From biogeochemical processes to sustainable human livelihoods: the challenges of understanding and managing changing marine social-ecological systems

摘要

The study and management of how humans interact with marine ecosystems has usually treated humans as stressors, in particular via fishing, coastal habitat change and pollution. This has led to numerous formal and informal institutions and regulations to constrain and control human behaviour (e.g. see [1,2] for examples related to fishing), which have been only partly successful. This lack of success is in part due to the lack of consideration by these institutions and regulations of the range of stressors acting on people and the motivations that underlie human behaviour in relation to the marine environment. The recent development of a more inclusive and interactive marine social-ecological systems approach, which Berkes and Folke [3] define as an integrated humans-in-nature concept in which the delineation between human social and 'natural' ecological systems is artificial and arbitrary, is an attempt to explicitly include the human dimension.