygondeau, Colette Wabnitz, and William Cheung as co-authors on a new study in Global Change Biology, “Projecting global mariculture diversity under climate change.” In their study, they look at how climate change will affect 85 of the most commonly farmed fish and invertebrates in coastal and open ocean areas.
Nereus Program director of science William Cheung (UBC) was recently announced as a recipient of the prestigious UBC Killam Research Fellowship for outstanding faculty research.
Alumnus Gabriel Reygondeau is part of a research team lead by the Monterey Bay Aquarium on a new open access publication in PLoS ONE, “Towards a global understanding of the drivers of marine and terrestrial biodiversity”. In it, they created the first comprehensive global map of biodiversity distribution using both marine and terrestrial species.
Nereus alumnus Robert Blasiak (Stockholm Resilience Centre) wrote an article for The Conversation about the newest publication he co-authored concerning the Blue Acceleration. You can read it and access the original article here.
At the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Harriet Harden-Davies participated in discussions about the development of a historic new treaty for marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ).
Robert Blasiak and Henrik Österblom from the Stockholm Resilience Centre are part of a research team on a new publication in One Earth, “The Blue Acceleration: The Trajectory of Human Expansion into the Ocean.” You can read a short summary and access the article here.
Harriet Harden-Davies was one of five international experts invited to attend a high-level dialogue at the Nobel Institute in Oslo, 20-21 January 2020. The participants discussed marine genetic resources and benefit sharing, a current challenging issue in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ).
Thomas Frölicher is a co-author on a new open access paper published in Nature, “Global vulnerability of marine mammals to global warming”. You can read a short summary and access it here.
Director (science) William Cheung is a co-author with others on a new study published in PLoS ONE, “Potential socioeconomic impacts from ocean acidification and climate change effects on Atlantic Canadian Fisheries.”
Principal investigator Malin Pinsky and research fellows Becca Selden and Zoë Kitchel are co-authors on a new publication in Annual Reviews, entitled “Climate-Driven Shifts in Marine Species Ranges: Scaling from Organisms to Communities”.
Director (science) William Cheung and Rashid Sumaila are co-authors on a recent study published in Science Advances, “Escaping the perfect storm of simultaneous climate change impacts on agriculture and marine fisheries.”
Nereus Program director (science) Willam Cheung and research fellow Muhammed Oyinlola are co-authors on a new Institute for the Ocean and Fisheries (UBC) report – “Dynamic Integrated Marine Climate, Biodiversity, Fisheries, Aquaculture and Seafood Market Model (DIVERSE)”. You can read a brief summary and access it here.
Nereus research associate Juan José Alava is lead author on a new publication in the journal Marine Policy – “Mitigating cetacean bycatch in coastal Ecuador: Governance challenges for small-scale fisheries”
Nereus Program principal investigator Malin Pinsky was the focus of a recent article that appeared in ScienceNews and in ScienceNews for Students – “Malin Pinsky seeks to explain how climate change alters ocean life”.
Thomas Froelicher recently received the Theodor Kocher Prize, awarded to the best junior faculty researcher at the University of Bern, Switzerland.
Lead author Hubert du Pontavice and co-authors Didier Gascuel, Gabriel Reygondeau, Aurore Maureaud, and William Cheung recently published an article in Global Change Biology – “Climate change undermines the global functioning of marine food webs”.
Today, the landmark “Special Report on Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate” (SROCC) is being presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) at COP25. Nereus Program director (science) William Cheung and principal investigator Thomas Froelicher are authors on the SROCC report.
Malin Pinsky, Daniel Pauly and Rashid Sumaila (UBC) all appear in a recent New York Times article about Iceland’s fisheries adapting to shifting fish distributions, entitled “Warming Waters, Moving Fish; How Climate Change is Reshaping Iceland”.
Nereus director (science) William Cheung (UBC) is a co-author on a new paper published in One Earth – “A Roadmap for Using the UN Decade of Ocean Science fr Sustainable Development in Support of Science, Policy, and Action”.
Andrés Cisneros-Montemayor is lead author with co-authors William Cheung, Muhammed Oyinlola, Gerald Singh, Wilf Swartz and Yoshitaka Ota on a new paper in Marine Policy – “Social equity and benefits as the nexus of a transformative Blue Economy: A sectoral review of implications”.
Nereus Program research associate Juan José Alava (UBC) wrote a blog for The Conversation about the rise in mercury concentrations in top marine predators due to climate change and overfishing, and the effect this has on human health, the fishing industry, and marine food webs.
Becca Selden (Wellesley College) and Malin Pinsky (Rutgers University) are co-authors on a new study in ICES Journal of Marine Science – “Coupled changes in biomass and distribution drive trends in availability of fish stocks to US West Coast ports.”
Andrés Cisneros-Montemayor (UBC) is a co-author on a new study published in the journal Fisheries Research – “Using harmonized historical catch data to infer the expansion of global tuna fisheries”.
The UN Environmental Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) is seeking to fill a Senior Post-Doctoral position working to integrate climate change into marine spatial conservation planning, with a December 8, 2019 application deadline. You can find a link to apply in here.
Andrés Cisneros-Montemayor (UBC) and U. Rashid Sumaila (UBC) are co-authors on a new paper in Marine Policy – “Busting myths that hinder an agreement to end harmful fisheries subsidies”. You can read an overview of the paper here, as well as access the original.
School of Marine and Environmental Affairs (SMEA) master’s student Sallie Lau (University of Washington) wrote a blog about her experience at the recent Nippon Foundation Nereus Science Conference. Both English and Chinese versions are posted here.
School of Marine and Environmental Affairs (SMEA) master’s student Karin Otsuka (University of Washington) wrote a blog about her experience at the Nippon Foundation Nereus Program Ocean Science Conference in September, as well as her research this past summer in Miyakojima, Okinawa, Japan.
Vicky Lam (UBC) is a co-author with Rashid Sumaila (UBC), Daniel Pauly (UBC) and others on a new study published in the journal Marine Policy – “Updated estimates and analysis of global fisheries subsidies”.
Several Nereus Program participants are co-authors on a new paper just published in Nature Sustainability – “Towards a sustainable and equitable blue economy”. The authors recommend five priority areas to address to ensure a safe and just future global ocean economy.
Nereus research fellow Muhammed Oyinlola (UBC) successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation – ‘Global seafood production from mariculture: current status, trends and its future under climate change’.
Nereus Program director (science) William Cheung and Rashid Sumaila are co-authors on a new paper published in Marine Policy – ‘Evaluating present and future potential of arctic fisheries in Canada’.
Colette Wabnitz (UBC) and Robert Blasiak (Stockholm Resilience Centre) are co-authors on a new paper in the journal Marine Policy – ‘A global assessment of structural change in development funding for fisheries’.
Research associate Suzanne von der Porten, Yoshi Ota, and Andrés Cisneros-Montemayor are co-authors on a new paper published online in the journal Coastal Management – ‘The Role of Indigenous Resurgence in Marine Conservation’.
Nereus director (science) William Cheung (UBC) and Thomas Frölicher (University of Bern) are co-authors on the newly released Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC) Summary for Policymakers (SPM). It was approved and presented at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on September 25, 2019.
Nereus alumnus Colleen Petrik (Texas A&M University) and Charles Stock (NOAA) are co-authors on a new paper in the journal Progress in Oceanography. They investigate how dominant factors influence the global distribution and functionality of certain commercially important fishes.
Robert Blasiak (Stockholm Resilience Centre), Colette Wabnitz (UBC) and Solène Guggisberg (Utrecht University) are all co-authors on a publication in the Marine Policy special issue on Ocean Finance. Their paper resulted from a two-day workshop focused on the transparency of ocean financial resources, which took place at the Stockholm Resilience Centre in December 2018.
The final Nippon Foundation Nereus Ocean Science Conference was recently held at Princeton University in New Jersey. Nereus Program research fellows, principal investigators, alumni, research associates and guests presented their research and reflected on the culmination of a decade of interdisciplinary research, and what the future holds for the oceans and society.
A recent study performed by Nereus researchers showing governance gaps concerning marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ) is featured in Science Daily.
Nereus research fellow Harriet Harden-Davies (University of Wollongong/ANCORS) is a co-author on a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science. In it, the authors discuss scientific best practices and accessibility to marine genetic resources (MGR), and how benefit sharing can be strengthened through a new Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) agreement.
Colette Wabnitz (UBC) and Robert Blasiak (Stockholm Resilience Centre) are guest editors this month for a special issue on Ocean Finance in the journal Marine Policy. Solène Guggisberg (Utrecht University) also contributes with a paper on funding fisheries projects under the climate change regime.
‘Predicting Future Oceans: Sustainability of Ocean and Human Systems Amidst Global Environmental Change’ is now available. It contains contributions from previous and current Nereus research fellows, associates and Principal Investigators, and covers a diverse span of ocean topics that include marine ecology, biodiversity, economics, fisheries management, seafood supply, climate change and many more.
Nereus members Guillermo Ortuño Crespo, Daniel Dunn, and Patrick Halpin are co-authors on a new paper published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, ‘High-seas fish biodiversity is slipping through the governance net’. They stress the need to include fish biodiversity in negotiations for the new BBNJ treaty at the United Nations General Assembly and close current legal gaps in existing ocean governance frameworks.
Andrés Cisneros-Montemayor (UBC) and director (science) William Cheung (UBC) are co-authors on a recent publication that models how changing environmental conditions and climate may influence future Pacific sardine distribution in Northwest Mexico, and what it may mean for marine ecosystems and regional fishers.
An updated summary of Colin Thackray (Harvard University), Elsie Sunderland (Harvard University), et al.’s paper that models how climate change and overfishing are contributing to the bioaccumulation of neurotoxin methylmercury (MeHg) in top ocean predators.
A new report was just released from the workshop ‘From visions to scenarios for nature and nature’s contributions to people for the 21st century’, which was co-organized by Nereus Program, Peter Wall Institute, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services’s (IPBES).
