Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, Potsdam
Germany
Short Bio
Dr. Gesche Krause is a social scientist, who is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Advance Sustainability Studies (IASS) in Potsdam (Germany) and works at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) in Bremerhaven (Germany). Her research centers around the development of methods to capture and link natural science findings to societal processes, focussing on sustainability issues of marine food production. She worked for the WBGU, the German Advisory Council on Global Change, the Research Council of Norway (RCN) and the EU. For the latter, she acted in 2017 as expert on the topic Food from the Oceans, in support of the European Scientific Advice Mechanism (SAM) via SAPEA (Science Advice for Policy by European Academies). Furthermore, she chairs the International Commission of the Exploration of the Seas (ICES) expert working group on social and economic dimensions of aquaculture (WGSEDA) and the working group in the EU-COST Action Oceans Past Platform (OPP) focussing on the historic dimension of marine resource use and aquaculture. Since 2016, she is part of the executive board of the global Oceans Past Initiative (OPI).
Abstract-Developing socio-economic indicators to capture the social dimensions of marine food security
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), can be viewed as a bold commitment to produce a set of universal goals that meet the urgent environmental, political and economic challenges of our time. However, whether current measurement and reporting models adequately capture contemporary conditions and challenges remains to be seen. One such challenge that has been gaining global attention is the acquisition of marine food security via sustainable aquaculture (here in particular the SDG14 Target 14.4).
Until very recently, governments of many countries of the globe, as well as their supporting organizations, have primarily addressed the biological and technical aspects of aquaculture. In its wake, social and cultural aspects of aquaculture production have taken a backseat in contrast to trade, technology and biological implications. The SDGs however explicitly include social and economic goals that need to be recognised side by side if aquaculture is to hold its promise of feeding a hungry world. We need to appropriately capture the complexity of the linkages between aquaculture practices and their economic, social, institutional and natural environments at the operational level. The observable rise of the “social license to operate” (SLO) and the “social acceptability” (SA) discourse in contemporary aquaculture research is a case in point for the failure to capture these linkages.
Drawing on the observation that aquaculture development in Western Societies has largely failed to capture and evaluate these social effects across different scales and contexts, the presentation showcases outcomes of a method application which operationalised a set of social dimensions indicators based on the social dimension categories put forward by the United Nations (UN). The methods employed were a suite of social science mix-methods with a strong emphasis on qualitative data that allowed to contextualize aquaculture in a detailed manner across different scales. This enabled us to apply experimental questions which addressed important social dimensions relevant to aquaculture across locations and social variables. By visualising the social effects of aquaculture, a door may be opened for new narratives on the sustainability of aquaculture that render social license to operate and social acceptability more positive for future sustainable food security.