Stefania Asta Karsldottir

The impact of humans’ growing demand for resources is particularly evident in marine ecosystems where it is driving biodiversity loss and negatively impacting ecosystem services critical to human societies, including fishery yields. Thus, to meet global biodiversity goals, it is critical to address biodiversity declines in marine habitats and promote recovery. Although net outcome policies for biodiversity are becoming widely used to support such goals in terrestrial systems, they have not yet been applied to mitigate and compensate for the full impact of fisheries and remain largely absent from fisheries management frameworks.

My research project will explore how principles of the mitigation hierarchy could be applied to mitigate and compensate for the total impact of fisheries on biodiversity, including on target stock, bycatch and the greater ecosystem, and become nature positive. I aim to develop a conceptual framework that will demonstrate how this could be done in theory, and use fishery case studies from the leading wild-capture fisheries certification programme, the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), to illustrate how it would work in practice. Based on the results, I will outline the implications for fisheries, biodiversity and the MSC Fisheries Standard.