Research fellows Harriet Harden-Davies (University of Wollongong/ANCORS) and Guillermo Ortuño Crespo (Duke University) with Daniel Dunn (Duke University) are co-authors on a policy brief published by IDDRI that aims to strengthen the current high seas management and governance framework to improve marine conservation and sustainability.
Leah Burrows (Science and Technology Communications Officer) of the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) wrote an article about Elsie Sunderland’s and Colin Thackray’s recent publication on methylmercury bioaccumulation in marine predators for The Harvard Gazette.
Colin Thackray (Harvard University) and Elsie Sunderland (Harvard University) are co-authors with others on a new publication that models how climate change and overfishing are contributing to the bioaccumulation of neurotoxin methylmercury (MeHg) in top ocean predators, some of which are commonly consumed species of seafood.
Nereus research fellow Harriet Harden-Davies (University of Wollongong/ANCORS) and Rashid Sumaila (UBC) are co-authors on a new paper published in Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems that identifies necessary measures to restore ocean health for future generations.
Nereus research associate Colette Wabnitz (UBC) recently appeared in a Reuters article, ‘Toxic seaweed a menace to Caribbean tourists’.
In her new publication, Nereus Fellow Sarah Roberts (Ph.D. Candidate at Duke University) finds that several fish species’ responses to ocean warming in the North Atlantic depend on the phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO).
Solène Guggisberg (Utrecht University) has published the article ‘The roles of nongovernmental actors in improving compliance with fisheries regulations’ in the Review of European, Comparative & International Environmental Law.
Nereus research fellow Kisei Tanaka (Princeton University) accepted a position as Research Scientist in the Conservation & Science department at Monterey Bay Aquarium, starting in August 2019.
New Paper Shines Spotlight on Social Justice Concerns Associated With Sustainability Transformations
Gerald Singh (UBC) and Andrés Cisneros-Montemayor (UBC) are both co-authors on the paper ‘Just Transformations in Sustainability’ in the journal Sustainability. The authors discuss social impacts that occur when changing social-ecological systems to become more sustainable, and how social justice considerations need to be central to these sustainability transformations.
Nereus research fellow Jessica Spijkers’s (Stockholm Resilience Centre – SRC) recent publication on the rise in international fisheries conflicts is the focus of an article in Hakai Magazine – ‘International Fish Fights on the Rise’.
Nereus’s Tyler Eddy, William Cheung, Miranda Jones, Derek Tittensor, and Charles Stock are co-authors on a recent article that projects a 5% decline, on average, in global marine biomass for every 1 degree (C) of warming. They did this by combining several different types of models, rather than using a single-model approach.
Nereus Principal Investigator Jack Kittinger (Conservation International, Arizona State University) is interviewed by Conservation International for their Human Nature Blog. You can read about his upbringing and inspiration to focus on sustainability and socially responsible seafood.
Nereus research associate Lydia Teh (UBC) writes a blog about her and other Nereus colleagues attending the Integrated Marine Biosphere Research Conference (IMBeR) Future Oceans Open Science Conference in Brest, France.
Nereus Fellow Tyler Eddy will be starting a position in November 2019 as an Associate Research Professor at the Centre for Fisheries Ecosystems Research, Marine Institute, Memorial University, St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada.
Nereus director (science) William Cheung (UBC) and research associate Rashid Sumaila (UBC) are co-authors on an article recently published in the journal Marine Policy – ‘Climate change impact on Canada’s Pacific marine ecosystem: The current state of knowledge’. They conducted a literature review to investigate currently known and projected impacts of climate change on Canada’s Pacific marine ecosystem.
Nereus research fellow Tiff-Annie Kenny (University of Ottawa) is lead author on a recently published article in the journal BMC Nutrition – ‘Potential impact of restricted caribou (Rangifer tarandus) consumption on anemia prevalence among Inuit adults in northern Canada’.
Nereus research fellow Harriet Harden-Davies (Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security (ANCORS), University of Wollongong) recently published a short article in the special Oceans edition (Spring 2019) of The Geographer, entitled ‘Sharing benefits from genetic resources and sustaining the high seas’.
Nereus Fellow Zoë Kitchel (Rutgers University) writes about fellows Katy Seto, Julia Mason, Tiff-Annie Kenny, Becca Selden and Harriet Harden-Davies discussing critically important themes concerning equity and interdisciplinarity in relation to how the ocean is studied at the United Nations building, during an Open-ended Informal Consultative Process on Oceans and the Law of the Sea.
Nereus research associate Andrés M. Cisneros-Montemayor (UBC) and director (science) William Cheung (UBC) are co-authors on a recent paper published in the open access journal PLoS ONE that uses metadata to evaluate the current state of knowledge of the ocean, using Mexico as a case study.
Lead author Gerald Singh (University of British Columbia – UBC) with other Nereus Program co-authors recently published ‘Climate impacts on the ocean are making the Sustainable Development Goals a moving target travelling away from us’ in the open access journal People and Nature.
Nereus Research Fellow Matilda Petersson (Stockholm Resilience Centre) published the open-access article ‘Transnational partnerships’ strategies in global fisheries governance’ in the journal Interest Groups & Advocacy.
Nereus Program blog on the Sargassum mass-bloom of 2018 is referenced in a piece in the Riviera Maya News that aims to clarify the severity of the bloom on beaches in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo.
Palau’s President Tommy Remengesau Jr. signs a presidential directive that intends to reduce fishing pressure on reefs and promote the consumption of local pelagic seafood, a policy which was advocated for in a Nippon Foundation-UBC Nereus Program research publication last year.
Nereus research fellow Tyler Eddy (University of South Carolina) recently published a short article in the journal Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems, entitled ‘Climate change drowned out by plastic’.
Nereus Program Director (Science) William Cheung (University of British Columbia – UBC) and Research Associates Vicky Lam (UBC) and Colette Wabnitz (UBC) recently published the working paper ‘Future scenarios and projections for fisheries on the high seas under a changing climate’. You can read the abstract and access it here.
Nereus alumnus Rebecca Asch (East Carolina University) writes a blog about her upcoming publication in the journal Global Change Biology, which focuses on how climate change is influencing seasonality, thereby creating critical mismatches in the timing between fish spawning and phytoplankton blooms in marine food webs.
Nereus Senior Research fellow Solène Guggisberg (Utrecht University) recently published the article “The EU’s Regulation on the Sustainable Management of External Fishing Fleets: International and European Law Perspectives” in the International Journal of Marine and Coastal Law. You can read her summary and access it here.
Nereus Research fellow Jessica Spijkers (Stockholm Resilience Centre) is the lead author, with other Nereus colleagues as co-authors, on an upcoming publication concerning the global patterns of international fisheries conflicts, and which countries are primarily involved. You can read a brief preview of the article here.
Nereus Senior Research fellow Solène Guggisberg (Utrecht University) co-organized a workshop on Transparency in Fisheries Governance that took place in Utrecht on May 20-21st, 2019. Fellow Matilda Petersson (Stockholm Resilience Centre), and Principal Investigators Quentin Hanich (University of Wollongong), Alex Oude Elferink (Utrecht University) and Erik Molenaar (Utrecht University) were also in attendance.
Vatosoa Rakotondrazafy receives the prestigious 2019 Whitley Award from The Whitley Fund for Nature (WFN) for her work with traditional small-scale fishing communities throughout Madagascar. Vatosoa previously worked with Nereus Program co-directors Yoshitaka Ota (policy) and William Cheung (science), and program manager/research associate Andrés Cisneros-Montemayor as a Nippon Foundation DOALOS fellow at University of British Columbia in 2015.
Meet Nereus’s new research fellow Frédérique Fardin, who is working toward her Ph.D. researching mangrove forests throughout South East Asia and the Caribbean at the University of Cambridge/UN Environment World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC). You can briefly learn about her background and previous work experience in the Caribbean here.
Nereus Research Associate Colette Wabnitz (University of British Columbia) writes about attending the OceanVisions2019– Climate Summit, ‘Successes in resilience, adaptation, mitigation, and sustainability’ in Atlanta, Georgia on April 1-4th, 2019. She was co-chair of session VI – Integrated Modelling of Human and Climate Impacts on Ocean Systems. Fellow Becca Selden (Wellesley College) and Principal Investigator Malin Pinsky (Rutgers University) also attended.
Nereus Fellow Guillermo Ortuño Crespo (Duke University) writes about the first Global Planning Meeting of the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development that he, fellow Harriet Harden-Davies (ANCORS, University of Wollongong) and policy director Yoshitaka Ota (University of Washington) attended in Copenhagen, Denmark on May 13-15th.
Nereus Fellow Guillermo Ortuño Crespo (Duke University) received the ‘2019 Dean’s Award for Outstanding Graduate Student Manuscript’ as the lead author for the paper ‘The Environmental Niche of the Global High Seas Pelagic Longline Fleet’, published in Science Advances.
Nereus Program Manager/Research Associate Vicky Lam (University of British Columbia) wrote a blog about using a modeling approach and scenario analysis to help project future biodiversity and ecological scenarios and identify approaches to achieve long-term ecological, economic and socially sustainable ways to utilize marine resources.
Meet Nereus’s new research fellow Zoë Kitchel, who is working towards her Ph.D. in the Ecology and Evolution Department at Rutgers University under Principal Investigator Dr. Malin Pinsky. You can learn about her background, and what inspired her to pursue research exploring the dynamics at species range boundaries.
Nereus Fellow Matilda Petersson (Stockholm Resilience Centre) wrote a blog about her most recent research and publication concerning non-state actor participation in tuna Regional Fisheries Management Organization (RFMO) committee meetings, and their influence on decision-making.
Nereus Fellow Matilda Petersson (Stockholm Resilience Centre – SRC) is a co-author with Principal Investigator Henrik Österblom (SRC) on a new publication in Marine Policy, entitled ‘Patterns and trends in non-state actor participation in regional fisheries management organizations’. They investigate participation trends and influence of non-state actors in the global governance of migratory and straddling tuna fish stocks.
