Sustaining coupled social-ecological marine systems in Mexico's Gulf of California region

Marine ecosystems provide many benefits to people, including food, protection from coastal storms, and places for recreation and spiritual renewal. These benefits are threatened by human impacts at multiple scales, including fisheries over-exploitation and global climatic change. More solutions-oriented knowledge of the connections between people and nature is urgently needed. I will discuss the approach my collaborators and I have developed to investigate the connections between people and marine ecosystems in the context of the small-scale fisheries of Mexico’s Gulf of California. To illustrate the value of this coupled systems approach, I will present findings from two geographic scales. First, using a coupled bio-economic model based on several communities in the Mexican state of Baja California Sur (BCS), I will show how fishers’ decisions are influenced by both climatic and institutional variation, and the consequences of these interactions for economic and ecological outcomes associated with fishing. Second, I will place these local-scale results in a broader context. Drawing on both natural and social science theory and data, I will show how environmental and institutional factors related to sustainability vary substantially throughout BCS. Fishing communities that exhibit greater potential for social-ecological sustainability in one dimension do not necessarily exhibit it in others. These results highlight the importance of integrative, coupled system analyses when implementing spatial planning and other ecosystem-based strategies and yield an understanding of the sustainability of coupled social-ecological systems that is quite distinct from that provided by either biophysical or social sciences alone.