Mission

To develop economic tools to assess the adaptive capacity and potential impacts of climate change risks and their roles in the overall vulnerability of marine resource harvesting so that appropriate management strategies can be developed to ensure economically resilient and sustainable fishing practices.

This web-based toolkit provides decision-makers and researchers and interested members of the public with an overview of the ways in which economic (market-based) instruments and policy can be used in the marine environment to incentivise private sector adaptation to climate change.  The toolkit outlines a number of potential adaptation options in marine environment under the following four broad categories: (1) fisheries management, (2) conservation management, (3) institutional arrangement, and (4) adaptation research 

Outline of the toolkit:

1. Fisheries management:  This section provides examples of economic instruments that have been used extensively in fisheries management. These instruments have a potential to contribute to building the resilience of both marine resource users and the fish stocks to climate change.

2. Conservation management:  This section discribes examples of economic instruments being used in a broader natural resource/environmental management for conservation context (“conservation management”), and we outline their application to the marine environment.

3. Institutional arrangement:  This section provides examples of instruments that have proven to be useful for strengthening institutional resilience to climate change adaptation.

4. Adaptation research: This section provides examples of climate change adaptation research, and address the need for social and economic studies. 

View the Markets Toolkit

The Marine Adaptation Network’s web-based Markets Toolkit has been complemented with a published Markets Toolkit Information Sheet which outlines the economic instruments in adaptation strategies for the marine environment under four broad categories: fisheries management, conservation management, institutional arrangements, and adaptation research. Please .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) if you would like copies of this Info Sheet for distribution.

Theme Leaders
Dr Sarah Jennings (University of Tasmania) is a natural resource economist with particular expertise in applied welfare analysis, including cost-benefit analysis and non-market valuation.  Her involvement in marine economics includes the evaluation of climate change impacts and adaptation strategies, and exploration of the behavioural responses of recreational fishers to climate-induced changes in the quality of recreational fishing opportunities and policies.  Sarah leads the FRDC’s Fisheries Economics Capability Building Project.

Dr Ingrid van Putten is a post-doctoral fellow with the ecosystems modelling team at the CSIRO Centre for Marine and Atmospheric research. She is a social scientist and has been working with biophysical scientists to gain a better understanding of coupled social-ecological systems. The main focus of her research is to formulate, implement and apply quantitative models of human behaviour in the context of the ecosystems models for the marine environment and climate change. Because complexity in the bio-physical sphere is mirrored in social and economic systems, she focuses on the tools that effectively model social and economic data and aims to find the optimum level of complexity for human behaviour models.