Nereus’s Yoshitaka Ota (Director of Policy, University of Washington) and Wilf Swartz (Program Manager, Dalhousie University) are co-authors on a recent article, entitled ‘Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Practices of the Largest Seafood Suppliers in the Wild Capture Fisheries Sector: From Vision to Action’. In it they discuss a framework that identifies and categorizes seafood suppliers’ practices based on their approaches to issues in the wild capture fisheries sector.
Nereus Fellow Kisei Tanaka (Princeton University) writes a blog about species’ suitability to their surrounding habitat and how traditional ecological models take into account a species’ habitat preference and known geographic distribution. His research focuses on incorporating species’ evolutionary aspects and adaptations into models, to better reflect their suitability to a changing habitat and environment.
Nereus Fellow Gerald Singh (University of British Columbia) recently had an article accepted into the journal People and Nature, entitled ‘Climate impacts on the ocean are making the Sustainable Development Goals a moving target traveling away from us’. A description of what to expect can be found here.
Nereus’s Vicky Lam, William Cheung, Andrés Cisneros-Montemayor and Oai Li Chen from University of British Columbia (UBC) are all co-authors on an article with Rashid Sumaila recently published in Science Advances, entitled ‘Benefits of the Paris Agreement to ocean life, economies, and people’. The authors investigated how implementing the Paris Agreement could protect top-revenue generating catch globally, impacting fishers’ revenues, seafood workers’ income and household seafood expenditure.
Nereus’s Vicky Lam (University of British Columbia) recently co-authored an article in Regional Studies in Marine Science, entitled ‘Dealing with the effects of ocean acidification on coral reefs in the Indian Ocean and Asia’. They discuss the ecological and socio-economic impacts of ocean acidification (OA) and warming sea surface temperatures on shallow coral reefs in the Indo-Pacific, the region’s current adaptive capacity to OA, as well as potential solutions.
Nereus Fellow Tyler Eddy (University of South Carolina) recently published an article in Science, entitled ‘Plan S: Motivations of for-profit publishers’. In it, he discusses how the academic community should consider if a journal is open access, as well as the publisher’s profit motivations, when deciding which venue to publish their research.
Nereus Fellow Tyler Eddy (University of South Carolina) is a co-author on a recently published article in the journal Nature Communications, entitled ‘State-of-the-art global models underestimate impact from climate extremes’. He writes about the importance of modelling for projecting future extreme events related to climate change, and how modellers from different research communities are addressing the impacts of climate change on things such as agriculture, human health, coastal infrastructure, marine ecology, fisheries, and more.
Nereus Research Associate Colette Wabnitz (UBC) and Fellow Tyler Eddy (University of South Carolina) attended the ‘Scenarios Forum 2019’ in Denver, CO on March 11-13, 2019. The forum hosted researchers from 41 countries across diverse disciplines who use climate change and sustainability scenarios and policy analysis to address current knowledge gaps.
Nereus Research Associate Colette Wabnitz (University of British Columbia) wrote a blog about the Sargassum mass bloom event that occurred in 2018, and how it impacted countries throughout the Caribbean. She discusses the origins of Sargassum, factors that trigger mass blooms, and what can be done about it.
Nereus researchers Robert Blasiak (Stockholm Resilience Center – SRC), Colette Wabnitz (University of British Columbia) and Henrik Österblom (SRC) recently published a paper, ‘Scientists Should Disclose Origin in Marine Gene Patents’ in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution. Here you can read a brief description of their work, as well as access the article in full.
Press Release: Nereus Program members Rashid Sumaila, Vicky Lam, William Cheung, Andrés Cisneros-Montemayor, Oai Li Chen, and co-authors published a study in Science Advances today, ‘Climate Target Could Net Additional Billions in Fisheries Revenue’. You can read the press release from UBC and access the article here.
Nereus Fellow Julia Mason recently had a chapter of her thesis published in Fisheries Research, ‘Community-level Effects of Spatial Management in the California Drift Gillnet Fishery’. You can read the abstract here, as well as access the article.
Nereus Fellow Brooke Campbell (University of Wollongong) wrote a blog about leaders among the Pacific Islands coming together to create policies to protect their coastal fisheries and resources for future generations of Pacific Islanders, and how they are monitoring and evaluating the progress of such policies.
Nereus Fellow Solène Guggisberg (Utrecht University) presented a paper at the Women in International Law event ‘New female voices in legal academia’ on February 11th, which took place at the Austrian ambassador’s residence in the Hague and gathered an audience of diplomats, practitioners, and academics.
Nereus Fellow Kisei Tanaka (Princeton University) recently had a paper accepted by ICES Journal of Marine Science in which he and contributing authors use a modeling approach that incorporates environmental factors in assessing commercial fisheries influenced by climate, specifically the American lobster.
Nereus Fellow Solène Guggisberg (Utrecht University) wrote a blog about Japan withdrawing from the International Whaling Commission (IWC), and what, if any, international legal obligations they may have violated, as well as any potential policy responses from other States.
Nereus researchers recently published an article in the open access journal PLoS ONE, entitled ‘The role of human rights in implementing socially responsible seafood’. You can read about the human rights violations in the seafood supply chain, reasons that contribute to their ongoing existence, and the authors’ proposals to improve the situation.
Nereus Research Associate Andrés Cisneros-Montemayor (University of British Columbia) will give a webinar to a group of young researchers and professionals in Central America on the Blue Economy. This is part of the Leadership Program in the Mesoamerican Reef System, hosted by the Fondo Mexicano para la Conservación de la Naturaleza.
Nereus Principal Investigator Quentin Hanich (University of Wollongong) was recently named Editor-in-Chief for the journal Marine Policy and is joined by Nereus Director of Policy Yoshitaka Ota (University of Washington) and Megan Bailey (Dalhousie University) as Associate Editors.
Nereus Fellow Becca Selden will be joining the Biology faculty at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. She is thrilled to be at this highly prestigious institution to continue her research and help launch the careers of the next generation of women scientists.
Nereus alumnus Gabriel Reygondeau (University of British Columbia – UBC) was chosen to work for the Half Earth Project, and become a UBC-Yale Fellow for his work on global marine species distribution. At UBC and Yale, he will continue his research on “the effects of climate change and anthropogenic activities on global ocean biodiversity.”
Nereus Fellow Julia Mason (Stanford University) will serve as a John A. Knauss fellow in Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey’s office in Washington D.C. starting in February, where she will work on a variety of important ocean and environmental issues and policies for the upcoming 2019 year.
A workshop on ocean finance co-organized by Nereus Program researchers Robert Blasiak (Stockholm Resilience Centre) and Colette Wabnitz (University of British Columbia) took place on December 6-7, 2018 at the Stockholm Resilience Center. Nereus fellow Robert Blasiak writes about the workshop, which included Solène Guggisberg (Utrecht University) presenting her recent publication on funding coastal and marine fisheries projects under the climate change regime.
Nereus Research Associate Lydia Teh (University of British Columbia) writes a blog about the Bajau Laut in Malaysia and their struggles with fishing and way of life. She discusses the balance between marine biodiversity conservation and the social side of the Bajau Laut communities, to include securing basic rights such as food, shelter, education, and an adequate standard of living.
Nereus Fellow Solène Guggisberg (Utrecht Univeristy) published the article ‘Funding coastal and marine fisheries projects under the climate change regime’ in a special issue of Marine Policy on Funding for Ocean Conservation and Sustainable Fisheries. You can read the description and access the full article here.
Nereus Fellow Julia Mason (Stanford University) recently successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation – ‘Who knows and who decides? Incorporating diverse perspectives in fisheries management’. You can read the abstract for it here.
Nereus Fellow Solène Guggisberg (Utrecht University) will present her paper entitled “Funding coastal and marine fisheries projects under the climate change regime” at a workshop on Ocean Finance at the Stockholm Resilience Center in Sweden. Her paper examines projects related to fisheries which are financed by the four multilateral funds created within the climate change regime.
Nereus Fellow Presents at the Climate Impacts on Oceanic Top Predators (CLIOTOP) symposium in Taiwan
Nereus Fellow Guillermo Ortuño Crespo (Duke University) attended the Climate Impacts on Oceanic Top Predators (CLIOTOP) symposium in Taiwan, where he presented his research on the spatial ecology of pelagic long liners. Guillermo’s research was recently published in a special collection in Science Advances on high seas fisheries.
Nereus Program Manager and Research Associate Dr. Vicky Lam (University of British Columbia) and Nereus Fellow Muhammed Oyinlola (UBC) participated in a meeting organized by the World Bank and held at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) headquarters in Rome on October 22-24, 2018. While there, they discussed how marine fisheries in Sub-Saharan Africa are important both economically, and for the millions of people dependent on them for food.
Nereus Fellow Tyler Eddy (University of South Carolina) writes about his recent trips to attend climate change impacts workshops at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Potsdam, Germany and Institute for Marine Science in Barcelona, Spain. While there he worked with other climate change impacts modellers on ways to get different models to interact with each other.
Nereus Program Manager and Research Associate Andrés M. Cisneros-Montemayor (University of British Columbia) recently co-authored an article titled ‘Managing at Maximum Sustainable Yield does not ensure economic well-being for artisanal fishers’. In the article the authors discuss potential reasons for why it may be difficult for artisanal fishers to escape poverty, even with improved fisheries management and practices.
Nereus Fellow Solène Guggisberg (Utrecht University) writes about Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMO) and the challenges they face managing fish stocks, such as non-members fishing in areas under their management and insufficient sustainable and conservation measures. Some RFMOs, such as the South Pacific RFMO, have adopted measures to address these challenges.
Nereus Senior Research Fellow Solène Guggisberg presented a paper entitled ‘The role of non-governmental actors in fisheries governance – Improving compliance’ at the Transatlantic Maritime Emissions Research Network (TRAMEREN) conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. She discusses how non-governmental actors may be filling in a monitoring and enforcement gap at sea to improve vessels’ compliance with fishing regulations.
Nereus Research Associate Colette Wabnitz (University of British Columbia) attended, and Nereus Fellow Jessica Spijkers (Stockholm Resilience Center) co-facilitated a workshop on fisheries resources and conflict at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at University of California, Santa Barbara. The purpose of the workshop was to better understand exiting types of fisheries conflicts, and which drivers spark different types of conflict and intensities.
