Alternatives for Recovering the Ecosystem Services and Resilience of the Salamanca Island Natural Park, Colombia

The portfolio effect in a small-scale fishery reduces catch and fishing income variability in a highly dynamic ecosystem

It is an increasingly accepted idea that biological diversity stabilizes ecosystem processes and the services they provide to society. By reducing biomass fluctuation, biodiversity could mitigate the impact of changing environmental conditions on rural incomes as long as people exploits a diverse set of natural assets. This effect is analogous to the risk-spreading function of financial portfolios. This paper presents evidence of the portfolio effect for an open-access artisanal fishery in an estuarine ecosystem, located in a Colombian Biosphere Reserve. Using catch statistics from 2002 to 2018, we evaluate the contribution of catch diversity to the stabilization of fishing income. We find that changes in catch composition are related to seasonal and interannual variations in salinity conditions. The portfolio effect arises from asynchronous fluctuations of fish species due to fluctuating environmental conditions. Catch diversification, instead of specialization, help achieve resilient fisheries.

Coping and Adaptation in Response to Environmental and Climatic Stressors in Caribbean Coastal Communities

Cumulative and synergistic impacts from environmental pressures, particularly in low-lying tropical coastal regions, present challenges for the governance of ecosystems, which provide natural resource-based livelihoods for communities. Here, we seek to understand the relationship between responses to the impacts of El Niño and La Niña events and the vulnerability of mangrove-dependent communities in the Caribbean region of Colombia. Using two case study sites, we show how communities are impacted by, and undertake reactive short-term responses to, El Niño and La Niña events, and how such responses can affect their adaptive capacity to progressive environmental deterioration. We show that certain coping measures to climate variability currently deliver maladaptive outcomes, resulting in circumstances that could contribute to system 'lock-in' and engender undesirable ecological states, exacerbating future livelihood vulnerabilities. We highlight the significant role of social barriers on vulnerabilities within the region, including perceptions of state abandonment, mistrust and conflicts with authorities. Opportunities to reduce vulnerability include enhancing the communities' capacity to adopt more positive and preventative responses based on demonstrable experiential learning capacity. However, these will require close cooperation between formal and informal organisations at different levels, and the development of shared coherent adaptation strategies to manage the complexity of multiple interacting environmental and climatic pressures.