An Overview of the Project

Aims

The overall aim of the project is to develop practical Fisheries Ecosystem Plans that can be used for the sustainable management of fisheries in the waters around Ireland.

A fundamental principle of the ecosystem approach is that it should be a participatory process involving stakeholders and accordingly the project will proceed through close co-operation between the third-level partners, relevant fishing industry representatives, the Marine Institute, managers, policy makers and other interested parties.

The principles underlying the ecosystem approach, and which will be developed into operational fisheries management objectives by the project partners are:

• We must maintain ecosystem integrity and function;
• we must include stakeholders in the decision making process;
• we must use a precautionary approach and risk assessments;
• we must use an adaptive management approach (i.e. management must be adaptive rather than predictive);
• ecosystem areas and management areas must be compatible;
• the impacts of all sectors (eg shipping, pollution, aquaculture) must be considered;
• ecosystem management is a social process – take a social-ecological complex systems approach;
• incentives must be aligned with conservation and rational use.

Organisational Structure