Sustainable Marine Resource Management: Lessons from Viability Analysis

Marine natural resources are under pressure worldwide. Management and surveillance systems are often inappropriate to guarantee a sustainable resource utilization since the knowledge on fisheries and/or stocks is limited. Additionally, institutional failures, e.g. unsuitable regulatory policies, have accelerated resource exploitation in several cases. Modelling is often considered as a very effective tool for studying the behaviour of complex systems, but a variety of difficulties arise if one has to deal with uncertain knowledge or inhomogeneous data of different quality. In this paper we present a method that is capable both for (i) integration of sparse or limited knowledge from different disciplines and (ii) provides a test-bed for an assessement of different management regimes.