Nereus Fellow Katy Seto attended a workshop on October 22-24th in Yokohama, Japan about emerging remote sensing technologies that highlight fishing activities in the Pacific and around the globe. The meetings continued to develop a research collaboration between the University of Wollongong’s ANCORS with Global Fishing Watch (GFW) and Japanese Fisheries Research and Education Agency (FRA).
School of Marine and Environmental Affairs (SMEA) Masters student Samantha Farquhar (University of Washington) writes about other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs), as well as other international goals and practices (e.g. Marine Protected Area implementation) that international organizations use to conserve biodiversity, including the skepticism that surrounds their effectiveness.
Nereus Fellow Tiff-Annie Kenny recently published an article in The Conversation, ‘Time and money – the biggest hurdles to healthy eating’. In the article, Tiff-Annie discusses how diet quality and health are socially stratified in developed countries.
Nereus fellow Colin Thackray (Harvard University) discusses how toxic methylmercury (MeHg) bioaccumulates within marine food webs, beginning with phytoplankton and zooplankton. This ultimately leads to some larger marine predators, such as fish, having much higher MeHg concentrations than the surrounding seawater.
Nereus colleague Jack Kittinger (Arizona State University), with Transform Aqorau and Johann Bell, respond in Science’s Policy Forum to a recent article co-authored by Nereus PI Malin Pinsky (Rutgers University). Pinksy et al. discuss how geographic shifts of migratory species due to climate change may potentially lead to conflicts over resources, while Aqorau et al. discuss examples of how good governance is working for migratory species.
Nereus fellow Fernando Gonzalez Taboada from Princeton University writes about how the painting ‘And They Still Say Fish are Expensive!’ by Joaquín Sorolla is still relevant to modern fishing culture and practices, as well as different approaches to predicting future fish abundance in the ocean.
Impacts from climate change will increase the risk of extinction for vulnerable marine species, both locally and globally. But according to a new study from UBC, effective fisheries management may be able to reduce the probability of certain species going extinct by as much as 63%.
Nereus fellow Robert Blasiak writes about the negotiations at the United Nations (UN) on conserving biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ), and the timely appearance of marine genetic resources in the mainstream media.
Nereus fellows Robert Blasiak (Stockholm Resilience Center) and Harriet Harden-Davies (University of Wollongong) both appear in The New York Times article ‘What 13,000 Patents Involving the DNA of Sea Life Tell Us About the Future’. Both fellows attended the United Nations debate earlier in September, about the future global legal framework for genetic resources on the high seas, and were interviewed for the article.
University of British Columbia researchers have found that chemical pollutant accumulation in Chinook salmon and southern resident killer whales in the Pacific Northeast Coast region will be exacerbated under climate change. This is yet another anthropogenic stressor that threatens the survivability of the both Chinook salmon and southern resident killer whales.
The Blue Economy consists of new marine-based industries that could provide alternatives for isolated or marginalized coastal communities to improve their well-being, and ocean health overall. However, this once equitable and sustainable concept has gradually lost its focus and is shifting toward more conventional industrial development.
Nereus PI Laurie Chan and Senior Fellow Tiff-Annie Kenny attended the International Society of Exposure Science and the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology conference (ISES-ISEE 2018) in Ottawa, Canada on August 26th-30th. The conference’s focus was on environmental health concerns, and included how scientific and local knowledge combine to assess the impact of contaminated fish consumption on First Nations’ health and well-being in Canada.
Nereus Director of Policy, Yoshitaka Ota, gave the keynote lecture at the 20 year anniversary symposium for Satoumi (Japanese coastal restoration) in the Okayama Prefecture in Japan.
The negotiations on the fate of biodiversity in 46% of our planet, or the high seas, have begun. Since the aftermath of World War II, the distribution and intensity of anthropogenic pressures on biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ) have been increasing almost continuously. After almost two decades of discussions about the need to better protect the high seas, the international community mobilized.
Marine heatwaves can cause irreversible ecosystem damage and their frequency has doubled since 1982. If average global temperatures rise 3.5°C, we’ll see a jump from just fewer than four marine heat waves a year on average to a startling 122.
What happens when some of the most vulnerable populations on the planet are forced to flee the impacts of climate change without legal backing or clear definition of their rights?
On the surface, it’s a joy to see students take ownership of research and form a connection with the ocean. But now, against a backdrop of cuts to programs supporting low-income communities and erosion of policies protecting marine ecosystems, this kind of community-oriented science education is incredibly urgent.
New models developed by Nereus researchers may help reduce this threat by giving regulatory agencies a powerful new tool to predict the month-by-month movements of longline fishing fleets on the high seas. The predictions should help determine where and when the boats will enter waters where by-catch risks are greatest.
One hundred and twenty five nations gathered from July 9-13 at the Committee on Fisheries meeting at the Food and Agriculture Organization headquarters in Rome, Italy, to examine international fisheries and agriculture issues.
In a Q & A session with Nereus researcher Dr. Richard Caddell, we delve deeper into the policy implications of the projected mass migration of fish towards the poles.
Is the ocean a biological continuum or are there distinct ecological units? Nereus researchers are delving deep into this question, exploring how climate-change will change the answer and untangling what it will all mean for the ocean resources humans rely on across the globe.
Halibut, sole and other flatfish are household names around the world. But that might not always be the case. New paper finds that climate change will drastically reduce flatfish numbers and alter species distributions by hundreds of kilometers by the end of the century.
An international team of researchers has developed a comprehensive set of criteria to help the International Seabed Authority (ISA) protect local biodiversity from deep-sea mining activities. These guidelines should help identify areas of particular environmental importance where no mining should occur.
The Nassau grouper: an endangered, boldly striped fish that was once plentiful in southern coastal Florida, the Florida Keys, Bermuda, the Yucatan, and the Caribbean Sea. For more than 20 years, conservationists in the Caribbean have been working to protect this endangered species. Climate change now threatens to undo all of it.
Twenty six million tons of seafood, worth $23 billion is illegally caught, unregulated and unreported every year. According to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, this is a “huge threat to all efforts to bolster sustainable fishing in the world’s oceans.”
The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals are an admirable set of targets set out to achieve a better world–but how do they interact with each other? Are some more pivotal to the success of all? Possibly.
A story of marine genetic resources with an unusual set of characters: a fuzzy little five-inch worm, the doomed Roman city of Pompeii, the world’s largest chemical company, and a cosmetic skin cream.
All the big names in the field were in attendance; the 5 days of presentations crystallized how far we have come in understanding what climate change will mean for ocean systems. But we still have a long way to go before we achieve climate-ready ocean resource management.
I think what inspires me most about this group is that it values a diverse array of approaches to research. We reward the type of disciplinary flexibility and freedom that most academic organizations tend to smother. Nereus lets us be who we want to be, not who they want us to be
As coastal and surface fisheries are depleted and fishers turn to the deep sea to fill their nets, scientists are developing innovative ways to locate and protect undiscovered deep-sea habitats.
Many marine organisms have evolved unique and rare adaptations to allow them to survive in some of the most extreme and varied environments on earth. The genetic sequences responsible for these traits could have applications in anything from pharmaceuticals to biofuels.
Fish are being driven from their territory at a rate of 70 km per decade, which could accelerate. In a paper published in Science yesterday, an interdisciplinary team of Nereus researchers describe how many species will be pushed across national and other political boundaries in the coming decades.
The most prevalent seafood supply chain is the shortest one: from the ocean to the plate. And that’s the one we have the least information on. Small-scale fisheries are vital to coastal communities around the world, but their contributions to global harvests are severely underestimated.
Who controls the narrative on the environment? Nereus researchers have been delving deeper into work on coastal Indigenous fisheries and as they develop relationships with Indigenous community members around the world, some are starting to rethink many of the core concepts of ocean governance.
The excitement around Sustainable Development Goals has faded somewhat since the United Nations meeting in 2015, and now comes the less inspiring dirty work of analysis and policy-setting to achieve them.
What happens to big prey when you fish out all of their big predators? Nereus researchers dig deeper into size-specific diet shifts.
Behind the scenes with a determined group of human rights and fisheries experts working to bring social responsibility to the forefront of sustainable fishing.
On April 3rd, 2018, tribal representatives, students and academics gathered to discuss a pressing issue for coastal indigenous communities of the Pacific Northwest: the future of the fish they’ve relied on since time immemorial.
Nereus Program Principal Investigator Malin Pinsky (Rutgers University) has published a commentary in PNAS on research regarding climate vulnerability and resilience in the American lobster fishery.
Global Fishing Watch, a project that combines machine learning and big data techniques to map industrial fishing activities, was published in new research in Science last week by Nereus collaborators Kroodsma et al.
We are excited to announce our newest interdisciplinary collaboration: Ocean Link Northwest. Ocean Link Northwest is a collaboration between the UW Communication Leadership graduate program and the Nereus Program.
Nereus Program Research Associate Lydia Teh (UBC), Principal Investigator Jack Kittinger (Arizona State University), and Yoshi Ota (University of Washington) joined a webinar organized by EBMTools to discuss “Socially Responsible Seafood.”
Sustainable marine fisheries seem to tick all the boxes. They can fill your belly, fill your wallet, and do it all for a fraction of carbon emmissions generated by conventional agriculture. Getting marine fisheries “right” could also help to reduce the loss of biodiversity in the ocean, and increase equity among coastal populations.
Robert Blasiak, Nereus Fellow at Stockholm Resilience centre, has published a new study on climate change vulnerability.
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in Australia, Fiji and New Zealand, in partnership with US-based tech innovator ConsenSys, tech implementer TraSeable and tuna fishing and processing company Sea Quest Fiji Ltd, has just launched a pilot project in the Pacific Islands tuna industry that will use blockchain technology to track the journey of tuna from “bait to plate”.
