What's on the horizon for community-based conservation? Emerging threats and opportunities

Community-based conservation can support livelihoods and biodiversity, while reinforcing local and Indigenous values, cultures, and institutions. Its delivery can help address cross-cutting global challenges, such as climate change, conservation, poverty, and food security. Therefore, understanding trends in community-based conservation is pertinent to setting and implementing global goals. We undertook a horizon scan to prioritize 15 emerging threats and opportunities expected to impact the future effectiveness of community-based conservation. Topics relate to global biodiversity policy; human rights; shifting human geography; inclusion, diversity, equity, and access; conservation finance and income; and economic reforms. Our findings offer guidance on strengthening community-based conservation to achieve global environmental and development goals.

Blue economy: industrialisation and coastal fishing livelihoods in Ghana

The growing focus on the blue economy is accelerating industrial fishing in many parts of the world. This intensification is affecting the livelihoods of small-scale fishers, processors, and traders by depleting local fishery resources, damaging fishing gears, putting fishers' lives at risk, and compromising market systems and value chain positions. In this article, we outline the experiences, perspectives, and narratives of the small-scale fishing actors in Ghana. Drawing on qualitative interview data, we examine the relationship between small-scale and industrial fisheries in Ghana using political ecology and sustainable livelihood approaches. We demonstrate how industrialised, capital-intensive fishing has disrupted the economic and social organisation of local fishing communities, affecting incomes, causing conflicts, social exclusion and disconnection, and compromising the social identity of women. These cumulative impacts and disruptions in Ghana's coastal communities have threatened the viability of small-scale fisheries, yet coastal fishing actors have few capabilities to adapt. We conclude by supporting recommendations to reduce the number and capacity of industrial vessels, strictly enforce spatial regulations, and ensure "blue justice" against marginalisation.

Characteristics and Dynamics of the Freshwater Fish Market in Chengdu, China

The drivers and characteristics of trends in aquatic product consumption are a crucial component of fish food system sustainability. The Chinese market for aquatic products is the largest in the world, yet little has been published on the characteristics of the freshwater fish market. This Paper draws on interviews with key informants to understand the social characteristics of the freshwater fish market in Chengdu, Sichuan province. Price, food safety and quality, freshness and local culinary traditions are important influences on patterns of freshwater fish consumption. However, imported species such as pangasius and branded products are increasing in popularity, indicative of changes in the Chengdu freshwater fish market and the Chinese market for aquatic products more generally.

Rethinking environmental leadership: The social construction of leaders and leadership in discourses of ecological crisis, development, and conservation

Leadership is heralded as being critical to addressing the “crisis of governance” facing the Earth's natural systems. While political, economic, and corporate discourses of leadership have been widely and critically interrogated, narratives of environmental leadership remain relatively neglected in the academic literature. The aims of this paper are twofold. First, to highlight the centrality and importance of environmental science's construction and mobilization of leadership discourse. Second, to offer a critical analysis of environmental sciences' deployment of leadership theory and constructs. The authors build on a review of leadership research in environmental science that reveals how leadership is conceptualized and analyzed in this field of study. It is argued that environmental leadership research reflects rather narrow framings of leadership. An analytical typology proposed by Keith Grint is employed to demonstrate how any singular framing of environmental leadership as person, position, process, result, or purpose is problematic and needs to be supplanted by a pluralistic view. The paper concludes by highlighting key areas for improvement in environmental leadership research, with emphasis on how a political ecology of environmental crisis narratives contributes to a more critical body of research on leadership in environmental science.