Towards vibrant fish populations and sustainable fisheries that benefit all: learning from the last 30 years to inform the next 30 years.

A common goal among fisheries science professionals, stakeholders, and rights holders is to ensure the persistence and resilience of vibrant fish populations and sustainable, equitable fisheries in diverse aquatic ecosystems, from small headwater streams to offshore pelagic waters. Achieving this goal requires a complex intersection of science and management, and a recognition of the interconnections among people, place, and fish that govern these tightly coupled socioecological and sociotechnical systems. The World Fisheries Congress (WFC) convenes every four years and provides a unique global forum to debate and discuss threats, issues, and opportunities facing fish populations and fisheries. The 2021 WFC meeting, hosted remotely in Adelaide, Australia, marked the 30th year since the first meeting was held in Athens, Greece, and provided an opportunity to reflect on progress made in the past 30 years and provide guidance for the future. We assembled a diverse team of individuals involved with the Adelaide WFC and reflected on the major challenges that faced fish and fisheries over the past 30 years, discussed progress toward overcoming those challenges, and then used themes that emerged during the Congress to identify issues and opportunities to improve sustainability in the world's fisheries for the next 30 years. Key future needs and opportunities identified include: rethinking fisheries management systems and modelling approaches, modernizing and integrating assessment and information systems, being responsive and flexible in addressing persistent and emerging threats to fish and fisheries, mainstreaming the human dimension of fisheries, rethinking governance, policy and compliance, and achieving equity and inclusion in fisheries. We also identified a number of cross-cutting themes including better understanding the role of fish as nutrition in a hungry world, adapting to climate change, embracing transdisciplinarity, respecting Indigenous knowledge systems, thinking ahead with foresight science, and working together across scales. By reflecting on the past and thinking about the future, we aim to provide guidance for achieving our mutual goal of sustaining vibrant fish populations and sustainable fisheries that benefit all. We hope that this prospective thinking can serve as a guide to (i) assess progress towards achieving this lofty goal and (ii) refine our path with input from new and emerging voices and approaches in fisheries science, management, and stewardship.

Technological entropy and its implications to fisheries governability.

The interactive governance theory postulates that the governability of a fishery system depends on the governing capacity, and the overall quality of the system to be governed. The elements making the fisheries more or less governable correspond to the diversity, complexity, dynamics, and scale of the natural and social systems that are being governed and the governing system. To date, the extent to which technological development affects these properties, and the fisheries governability, has not been evaluated. This paper presents a novel conceptualization of "technological entropy", linking the concept of entropy with technological innovation happening across fisheries. It further discusses the relationship between technological entropy and governability of fishery systems and illustrates it using examples from Newfoundland fisheries. The paper argues that technological entropy creates new challenges for fisheries governance by influencing fishers' decisions and adding demands on the governing capacity. Assessing how technologies fit into the fisheries governability framework can, therefore, help inform governing actions towards securing sustainable fisheries.

Historical Perspective and Risk of Multiple Neglected Tropical Diseases in Coastal Tanzania: Compositional and Contextual Determinants of Disease Risk.

BACKGROUND: In the past decade, research on neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) has intensified in response to the need to enhance community participation in health delivery, establish monitoring and surveillance systems, and integrate existing disease-specific treatment programs to control overlapping NTD burdens and detrimental effects. In this paper, we evaluated the geographical distribution of NTDs in coastal Tanzania. METHODS AND FINDINGS: We also assessed the collective (compositional and contextual) factors that currently determine risks to multiple NTDs using a cross sectional survey of 1253 individuals in coastal Tanzania. The results show that the effect size in decreasing order of magnitude for non-binary predictors of NTD risks is as follows: NTD comorbidities > poverty > educational attainment > self-reported household quality of life > ethnicity. The multivariate analysis explained 95% of the variance in the relationship between NTD risks and the theoretically-relevant covariates. Compositional (biosocial and sociocultural) factors explained more variance at the neighbourhood level than at the regional level, whereas contextual factors, such as access to health services and household quality, in districts explained a large proportion of variance at the regional level but individually had modest statistical significance, demonstrating the complex interactions between compositional and contextual factors in generating NTD risks. CONCLUSIONS: NTD risks were inequitably distributed over geographic space, which has several important policy implications. First, it suggests that localities of high burden of NTDs are likely to diminish within statistical averages at higher (regional or national) levels. Second, it indicates that curative or preventive interventions will become more efficient provided they can be focused on the localities, particularly as populations in these localities are likely to be burdened by several NTDs simultaneously, further increasing the imperative of multi-disease interventions.

An interactive governance and fish chain approach to fisheries rebuilding: a case study of the Northern Gulf cod in eastern Canada.

Rebuilding collapsed fisheries is a multifaceted problem, requiring a holistic governance approach rather than technical management fixes. Using the Northern Gulf cod case study in eastern Canada, we illustrate how a "fish chain" framework, drawn from the interactive governance perspective, is particularly helpful in analyzing rebuilding challenges. The analysis demonstrates that factors limiting rebuilding exist along the entire fish chain, i.e., the pre-harvest, harvest, and post-harvest stages. These challenges are embedded in both the ecological and social systems associated with the Northern Gulf cod fisheries, as well as in the governing systems. A comparative analysis of the pre- and post-collapse of the cod fisheries also reveals governance opportunities in rebuilding, which lie in policy interventions such as integrated and ecosystem-based management, livelihood transitional programs, and cross-scale institutional arrangements. Lessons from the Northern Gulf cod case study, especially the missed opportunities to explore alternative governing options during the transition, are valuable for rebuilding other collapsed fisheries.