Research and Projects

Coastal CURA (Community-University Research Alliance) 

The Coastal CURA is a five-year project that is building knowledge and capacity, across the Maritimes, to support community involvement in managing our coasts and oceans. The Coastal CURA – a “Community University Research Alliance” – is a partnership of First Nations communities, fishery-related organizations and university participants, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Coastal CURA is reaching out to other communities, organizations and academics, as well as to government agencies, interested in contributing to the goals of the project. It is making a difference close to home, and across the country, wherever coastal communities and coastal resource users are facing challenges from a range of environmental, economic and social impacts. The Coastal CURA is helping to meet these challenges by supporting community involvement in both grass-roots and large-scale integrated coastal and ocean management initiatives – ones that seek to coordinate management of multiple coastal uses (fishing, aquaculture, shipping, tourism, etc.), and that can have a major impact on the social and economic well-being of coastal communities.

Partnership for Canada-Caribbean Community Climate Change Adaptation (ParCA)

This five-year project (2011-2016) will investigate how small and medium-sized coastal communities in Jamaica, Tobago, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island will adapt to the impact of rising sea levels and other climatic changes. ParCa involves a team of researchers from the University of Waterloo, the University of Prince Edward Island, Saint Mary’s University, and the University of the West Indies. ParCA will lead to the development of best practices guidelines for conducting this kind of research as well as lessons learned that can be applied to other coastal communities around the world. The award is under the International Research Initiative on Adaptation to Climate Change (IRIACC), the result of a funding collaboration between IDRC, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Canadian Capture Fisheries Research Network

The NSERC Canadian Capture Fisheries Research network is a unique collaboration among Canada’s academic researchers, fishing industry and government. The vision of this network is to re-shape fisheries research in Canada, bringing together industry, the academic community and governmental research on priority research questions, and linking existing work/research so that it is useful. The research of the new network is aimed at increasing knowledge that will enhance ecological sustainability, viability, and improved management of Canadian fisheries. It includes research to overcome information gaps in relation to important fisheries, improve the use of industry information in assessment and management, enhance ecological sustainability while achieving operational efficiency, and improve the basis for the ecosystem-based approach to fisheries management. The network involves 33 academic co-applicants from 11universities working in ongoing close collaboration with many collaborators from the fishing industry of Canada, researchers and managers from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and other federal and provincial departments. The network is unique in that it is industry driven, and is focused on projects that have the active collaboration of industry with academic and departmental researchers. The network will increase research and training and provide information, knowledge and technology that will assist the capture fisheries industry to improve sustainability and viability.

Governing Small Scale Fisheries Project: Canada-WorldFish Center Collaborative Project

The ongoing erosion of fisheries ecosystems and the context of rapid market-driven change and increasing climate instability require intensified efforts to make small-scale fisheries more resilient. One potentially significant contribution to these efforts is the social wellbeing perspective. While hardly a new concept, wellbeing has been widely embraced in recent years as a way to expand beyond narrow income measures of development success. In fisheries, where the focus on rent generation has often dominated policy, wellbeing builds on longstanding counter currents arguing that fisheries governance will be more successful if not driven solely by a focus on rent maximization but instead considers the numerous contextual factors that shape fisher decision making. Wellbeing has the advantage of being intuitively appealing and yet, in forms such as the social wellbeing perspective, also providing a richly worked out analytical perspective that can be applied to fisheries and other sectors. The Governing Small-scale Fisheries project (GSF) is funded by the Canadian International Development Agency for the period 2009-2012. It brings together Canadian and international fisheries scholars and WorldFish scientists to think through the potential contributions of social wellbeing approach for fisheries governance. The overall goal of the GSF project is to improve the poverty-reduction outcomes of governance reforms in small-scale fisheries in developing countries. This will be achieved by developing a conceptual and practical understanding of how wellbeing considerations may be fully incorporated into fisheries governance reforms, and correspondingly into the design of fisheries management instruments.