Oceans and Fisheries Seminars

Dr. Sarah Harper completed her PhD in 2019 at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, where she focused on estimating the contributions by women in fisheries economies around the world. Her research continues to weave together social, economic and policy dimensions of fisheries in BC and around the world, including gender equality, Indigenous fisheries, fisheries access and licensing policies, subsidy provision and reform, among other topics. Sarah is currently the gender co-lead for the Illuminating Hidden Harvests project, a collaboration between the FAO, WorldFish and Duke University, she is an instructor for the Haida Gwaii Institute where she teaches a course on fisheries co-management in the North Pacific Coast, and is about to start a Mitacs funded Postdoctoral Fellowship with the University of Victoria and Nature United, investigating climate change vulnerability and adaptation in BC fisheries. Sarah has worked with the United Nations FAO, Ecotrust Canada, the Heiltsuk Nation, Oceana Washington, and the Vancouver Aquarium’s OceanWise program. Her approach to research is highly collaborative, seeking projects that push for more sustainable and equitable ocean policies and institutional change.

The importance of gender in fisheries is gaining recognition as reflected by the Small-scale Fisheries Guidelines, and in mandates by organizations and funders to include gender in any research with a human dimension. Developing fisheries policies and programs now often requires a gender analysis to identify and mitigate the impact of these efforts on women and other vulnerable groups. This push for equity and equality emerges from human rights-based approaches to small-scale fisheries, further bolstered by the Sustainable Development Goals. While there is increasing emphasis on gender inclusion in fisheries policy and programs at a high level, the data needed to support gender analysis and the development of targeted programs on the ground, that redress inequalities, are lacking. Acknowledgement of this gap in gender data to inform fisheries management and policy is not new but efforts to close this gap might finally be gaining traction. This seminar focuses on the need to close this gender data gap for more informed and effective small-scale fisheries management and how to go about doing it. As we move even more fully into a data driven world where models and algorithms are used to make predictions and develop future scenarios, reducing gender bias in fisheries socio-economic data is even more critical to advancing gender equality in this sector.

Boris Worm is a Killam Research Professor in Marine Conservation Biology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. His research program focuses on changes in marine biodiversity, and the effects of fisheries, climate change, and other human impacts on global ocean ecosystems. He is also the Ocean Frontier Institute’s Ambassador for Ocean Literacy and the Scientific Director of Ocean School, a youth education initiative developed in collaboration with the National Film Board of Canada.

In this presentation I will argue that humanity has reached a critical turning point in our relationship with the ocean. We now comprehend our collective impacts and dependence on the sea and have the opportunity to work towards recovery at a global scale. I will present evidence that substantial rebuilding of marine ecosystems is possible over the next 30 years, assuming that local solutions are scaled to the global level, and integrated across national boundaries and diverging interests. Building ocean literacy, especially among youth, is identified as a critical prerequisite towards realizing that vision