From December 21 to 22 , 2017, Principal Investigators from new partner institutes of the Nippon Foundation-Nereus Program convened in Tokyo to present research and engage in rich discussions of the various challenges facing the world’s oceans. Speakers covered a diverse range of topics, including climate change impacts on marine ecosystems, the role of fisheries and food security in the South Pacific islands, and the complexity of social responsibility in seafood supply chains
Nereus Program research featured in the Independent, National Geographic, Radio New Zealand, Newsweek, Huffpost UK, ABC Spain, and more.
Not all fish swim the same way. Some fish will live their whole lives swimming around a tiny home range, while others migrate 5000 km across the Atlantic ocean in just a few months. Even among those that move over large areas, there is a lot of variability.
The East Carolina University (ECU) Fisheries Oceanography Lab is now open and being run by Rebecca Asch, a Senior Nereus Fellow at Princeton University from 2013 to 2016.
By Andrés Cisneros-Montemayor, Nereus Program Manager and Research Associate
From shore you can see the windmills that provide electricity to the whole town, just behind the desalination plant that supplies freshwater to most of the region. The adjacent bay is where the fishing boats—fishing sustainably, of course—come to unload at the seafood processing centers that take in both wild captured fish and the products from integrated mariculture, where multiple species are grown, simulating an ecosystem. This is the vision for the Blue Economy fostered by the World Bank, the UN, and some of the largest global financial and conservation foundations.
International wildlife law can be used as a tool to enhance conservation if a selective, informed approach is chosen to enhance cooperation among international wildlife lawyers and conservation professionals. Nereus Program Fellow Richard Caddell explores the limitations and opportunities of international wildlife law in a new paper published in BioScience.
Fellowships provided by the Nippon Foundation have been a life-changing opportunity for thousands, opening up new frontiers of personal and professional development. Another lasting positive impact of the fellowship programs is the networks that develop among participants.
Developing scenarios — projections of the future — may help individuals, communities, corporations, and nations develop a capacity for dealing with the future. Scenarios are an important tool for proactively thinking about, and acting in a way that anticipates, things to come.
By Robert Blasiak, Nereus Program Fellow at Stockholm Resilience Centre
Fachidiot! This wonderfully direct word from the German language describes a person who knows their subject (Fach), and nothing else. It was on my mind recently as I read articles in a new special issue of the journal Ecology & Society on “Reconciling Art and Science for Sustainability”. The issue is filled with contributions from scientists and artists who have in some sense travelled into unknown and unfamiliar territory, and discovered along the way that this was feeding innovation and adding value to their work.
Scientists with the VaquitaCPR conservation project recently caught a live vaquita in the Gulf of California, Mexico. Vaquita are the smallest marine mammal in the world and are dangerously close to extinction. The captured vaquita was about six months old; since it was so young, it was quickly released.
Women working in natural resource extraction face many challenges, which hinders countries in efforts towards sustainable development and from achieving gender equality. This is especially true in the context of small-scale fishing communities.
“The intersectoral and interdisciplinary nature of the ISIMIP approach meant that topics were very broad and spanned both land and sea, natural science, social science, economics, human health, and policy,” said Tyler Eddy. “This perspective was very interesting to consider big ideas and issues at broad scales, however as a result of this broad approach, detailed ocean processes weren’t covered as much.”
When the European Space Agency (ESA) launched a satellite into orbit on Oct. 13, it did so despite opposition from Inuit leaders in Canada and Greenland over its potential to contaminate an important Arctic area.
By Julia Mason, Nereus Program fellow at Stanford University
There’s a tendency among conservation scientists to attribute the world’s environmental crises to the growing global population. Fisheries science is no exception—the issue of overfishing is often condensed to one of “too many fishers chasing too few fish,” leading to inevitable fisheries declines.
By Julia Mason, Nereus Fellow at Stanford University
I got to spend a few weeks this August doing my very favorite activity: playing field assistant for a friend in a beautiful place. The closest I get to fieldwork for my own research is interviewing fishermen—fun and exciting in its own way, but it’s still a treat to put on my ecologist hat (or rather, mask) and jump in the water.
By Guillermo Ortuño Crespo, Nereus Program Fellow at Duke University
Due to their wide-ranging swimming behaviors, migratory fish, marine mammal, seabird and sea turtle species experience a variety, and an increasing amount, of anthropogenic pressures over the course of their lives. These threats, including climate change, overfishing, and marine pollution, combined with conservation strategies that largely fail to consider spatial connectivity over the life cycle, are resulting in declining populations worldwide.
Reducing tourist consumption of reef fish is critical for Palau’s ocean sustainability, finds a new Nippon Foundation-UBC Nereus Program study published today in Marine Policy.
Nereus Director of Science William Cheung has won the Prix d’Excellence Award by the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES). The ??????????Prix d’Excellence is awarded every three years for a high level of achievement in marine sciences work through research, scientific leadership and scientific policy leadership.
Nereus Alumnus Natasha Henschke (Princeton University) and current UBC postdoc with Evgeny Pakhomov is at sea on the RV Investigator, sailing off the East Australian coast. She is working as the deputy chief scientist, helping to collect data that will allow, for the first time, the relationship between open ocean production and coastal fisheries off south eastern Australia to be established. The voyage will be used to study the Tasman Sea ecosystem and examine the link between plankton and fisheries in the region.
It’s fairly common knowledge that tuna is high in methylmercury, a neurotoxin that bioaccumulates in marine food webs. This means that methylmercury magnifies further up the food web – tuna eat smaller fish that eat even smaller fish or plankton — all of which could contain the contaminant.
As part of the 2016 International Marine Conservation Congress, in St John’s, Newfoundland, new Nereus Fellow at Stanford Julia Mason shared her story about beginning her career in science and the realizations she had. She discusses the disconnect between fisheries science and the management of the fisheries on the ground and the importance of building relationships.
Hanson Hosein discusses creative outputs and content and how they’re changing in the year 2017 at a CreativeMornings talk in Seattle on September 8. He was the September speaker on the topic of “compassion”.
Climate change and human activity have pressing impacts on the state of our ocean, threatening the integrity of marine ecosystems themselves as well as the services they provide to human communities. Given the inevitable current and future effects of climate change, adaptation by both physical and human systems is crucial. As defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), adaptation refers to “the process of adjustment to actual or expected climate and its effects.”
Climate change is expected to have many impacts on the oceans; one of them is where fish are located in the ocean. Ocean warming is expected to cause fish to shift to different locations that are cooler — generally toward the poles and into deeper waters. But not all fish are moving in the same directions and at the same speeds. This is changing what fish are eating and who are eating them.
Nereus Fellow, Rachel Seary, a PhD Student at the University of Cambridge and the United Nations Environment World Conservation Monitoring Centre, has just returned from Cambodia, where she conducted a month long fieldwork period aimed at understanding the links between mangroves and fishing community livelihoods.
Research supported by the Nereus program was featured prominently at the symposium “Marine Species on the Move” at the annual meeting of the American Fisheries Society in Tampa, Florida from August 20 to 24, 2017. The symposium brought together researchers to discuss and identify information gaps and potential adaptation strategies for the shifting spatial distributions of US fish stocks due to changing ocean conditions and climate change.
The authors looked at how food production on land and in the sea will be threatened by climate change and what the future effects on biodiversity, livelihoods and food security will be. They adopted the human development index (HDI) — a global index of life expectancy, education and per capita income. They found that all of the low human development index countries will face declines in both agriculture and fisheries production by 2050.
The rapid development of fisheries in the 1950’s facilitated declines in predator biomass, overexploitation, collapse of fish stocks, and degradation of marine habitats. A new PLOS ONE paper investigates past changes in trophic functioning of marine ecosystems cause by human-induced changes in species assemblages by applying an ecosystem approach to fisheries.
By Robert Blasiak, Nereus Program Fellow at Stockholm University
Let’s turn the clock back 113 years. The prominent German zoologist Franz Doflein is about to embark on a two-year journey with the dream of becoming one of the first scientists to study the marine flora and fauna of the deep-sea trenches off the coast of Japan. Reports that the Japanese and Russian empires have just declared war on each other are troubling, yet months of preparation cannot be abandoned, and in the summer of 1904, he boards the Prince Heinrich, a steamship bound for East Asia.
Fish are expected to shrink in size by 20 to 30 per cent if ocean temperatures continue to climb due to climate change. A new study by researchers at the Nippon Foundation-UBC Nereus Program provides a deeper explanation of why fish are expected to decline in size.
The mesopelagic zone of the ocean, which includes the 200 to 1000 m below the ocean surface, is poorly understood. Our limited scope of understanding for these areas may become increasingly problematic, as they may be vulnerable to global issues such as climate warming, deoxygenation, acidification, commercial fishing, and seabed mining.
Compared to historical times, there has been an increase in the frequency of reportings of jellyfish sightings in coastal waters. Based on a few regional case studies, many have gathered that jellyfish population sizes are exploding due to warming waters. However, there are not a lot of datasets to support this. Natasha Henschke addressed this topic in her research completed during her fellowship with the Nereus Program.
The high seas — also called international waters — comprise 64% of the world’s oceans and 45% of the earth’s surface. They are shared by the world but governed by no one country. That means that the incredible biodiversity of the high seas, from seaweeds to fish to sharks, is not currently protected.
Pacific bluefin tuna are in trouble — they’re at just 2.6% of historic, pre-fishing levels. They have been overfished and this overfishing is still continuing. Due to this dire situation, proper management of the stocks is increasingly important, yet information of the fish’s life history and migration patterns is limited.
By Colin Thackray, Nereus Fellow at Harvard University
The oceans are very expansive. Their enormous size and distance from where people stay long term presents a challenge for scientists monitoring the oceans. Unlike many atmospheric measurements for meteorology which we can make just outside of cities, often at airports, to get good measurements for ocean science, a journey on the sea is often required. Around the world, there are many ships designed or outfitted specifically for bringing scientists to the ocean – so called Research Vessels (RVs).
Nereus Program Fellow Phil Underwood (Cambridge-WCMC) attended the Advances in Marine Ecosystem Modelling Research (AMEMR) Conference, which took place between July 3 and July 6, 2017 at the Roland Levinsky Building of the University of Plymouth.
