Effective coordination of the activities needed to progress the implementation of Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD) within the fisheries and aquaculture sectors is essential. The concepts of ESD cover a variety of different disciplines including environmental, social, economic, legal and administrative. Furthermore, the stakeholders involved include the research agencies, fisheries management agencies, environmental agencies, the commercial, recreational and aquaculture industries along with the non-government organizations plus indigenous interests. Therefore, the standard jurisdictional, discipline or stakeholder consultative structures are not appropriate to meet this task.
A “Subprogram structure”, which has a reference group that acts both as a coordinating group and as method of increasing communication amongst the different parties, has proven an effective method of administering these activities for the past two years. The duration of the current ESD Reporting and Assessment (ESDRA) subprogram project will finish in June 2004. At this time, however, a number of ESD based initiatives will still be underway. Moreover, a number of new initiatives have only just been endorsed by the ESD reference group and the Ministerial Council for Natural Resource Management (NRMSC) and are likely to be funded in the coming round of applications. Therefore, to assist in the effective management and coordination of these activities (and any future developments) an extension of the subprogram for a further three year period will be required.
Final report
The second stage of the operation of the ESD Subprogram was successful, but compared to the focus during the first subprogram period, mostly in a consolidation manner rather than from the generation of significant new tools. This was necessary because it takes time to adopt and integrate significant changes to the methods of operation of agencies and industries. The policies must be there before any real activity can occur and we found that for the broader focused, cross fishery/cross sector applications of the framework, agencies were not in a position for much of the time to apply this.
There was also the need to get a level of harmonization of policy and processes amongst agencies - especially between fishery and environment agencies before these broader frameworks can be applied in an effective manner. Such discussions are now occurring in some jurisdictions and these regional types of frameworks are therefore becoming more relevant to their operations and it is likely that they will be used with increasing frequency over the coming few years.
The projects and processes undertaken through the ESD subprogram (and related activities) have overall, been successful. It has provided the basis to demonstrate whether management has credibility with the issues of resource sustainability, functional ecosystem relationships and habitat processes such as is needed to meet the requirements of the Commonwealth's EPBC assessment. Most jurisdictions are now using the tools and frameworks developed by the subprogram or related projects.
Keywords: Ecologically Sustainable Development, Ecosystem Based Fisheries Management, Ecosystem Approaches; Risk Assessment, fisheries management, reporting frameworks, social and economic assessments.
