Coastal marine systems: Conserving fish and sustaining community livelihoods with Co-management

Abstract

Community contributions to fisheries management are important to the sustainability of coastal ecosystems, including the people who most depend on fisheries. A majority of the world's population lives along coastlines. People are an integral component of coastal marine systems because of what they do to either conserve or damage marine resources. Just as we think of ecological systems as having structure, function, and patterns of interrelationship and change, so too are human populations usually organized into communities that have institutions (laws, rules, customary practices) and measurable effects on coastal marine systems. Human communities and the coastal marine zone that they most strongly impact are thus logically viewed as an integrated social-ecological system (see Chapter 1). © 2009 Springer-Verlag New York.