Measuring the sustainability of coral reef fisheries

Presented by Indiana Riley

PhD Candidate, The University of Sydney

Supervisors: Prof Josh Cinner (USyd), Prof Will Figueria (USyd), Dr Hayden Schilling (NSW DPI Fisheries)

Sustainable harvest is an increasingly urgent goal for global fisheries as oceans and the communities that depend on them face mounting climatic, political, and population pressures. However, conventional fisheries sustainability benchmarks primarily focus on conserving individual species stocks, often overlooking the broader goals of “sustaining” livelihoods, cultures, and the ecosystems that fisheries rely on. The limitations of traditional sustainable benchmarks are particularly evident in coral reef fisheries, where diverse fishing methods yield multispecies catches, the needs and priorities of local communities differ vastly across the globe, and limited resources prevent the collection of long-term, detailed catch data. Traditional single-species stock assessments and reference points are insufficient for guiding sustainable management in these complex systems.

Recent advancements in data-poor, multispecies and ecosystem-based reference points offer promising alternatives, but their application to coral reef fisheries remains limited and have rarely been evaluated alongside other indicators of environmental, economic, and social well-being on a global scale. Indy’s talk will explore some of the emerging best practices in measuring sustainability on coral reefs, how she intends to apply these methods to measure the sustainability of reefs on global and local scales, and some of the potential trade-offs associated with these measurements.