Sustainable coastal production systems: a model for integrating aquaculture and fisheries under community management

In spite of the productive potential of coastal environments, fish supplies to coastal communities are decreasing. The causes of the decline in landings from coastal fisheries are many but the most serious and intractable problem is increasing human populations leading to the over-exploitation of coastal fisheries. In this article ideas are presented for the development of a new way of using coastal waters, called Sustainable Coastal Production Systems (SCPS), which may transform parts of the coast from abused and over used ecosystems to productive systems which are integrated and under local control. As proposed, SCPS depends on integration at different levels. At the ‘aquaculture’ level components are energetically linked; system design includes species that will complement each other. In SCPS a variety of trophic levels should be maintained and their interactions managed to maximize the benefits from the whole system, fully utilizing available energy while reducing inputs. The SCPS is fully integrated with the local ecology instead of considering the surrounding waters as external and a source of threats (fouling and predators). The question of scale of SCPS has to do as much with the distribution of benefits to human populations as it does with the biophysical factors.