Assessing social-ecological vulnerability of coastal systems to fishing and tourism

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Authors

Detecting areas with high social-ecological vulnerability (SEV) is essential to better inform management interventions for building resilience in coastal systems. The SEV framework, developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is a robust method to identify SEV of tropical coastal systems to climate change. Yet, the application of this framework to temperate regions and other drivers of change remains underexplored. This study operationalizes the SEV framework to assess the social-ecological implications of fishing and tourism in temperate coastal systems. We spatially represented the SEV of coastal systems and identified the social and ecological vulnerability dimensions underpinning this SEV. Our results demonstrate that different dimensions contribute differently to the SEV, suggesting the need for distinctive management intervention to reduce the vulnerability of coastal systems. Our findings also highlight that livelihood diversification and the protection of marine areas may be plausible strategies to build resilience in temperate coastal systems that face fishing and tourism pressures. With this study, we hope to encourage the application of the SEV framework to other drivers of change for building more resilient coastal systems.
Original languageEnglish
Article number147078
JournalScience of the Total Environment
Volume784
Number of pages13
ISSN0048-9697
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 25.08.2021

Bibliographical note

We thank all the RLS divers who have contributed to biological data collection, and all the dive centers that made the sampling possible. This study was supported by the project MARINERES, CGL2013-49122-C3-1-R of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness , DIVERSAT, RTI2018-098970-B-100 of the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities , and by the project INBIOMAR, PRCV00676 that count with the support of the Biodiversity Foundation of the Spanish Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge. We also thank the valuable comments and suggestions from the two anonymous reviewers, which helped improve the quality of our manuscript.

Copyright © 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

    Research areas

  • Sustainability Science - Fish community, Marine biodiversity, resilience, rocky reef, Social-ecological associations, Temperate regions