Nereus Program Director of Policy Yoshi Ota (University of Washington) attended the Association of Pacific Rim Universities’ (APRU) Annual Meeting, where he delivered a keystone speech on the interrelationships between oceans, climate change, and social equity, with an emphasis on their importance in contributing to sustainable development.
A new paper, ‘A rapid assessment of co-benefits and trade-offs among Sustainable Development Goals‘, has been published in Marine Policy and includes contributions from various Nereus affiliates. This study highlights how achieving SDG 14: Life Below Water targets contributes to the accomplishment of other SDGs
Coastal ecosystems are undergoing complex changes caused by both social and ecological drivers occurring at varying scales and speeds, which ultimately act as either risks or opportunities to coastal social-ecological systems. The assessment of adaptive capacity of coastal ecosystems is crucial in understanding the extent to which they will be able to accept and adapt to these social and biophysical drivers.
Nereus Program Fellow Richard Caddell attended the “Natural Marine Resource Management in a Changing Climate” Workshop between June 12 to 13, 2017 at the University of Tromsø in Norway. Discussion at the workshop addressed how regulations might evolve in response to shifting fish stocks due to ocean warming and acidification.
Nereus Program fellow Jessica Spijkers attended the 2017 EAT Stockholm Food Forum, hosted between June 12 and 13, 2017. At the conference, 500 of the world’s leading experts from the science, business, politics, and civil society fields gathered to collaborate on transforming the food system to solve the interconnected challenges of climate, sustainable development, and health.
The United Nations Ocean Conference to “Support the Implementation of Sustainable Development Goal 14” was held in New York at the UNHQ between June 5 and 9, 2017. On Friday June 9, the Nereus Program hosted a side event, ‘The Role of the Oceans in Sustainability: Benefits of Achieving SDG 14 for all Sustainable Development Goals,’ at the conference. This side event introduced recent research that evaluates how achieving ocean SDG 14 targets contributes to- and in some cases is required for – the achievement of other SDG targets.
Developing nations, which have contributed little to the issue of climate change, are likely to experience reduced livelihood opportunities and emerging dietary nutrient deficiencies as a result of climate change impacts on fisheries.
Due to the expansion of fishing practices, fish catches have become stagnant at best while global fishing efforts continue to grow, ultimately creating major stresses on marine resources. Fisheries impacts on both coastal and deep-sea ecosystems are well understood and documented; however, the biological and ecological impacts of fishing on open-ocean systems are not well studied or documented.
Human activities degrade and convert coastal ecosystems through infrastructure development, resource extraction, and tourism, among other anthropogenic activities. There is an urgency to gain a comprehensive understanding of how human activities/stressors impact coastal ecosystems and the ecosystems services they provide us.
The third day of the UN Ocean Conference continued with plenary discussions between member state representatives on making fisheries sustainable and increasing benefits to small island developing States (SIDS) and least developed countries (LDCs).
Continuing on the tone set during the first day of the UN Ocean Conference, day two showed the engagement and commitment of many nation states, NGOs, businesses and other stakeholders to achieving SDG 14 ‘Life Below Water’. It featured two important plenary meetings and partnership dialogues addressing targets 14.2 and 14.3: managing, protecting, conserving and restoring marine and coastal ecosystems, and minimizing and addressing ocean acidification. During those meetings, the need for enhanced international cooperation to address the common challenges were emphasized; with, for example countries such as the Soloman Islands, Israel, Tuvalu and Estonia expressing commitments to minimize ocean acidification.
Fisheries Economics Research Unit (UBC) Research Associate Louise Teh, Nereus Director of Science William Cheung, and OceanCanada Director and Nereus Research Associate (Honourary) Rashid Sumaila recently had a paper (“Scenarios for investigating the future of Canada’s oceans and marine fisheries under environmental and socioeconomic change”) published in Regional Environmental Change…
Meeting the Paris Agreement global warming target of 1.5°C will have large benefits to fisheries, finds a new Nippon Foundation-Nereus Program study published in Science. For every degree Celsius decrease in global warming, potential fish catches could increase by more than three million tonnes per year.
Indigenous seafood consumption study featured in the Washington Post, CBC, and Metro News.
The study “Biogeochemical regions of the Mediterranean Sea: an objective multidimensional and multivariate environmental approach” was recently published in Progress in Oceanography with Nereus Fellow Gabriel Reygondeau (UBC) as the lead author.
Coastal Indigenous people eat, on average, 15 times more seafood per person than non-Indigenous people in the same country, finds a Nippon Foundation-Nereus Program study published today in PLOS ONE.
Traditionally, Indigenous people have resisted research, especially quantitative research that has fed into the imposition of discriminatory socio-economic and political policies to the detriment of Indigenous communities. However, having access to a global database that quantifies fish consumption specifically by Coastal Indigenous peoples around the world, is a critical contribution to Indigenous struggle on a number of fronts.
“Our energy choices have ramifications for many other types of pollutants,” said Elsie Sunderland, Associate Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering at Harvard University and Nereus Program collaborator.
Nereus Fellow at Princeton University Colleen Petrik won the Science Board Best Presentation Award at the North Pacific Marine Science Organization (PICES) annual meeting, held in San Diego, from November 2 to 11.
Madingley is a global computational model. To a broad approximation, the Madingley model represents all (most) forms of life.
From November 2 to 13, the North Pacific Marine Science Organization (PICES) held their annual meeting in San Diego, USA. The meeting celebrated the 25th anniversary of PICES with the theme of looking at the past 25 years and imagining the next 25.
This information sheet looks at Japanese seafood imports and locations of forced and child labour.
For the past ten years, Sea Around Us has been constructing a more accurate view of world fishery catches, finding, among other things, that 30% of catch goes unreported.
Spatial differentiation of marine eutrophication damage indicators based on species density” was recently published in Ecological Indicators, co-authored by Nereus Alumnus Miranda Jones (UNEP-WCMC) and Nereus Director of Science William Cheung.
“Emptying seas, mounting tensions in fish-hungry Asia” was published yesterday by Nikkei Asian Review. It discusses the state and future of oceans and fisheries in Asia, with increasing demand yet overfished stocks, and features insights by Nereus Director of Policy Yoshitaka Ota.
Mexico recently released its budget for 2017, and among the top five largest cuts were environmental protection (down by 37%), culture (-30%), and education (-11%). Political rhetoric aside, these cuts reflect a continuing view of these issues as minor, long-term, or otherwise less important or pressing.
In his newly published chapter “Wilderness protection in Estonia“, Richard Caddell, Nereus Fellow at Utrecht University, uses Estonia as a case study for European wilderness management.
Nereus Fellow at Utrecht University Richard Caddell presented at the Seventh Annual Oslo-Southampton-Tulane Colloquium at Southampton University on October 13, 2016. He presented his paper entitled “Pirates and Platforms: Maritime Disorder and the Arctic Sunrise Arbitration”.
Dellmuth received her PhD in political science from the University of Mannheim. Her research as part of her fellowship focused on understanding when, how and why advocacy groups mobilize and gain influence in global marine governance.
“After climate change, fishing is the biggest impact humans will have on the oceans. But we have very a limited understanding of what happens beyond the horizon.
Nereus Director of Science William Cheung gave a keynote entitled “Applying macroecology to project future marine ecosystems under climate change” at the British Ecological Society’s Aquatic Macroecology Meeting in London on September 30, 2016.
Nereus Fellow at Duke University Daniel Dunn attended the Sustainable Ocean Initiative (SOI) Global Dialogue with Regional Seas Organizations and Regional Fisheries Bodies on Accelerating Progress Towards the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, which took place September 26-29th, 2016 in Seoul, Republic of Korea.
This chapter explores recent and future impacts of rapid temperature changes in the North Sea, identified as a ‘hot spot’ of climate change, with respect to biological, operational, and economic concerns in fisheries.
Nereus Fellow at Utrecht Richard Caddell acted as the keynote speaker at a fisheries law workshop on September 23 at Tromsø University, Tromsø, Norway.
Heatwaves are occurring not only on the land but also in the sea, notably “The Blob” in Northeast Pacific and a shorter heatwave on Australia’s west coast in 2010 and 2011.
‘Aliens’, ‘jelly-balls’, ‘globs’, ‘buckets of snot’, and ‘sea-walnuts’. These are the names media have used to describe salps, as mentioned by Nereus Fellow Natasha Henschke, Princeton University, in her recently published paper “Rethinking the Roles of Salps in the Ocean”.
We know the oceans are quickly changing; we are at a point in time where very different future oceans could be laid out in front of us.
In spring, as the plant buds push up through the ground and the days get warmer and longer, the baby salmon fry hatch out of their eggs and start swimming and feeding. At this time, their food – phytoplankton – should also bloom.
Nereus Program research featured in Wired, NEWS 1130, The Ubyssey, and Conservation magazine.
Nereus Principal Investigator at Utrecht University Erik Molenaar and the Netherlands Institute for the Law of the Sea (NILOS) hosted a seminar on fishing in the polar regions on September 12 at Utrecht University.
Nereus Fellow at UBC Mathieu Colléter participated in the Day of the Thousandth Fisheries Scientist conference, which took place at Agrocampus Ouest in Rennes, France, on September 16.
This year, the Nereus Program will hold a seminar series with UBC’s Green College on “Adapting to global changes in oceans and fisheries.” This series will consist of seven lectures looking at how ocean changes are affecting environments and people.
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) released their Methodological Assessment of Scenarios & Models of Biodiversity & Ecosystem Services, for which Nereus Director of Science William Cheung was a coordinating lead author, as well as a contributing author for Chapter 5.
The Second Session of the Preparatory Committee related to Marine Biological Diversity Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction took place from August 26th to September 9th at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City, United States.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature‘s World Conservation Congress took place in Honolulu, Hawaii, from September 1 to 5.
Nereus Alumni at ETH Zurich Thomas Fröelicher attended The Royal Society’s meeting on ‘Ocean Ventilation and Deoxygenation in a Warming World’ on September 12 and 13, in London, United Kingdom.
