Fifteen fisheries scientists and fisheries experts from the West African sub-region (Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia, Cape-Verde, Guinea Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone) will be attending a capacity-building workshop, hosted by the UBC Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries’ Sea Around Us project, and funded by the MAVA Foundation.
The workshop, which runs from July 25 to August 5, will focus on each country’s priority areas, using detailed catch reconstruction data, Marine Protected Area coverage, climate change indexes, and other parameters that have been researched by the participants. Their research will focus on data and knowledge gaps that require addressing, and will produce scientific papers authored or co-authored by the participants. The workshop will also include instructions on major concepts such as fishing down the marine food webs and shifting baselines, fisheries economics and policy, climate change impacts, Marine Protected Areas, as well as details of the global Sea Around Us and FAO databases, the global online encyclopaedias FishBase and SeaLifeBase, and some basic training in scientific writing. Participants are expected to work closely with their colleagues from other West African countries to research common issues, and to leverage these interactions and collaborations into future opportunities for data exchange and collaborative research work in the region.
The workshop will close with each participant, or group of participants, producing a draft paper whose topic will be conceptualized within the workshop’s stated fields. This paper will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal during or immediately after the workshop.
The Sea Around Us project has focused its work over the last decade on the ‘reconstruction’ of total catches by the marine fisheries of the world, with a heavy emphasis on fisheries – domestic and foreign – in West Africa, which makes them the ideal research unit to host this workshop. The Sea Around Us, and its Global Fisheries Cluster counterparts (the Fisheries Economics Research Unit and the Changing Oceans Research Unit) are part of UBC’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, which brings together a community of Canadian and international experts in ocean and freshwater species, systems, economics and other issues to provide new insights into how our marine systems function, the impacts of human activity on those systems, and the development of a transformative global shift toward sustainable coastal ecosystems, oceans and fisheries.
Workshop overview
West African Workshop: FISHERIES ECONOMICS
by Sea Around Us
The second day of the West Africa capacity-building workshop saw Dr. Rashid Sumaila give an engaging lecture on the economics of fisheries. The workshop is being coordinated by Dr. Dyhia Belhabib and is funded through the generous support of the MAVA Foundation.
Sumaila discussed several fundamental principles — like supply and demand, externalities, and incentives — and applied them to real world examples in West Africa.
West African Workshop: COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH
by Sea Around Us
On the third day of the West Africa capacity-building workshop researchers narrowed down subject areas to analyze — areas, they agree, that are affecting all countries in the West Africa sub-region, and therefore, need to be confronted through nation-to-nation collaboration.
Dr. Dyhia Belhabib, who organized and is coordinating the two-week workshop, said that four topics have been decided upon. These are, broadly, climate change, marine protected areas, illegal fishing, and governance. A different group of researchers will look at each of the topics.
West African Workshop: DR. DYHIA BELHABIB CONCLUDES WEST AFRICAN CAPACITY-BUILDING WORKSHOP
by Sea Around Us
After two weeks of work and lectures the West Africa capacity-building workshop is coming to a close.
Organized by Dr. Dyhia Belhabib and funded through the MAVA Foundation, researchers from West African countries collaborated on many fisheries issues important to the sub-region.
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