Blue harvest: inland fisheries as an ecosystem service

The world's rivers and lakes support globally important inland fisheries, providing food and employment for tens of millions of people in Africa, Asia and Latin America. This assessment paper reviews the importance of inland fisheries as an ecosystem service, the pressures upon them, and management approaches to sustain them.

The paper clarifies that the continued supply of benefits from inland fisheries is dependent on the health of the ecosystems upon which they depend. Therefore, there is an urgent need for major investment in policy and management approaches that address the direct and indirect drivers of aquatic ecosystem degradation and loss of inland fisheries.

The authors underscores that the UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) Ecosystem Management Programme provides an effective framework for this purpose, and FAO complements this work. The policy implications of this integrative ecosystem approach include:

• all constituencies that impact on fisheries need to be engaged, especially those concerned with land and water management
• coalitions of interest should be developed with stakeholders in other sectors that draw upon other services provided by aquatic ecosystems
• stakeholders need to agree upon future scenarios and management objectives for each fishery and the ecosystems that sustain them
• successful management of inland fisheries needs to adopt an effective process of adaptive learning that adjusts management practices and policies in response to the results achieved

• improve understanding of inland fisheries' vulnerability to environmental change
• develop viable options for addressing the threats posed to inland fisheries by environmental change
• build adaptive capacity among key stakeholder groups to increase resilience of inland fisheries at local, national and regional scales
• improve governance of inland fisheries and their ecosystems
• develop capacity to sustain and enhance social benefits from these resources