Gerald Singh is a Nereus Fellow working with Yoshitaka Ota and Andres Cisneros-Montemayor and collaborating with the United Nations Development Programme. Gerald is characterizing the contribution of a sustainable ocean to achieving broad sustainable development goals.
Nereus Director of Science William Cheung was a plenary speaker at the ‘International Conference on Scenarios and Models of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services in Support of Decision-Making.’
Nereus Program research featured in Global News, CBC Radio Canada, Metro News, and CKNW AM 980.
Global fisheries could lose approximately $10 billion of annual revenues by 2050 if climate change continues at current rates, and countries most dependent on fisheries for food and livelihoods will feel more of the effects, finds new Nippon Foundation-Nereus Program research published today in Scientific Reports.
Nereus Director of Science William Cheung attended the Scoping Meeting for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways as an invited expert.
Jessica Spijkers is a PhD student at the Stockholm Resilience Centre (Sweden) and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Australia).
Explaining Ocean Warming is a comprehensive report produced by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) looking at the impacts of warming on ocean life, ecosystems, and goods and services. The report is the work of 80 scientists from 12 countries, launched during the IUCN World Conservation Congress, September 1-10 in Hawaii. Nereus Program research was contributed to two chapters within the report.
Nereus Program research covered in National Geographic, Reuters, CBC Radio Canada, Metro, LocalXpress, and Sport Fishing.
Closing the high seas to fishing could increase fish catches in coastal waters by 10%, compensating for expected losses due to climate change, finds a new Nippon Foundation-Nereus Program study published in Fish and Fisheries.
The Nereus Scientific & Technical Briefs on Marine Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ) series was developed out of a workshop held prior to this year’s 4th International Marine Conservation Congress in St. John’s, Newfoundland (July-August 2016).
Nereus Fellow at University of Cambridge/UNEP-WCMC Rachel Seary attended the 1st FishAdapt conference on climate change adaptation for fisheries and aquaculture, held in Bangkok from August 8 to 10, 2016.
Marine areas beyond the limits of national jurisdiction contain ecosystems with marine resources and biodiversity of significant ecological, socioeconomic, and cultural importance. These areas and their resources are subject to increasing impacts from ongoing human activities and global climate change and their associated cumulative and combined effects.
A new source of publicly accessible data on fishing vessel activity is providing unprecedented insight into the scope of fishing in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ) and governance gaps therein.
Up until the 1960s, the open-ocean in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ) was one of the last frontiers of fisheries exploitation.
Despite their remoteness, the high seas and deep ocean in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ) are at the forefront of CO2-induced climate stress, both in their mitigation capacity, and their vulnerabilities.
The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) Part XIV provides for State cooperation with the view to promoting the development and transfer of marine science and technology. In addition, Article 202 refers to the provision of scientific and technical assistance to developing States for the protection and preservation of the marine environment. UNCLOS Part XIV and XIII refer to various forms of technology transfer including training, access to information, international scientific research cooperation and establishing national and regional marine science and technology centres.
Open data is critically important for effective conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ). Open data enables effective and efficient environmental impact assessments, area-based management, sharing of non-monetary benefits of marine genetic resources and achieving marine technology transfer.
Biomass is the mass of organisms in an ecosystem or community; it is thought of in terms of energy for the next trophic level – the higher chain in the food web. For example, the biomass of plankton, which may be eaten by herring, which may be eaten by tuna.
This blog explores the collaborative process I followed as a Nippon Foundation-Nereus Program consulting artist. I was commissioned to create 17 illustrations celebrating the beauty and complexity of our planet’s oceans and fisheries.
Nereus Fellow at UBC Muhammed Oyinlola attended the ClimEco5 Summer School organized by the Integrated Marine Biogeochemistry and Ecosystem Research project (IMBER), titled ‘Towards more resilient oceans: Predicting and projecting future changes in the ocean and their impacts on human societies’. The summer school took place from August 10 to 17, in Natal, Brazil.
The ocean has provided incredible services for us — taking up 28% of carbon emissions since preindustrial levels and absorbing 93% of the Earth’s excess heat since the 1970s — but because of this, it is undergoing changes.
The International Marine Conservation Congress (IMCC) took place from July 30th to August 3rd in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada. The congress brings together marine conservation professionals and students in order to “develop new and powerful tools to further marine conservation science and policy”.
The International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) ‘Final Research Coordination Meeting on Ocean Acidification and the Economic Impact on Fisheries and Coastal Society’ took place from July 18 to 22 in Monaco. The meeting, organized by Nereus Alumni Marc Metian, included Nereus Director of Science William Cheung as an invited expert.
Nereus Director of Policy Yoshitaka Ota acted as moderator at the International Symposium on Capacity Building for Sustainable Oceans from July 19 to 20 in Tokyo, Japan.
Nereus Director of Science William Cheung participated in a lecture at the Centre for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute (CINVESTAV) in Merida, Mexico, from July 25 to 26.
Newly published in the Asia-Pacific Journal of Ocean Law and Policy is the paper “Dispute Resolution and Scientific Whaling in the Antarctic: The Story Continues” by Nereus Fellow Richard Caddell, Utrecht University. The paper looks at the implications of judgements by the International Court of Justice against Japanese scientific whaling in the Southern Ocean.
alps, a type of gelatinous zooplankton, are often confused with jellyfish and while jellyfish research has increased drastically, salps have been ignored. The authors write that there “has been no comprehensive study on the biology or ecological impact of salps in almost 20 years”. This paper looks at four misconceptions about salps, including that salps are jellyfish, salps are rare, salps are trophic dead ends, and salps have a minor role in biogeochemical cycles.
Nereus Alumni and Research Fellow at Duke University Andre Boustany attended the International Scientific Committee for Tuna and Tuna-like Species in the North Pacific Ocean (ISC) plenary meeting in Sapporo, Japan, from July 13th to July 18th.
Senior Nereus Fellow at Duke University, Daniel Dunn, co-organized a workshop from July 12th to 15th on the development of a strategic environmental management plan for deep sea mining on the Mid-Range Atlantic Ridge. The workshop, held in Lisbon, Portugal, was carried under the International Seabed Authority.
One of the most significant – and increasingly bitter – international disputes of recent years has engaged legal claims over maritime territory in the South China Sea. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea of 1982 (UNCLOS), to which the main protagonists are parties, states are entitled to claim an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) conferring sovereign rights and jurisdiction up to 200 nautical miles of maritime space from their coasts.
It’s important to address the activities of transnational corporations in global fishery reform, argues a new letter co-authored by Nereus Program Principal Investigator Henrik Österblom, Stockholm Resilience Centre, and published in PNAS.
Senior Nereus Fellow at Duke University, Daniel Dunn, acted as a panelist at a COMPASS Capitol Hill briefingon ocean change and implications for fisheries and fishing communities.
“Towards an integrated database on Canadian ocean resources: benefits, current states, and research gaps” was recently published in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, authored by Nereus Fellow Andrés Cisneros-Montemayor (UBC), Director of Science William Cheung, and OceanCanada Director Rashid Sumaila (Nereus Honorary Research Associate).
Aquaculture, the farming of aquatic species, is gradually becoming an important aspect of solving the challenge of global food security. The supply of seafood from fisheries is declining; fish stocks can only be increased if we reduce our fishing pressures, yet governments continue to subsidize the fishing industry for us to fish more. Hence, the open window we have is aquaculture.
n the lead up to last week’s referendum on whether the United Kingdom should remain in the European Union, immigration often seemed to be at the forefront at the debate. But the fishing industry was also a hot topic, even leading to demonstrations and bitter exchanges on the impact of EU membership, including from boats on the Thames.
For five days, from May 23rd to 27th, and 14 years after the 1st World Fisheries Congress in Athens, Greece, the 7th World Fisheries Congress visited Busan, the second largest city of South Korea.
The Nereus Program organized a workshop with the Center for Ocean Solutions and the Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security called “Integrating climate change and small scale fisheries: Impact shocks and responses.”
“I wanted to look at contemporary species distributions, arguing that we have so little data and know so little about the distribution of a lot of species that the logical first step is to look at the contemporary distribution,” says Laurens Geffert, Nereus Fellow at Cambridge/UNEP-WCMC.
Nereus Fellow at Princeton University Natasha Henschke attended the 5th International Jellyfish Bloom Symposium from May 30 to June 3 in Barcelona, Spain.
Nereus Alumni Thomas Fröelicher (ETH Zurich) gave a joint seminar at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Hungary, on June 8th.
Nereus Fellow Richard Waddell (Utrecht) presented at the ‘New uses and abuses of the seabed’ workshop at the Scandinavian Institute of Maritime Law at the University of Oslo, Norway, from June 1 to 2, 2016.
Nereus Program research and interviews in Vice, the Globe and Mail, and Radio Canada International.
The Nereus Program was created to look at ocean questions that need input from experts on a range of topics from around the world. This past May 30 to June 3, nearly 50 of these experts gathered at the University of British Columbia for the Nereus Program Annual General Meeting.
More than 10% of the global population could face nutrition deficiencies in the coming decades due to fish catch declines, says a new Nature commentary published today co-authored by Nereus Director of Science William Cheung.
The Nereus Program presented at the Global Fishing Watch Research Workshop on June 6th and 7th at Google’s offices in San Francisco, California, United States.
Richard Caddell, Nereus Fellow at Utrecht, has had his chapter “Uncharted Waters: Strategic Environmental Assessment in the UK Offshore Area” published in The Strategic Environmental Assessment Directive.
Nereus Fellow Andres Cisneros-Montemayor (UBC) attended the OceanCanada Partnership Meeting, in Vancouver, BC, Canada, from May 24 to 27.
In our current eco-friendly world, where climate change makes front-page news and the killing of a lion launches thousands of Facebook posts, how can a porpoise be nearing extinction and most of the world not even know of its existence?
Nereus Director of Science William-Cheung gave a plenary keynote presentation at the 4th International Symposium on the Ocean in a High-CO2 World, held in Hobart, Australia, on Friday, May 6.
