Social scientist and Associate Professor Kate Barclay has been investigating fishing industries and aquaculture – the farming of fish as compared to commercially harvesting wild fish – since her PhD days in the late 1990s.
It is a specialty that continues to produce returns through extensive funding grants and ongoing, unprecedented research. Kate has become an expert in the field who has informed NSW Government inquiry and policy, as well as international studies like Blue economy, which aims to reconcile economic growth and ocean conservation in the Asia-Pacific region.
Running concurrently and drawing on previous field work carried out in NSW is another project: Valuing Victoria’s Wild-catch Fishing and Aquaculture Industries. Funded to the value of almost half a million dollars by the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation to run between 2018 and 2020, the research team is approximately one-third of the way through their survey of the Victorian coastal as well as inland landscape.
The key objective is to explain the benefits of commercial fishing to local communities, encompassing environmental, economic, safety, gastronomic and recreational interests, and positing these interests as synchronised rather than competing.
“We want to get information out there about the contribution of fisheries to the wellbeing of communities – this information hasn’t been collected before.” - Associate Professor Kate Barclay
By sharing the coastline and coastal waters, interests such as waterfront real estate and fisheries enhance and rely on each other, so that restaurants, for example, can supply the fresh local produce that tourists expect.
In this view, a macro supply chain and culture emerge which ultimately facilitate sustainable and profitable fishing. Another aim is to enable governments and policymakers to better understand and predict the social and ecological impacts of coastal use by different groups, to improve reform and decision-making.
Kate continues to be adept at examining multiple positions to arrive at mutually beneficial ways forward for the use of precious resources.
Read more on the Valuing Coastal Fisheries Research Project
Photo Credit: Patrick Gilmour