Lessons in precaution: The International Whaling Commission experience with precautionary management

The precautionary principle (PP) only represents a new approach to managing uncertainty in so far that it requires proponents of an activity or substance to provide evidence that the activity/substance is harmless, as opposed to the more traditional “trial and error” approach that has instead placed the burden of proof that something is harmful on its opponents. This article critiques the PP as a policy making tool for managing uncertainty, focusing on the epistemological problems it raises, before then using the International Whaling Commission's experience with precautionary approaches to wildlife management to demonstrate the principle's limits and weaknesses when applied in a highly politicised policymaking environment. The article concludes that while the PP offers some benefits for managing uncertainty, its vagueness and openness to broad interpretation can also result in its application creating, rather than limiting, risks and uncertainty.     

Local economic development and the academy

This brief introduction highlights the various ways the Academy approaches local economic development (LED). It shows that the Academy is not always been favorable to the advancement of LED as its practical demands often transcend the tightly defined disciplines of a typical university structure. Caught between disciplines, LED to often neglected by theorists as the subject matter is difficult to model and depends heavily on the social fabric of the regional economy. The paper concludes with a brief outline of this special issue. The papers in this volume show the diversity of approaches and topics that characterize the practice of LED. They are multidisciplinary and depict a variety of approaches from the more theoretical to the applied.     

Estimating global discards and their potential reduction for the Galician fishing fleet (NW Spain)

This study presents the first comprehensive estimation of discard amounts in the Galician fishing fleet, in order to provide an integral view of this increasing environmental problem at a regional scale. Subsequently, a series of improvement actions relating to discard minimization are suggested with the goal of enhancing the performance of the Galician fishing fleet through discard minimization. Discard estimates were constructed individually for the different Galician fisheries by aggregating primary data obtained from a total of 89 fishing vessels and secondary data for those fleets that were not directly sampled. Results showed that roughly 60,250 t of marine organisms were discarded by the Galician fleet in 2008, representing 16.9% of the total capture. Moreover, an important percentage of these discards were linked mainly to trawling vessels and to a lesser extent, to certain long lining fisheries. Therefore, improved management measures in target stocks should take into account the fact that alternative fishing gears other than trawl nets may reduce the amount of discards for certain species. This estimation may improve the assessment of stocks and help to quantify the damage that discards may have on wild ecosystems.