Nereus Fellow Daniel Dunn (Duke) attended the Convention on Biological Diversity’s twentieth meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice on April 30th in Montreal.
Fish don’t respect borders. With 1982’s United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, coastal nations were given the right to manage fisheries within their Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) – the area that extends, generally, up to 200 nautical miles. But of course, fish don’t adhere to imaginary lines in the ocean.
Nereus Fellow Phil Underwood (Cambridge/UNEP-WCMC) gave a presentation at the Friends of Madingley Symposium on May 6th at the David Attenborough Building at the University of Cambridge, which aimed to bring together the community of researchers working on the Madingley Model and to discuss the latest advancements.
Nereus Senior Research Fellow Daniel Dunn (Duke University) attended the workshop “A Conservation Agenda for Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction” hosted by the Cambridge Centre for Environment, Energy, and Natural Resource Governance at the University of Cambridge from May 10 to 11.
Yoshitaka Ota, Nereus Program Director (Policy), and Rashid Sumaila, OceanCanada Research Director and Nereus Program Honorary Research Associate, acted as panelists during a talk by Marjo Vierros, Adjunct Senior Fellow at the United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability and Liu Institute Visiting Fellow, given at the Liu Institute for Global Issues on April 27th.
Nereus Program Fellow at Princeton University Natasha Henschke attended the ICES/PICES 6th Zooplankton Production Symposium “New Challenges in a Changing Ocean” from May 9-13 2016, in Bergen, Norway.
Paris tends to relate to fisheries through its gourmet cuisine, which every so often includes fish. However, in December 2015, Paris was the epicenter of the renowned United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 21), which aimed at setting a target to curb Carbon emissions at a global scale.
Floating marine species and objects can drift from one area in the surface ocean to any other spot across the globe in less than a decade, finds a new study published in Nature Communications by Nereus Program alumnus James Watson, currently a research scientist at Stockholm Resilience Centre.
“What has been interesting about the Nereus fellowship right from the beginning is that we are all here, all engaged in this monumental challenge of predicting the future of marine fisheries and the global oceans. My whole PhD has been grappling with that question- how do you say something valuable around the future of the oceans from a governance perspective?”
“Seasonal phytoplankton blooms in the North Atlantic linked to the overwintering strategies of copepods,” co-authored by Nereus Fellow Rebecca Asch (Princeton University), was recently published in Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene.
Japanese call it shun (?), the seasonality of food. It refers to the time of year when a specific type of food is at its peak, either in terms of harvest or flavour. It is not unique to Japanese culture, as The Byrds reminded us in the mid-1960s with their, now classic, rendition of “Turn! Turn! Turn! (to Everything There Is a Season).”
Richard Caddell, Nereus Fellow at Utrecht, has contributed a chapter entitled “‘Only connect’? Regime interaction and global biodiversity conservation” to the Research Handbook on Biodiversity and Law, to be published June 2016.
The Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released in 2013 and 2014, highlighted the vulnerability, impacts and adaptation of marine systems to climate change and ocean acidification.
The paper “Temperature-based targeting in a multispecies fishery under climate change” was recently published in Fisheries Oceanography by Nereus Program Fellow Daniel Dunn (Duke University) and Principal Investigator Patrick Halpin (Duke University). The study looked at whether the bottom temperature of the water, in spring and fall, affected the distribution of Atlantic cod in the USA Northeast compared to other species of fish.
Andre Boustany, Nereus Alumnus (Duke University), attended the ICCAT Advisory Committee Meeting and the Highly Migratory Species Advisory Panel Meeting in March. Boustany sits on the advisory panel for both.
Different people will naturally have different awareness levels of international organisations and global governance. But why does this matter? A new paper by Nereus Fellow Lisa Dellmuth, at Stockholm University, finds that there is inequality due to the type of people that have this knowledge.
Matilda Petersson has a background in Political Science with a specialization in Environmental Politics. Her PhD project will investigate whether and under which conditions inclusive governance systems can contribute to effective governance of global marine resources.
Nereus Program research and interviews featured in Vox, Deutschlandfunk, and Toronto Star.
OceanCanada Research Director Rashid Sumaila and his collaborators from the UBC Global Fisheries Cluster (Sea Around Us and the Nereus Program) have published an updated estimate of global fisheries subsidies in the international journal Marine Policy. The researchers found that the global fishing industry is being supported by $35 billion yearly in government subsidies, the majority of these, upwards of $20 billion annually, promote increased capacity that can lead to harmful impacts such as overfishing.
Climate change is expected to have major impacts on the ocean, the species that live there, and the people who rely it for their food and livelihood. Since the beginning of the 20th century, CO2 emissions from human activities have altered physical and chemical properties of the ocean. The ocean has become warmer and, in some areas, less oxygenated, which has caused changes in the productivity and distribution of marine species.
Controlled chaos is one way to describe a Surya Vanka-led Design Swarm. Controlled chaos that brings great minds together to solve important real world problems would be more accurate. Conceived of by Vanka, a design industry leader and former Director of User Experience at Microsoft, the innovative hack-a-thon meets brainstorm design approach has been traveling the globe tackling issues where solutions are in high demand.
My mother is an abstract expressionist painter who creates art using oil paints, acrylics, watercolors, and pen and ink. My father has a Masters degree in physics and spent most of his career working as a software engineer. As a result, I have born witness to many conversations about the intersection between art and science throughout my life.
A range of human pressures is threatening the sustainability of marine fisheries. Amongst those, overfishing, partly driven by Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing, is a major stressor. Thirty percent of global fish catch goes unreported, found a recent study by Nereus Program collaborator Sea Around Us.
Recently published in Fisheries Oceanography,by Nereus Alumnus Andre Boustany (Duke University) and Principal Investigator Patrick Halpin (Duke University), was the study “Tuna and swordfish catch in the U.S. northwest Atlantic longline fishery in relation to mesoscale eddies”.
While jellyfish, with their soft, gelatinous bodies, may seem like innocuous creatures, when they occur in large blooms they can often cause detrimental effects. Jellyfish blooms have been observed to clog power plants, cause mass mortality to fish in aquaculture farms, burst fishing nets and even sink a 10 tonne fishing vessel.
Nereus Director (Science) William Cheung was invited as a “resource person” at the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Methodological Assessment of Scenarios and Modelling of Biodiversity and Ecosystem services, in De Bilt, The Netherlands, from January 25 to 27.
For three days from January 18th to 20th, Monterey, California, has become an aggregation hotspot for more than 100 of the world’s foremost experts on the conservation and management of the three bluefin tuna species that inhabit our global ocean.
A new Nereus Program study, funded by the Nippon Foundation, finds that dynamic ocean management, which changes in real time in response to the nature of the ocean and its users, can reduce bycatch — fish and marine species caught accidentally while catching targeted species — without additional costs to fishers.
Countries drastically underreport the number of fish caught worldwide, and the numbers obscure a significant decline in the total catch.
Nereus research reported on in the Washington Post, the Vancouver Sun, CTV News, Global News, NPR, Hakai magazine, The Tyee, Times Colonist and Vancouver Observer.
First Nations fisheries’ catch could decline by nearly 50 per cent by 2050, according to a new study examining the threat of climate change to the food and economic security of indigenous communities along coastal British Columbia, Canada.
Climate change news, editorials and interviews from CKNW, the David Suzuki Foundation and Future Oceans.
Based on the current trajectory of human-induced impacts on the environment, it is clear that we are pushing the oceans and marine ecosystems to unprecedented limits.
Climate change could affect temperatures all over the world, but what may not be immediately apparent is that climate change will affect ocean temperatures.
Climate change is resulting in the earlier arrival of spring conditions in many ecosystems around the world.
From November 20 to December 11, leaders from more than 195 countries will meet in Paris to discuss the future of the planet. But will oceans be on the agenda?
Colleen Petrik, Senior Nereus Fellow at Princeton, visited the Stockholm Resilience Centre at the University of Stockholm from October 26 to 30 to collaborate with former Nereus Fellow James Watson.
Gabriel Reygondeau, Nereus Fellow (UBC), has co-authored a paper entitled “Reliability of spatial and temporal patterns of C. finmarchicus inferred from the CPR survey” in the Journal of Marine Systems.
The fourth Integrated Marine Biogeochemistry and Ecosystem Research (IMBER) IMBIZO (a Zulu word meaning ‘meeting or gathering’) workshop took place at the Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia and Geofisica (OGS) in Trieste, Italy, from October 26 to 30th, 2015.
Water spills from the edge of a giant, melting iceberg on the cover of the November 2015 issue of Science. The special issue focused on the effects of climate change on our ocean systems, and highlighted research by Dr. William Cheung, an Associate Professor with the Changing Ocean Research Unit at the University of British Columbia, and Director (Science) of the Nereus Program.
New media coverage from Science, BBC News, South China Morning Post, International Business Times, Undercurrent News and more.
Vicky Lam, Fisheries Economist and Senior Research Fellow (UBC), was invited by the Fraser Basin Council to give a presentation on the impacts of climate change on fisheries on the coast of northwest British Columbia, Canada.
“Boom or Bust: The Future of Fish in the South China Sea” has been published by William Cheung, Director of the Nereus Program (Science), and Rashid Sumaila, Research Director of the OceanCanada Partnership (UBC), for the OceanAsia project.
Lisa Dellmuth, Senior Research Fellow at Stockholm University, is a co-author of the newly published paper “NGO Influence in International Organizations: Information, Access and Exchange” in the British Journal of Political Science.
In A Sand County Almanac, the landmark book on wilderness, ecology, and conservation, we are offered a short anecdote regarding a changing environment:
“I had a bird dog named Gus. When Gus couldn’t find pheasants he worked up an enthusiasm for Sora rails and meadowlarks. This whipped-up zeal for unsatisfactory substitutes masked his failure to find the real thing. It assuaged his inner frustration.” – Aldo Leopold (1949).
William Cheung, Director of the Nereus Program (Science), and Gabriel Reygondeau, Nereus Fellow (UBC), are co-authors of a chapter on The Southern Ocean, published in the Ocean and Climate Platform’s Scientific Notes.