Please join us for the School of Environmental Studies Colloquium this Thursday March 7th at 2:30 pm featuring
Dr. Evan Andrews, Memorial University for a special invited talk about the Sustainable Development Goals
and Small-Scale Fisheries in Canada.
Date and time: Thursday March 7, 2:30 – 4 pm in Kinesiology Rm 106
Title: Blue Justice by 2030: Thinking Big about Canadian Small-Scale Fisheries in Canada
The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) reflect global aspirations for achieving sustainability. According to SDG scholarship, human dignity is an overriding principle that connects the SDGs together, anchoring principles of justice and equity in SDG implementation for marginalized natural resource users. Unfortunately, there has been a mixed track record of success for the SDGs, particularly from justice and equity lenses. Under these realities, alternatives are urgently required. However, the solutions offered remain overly technical and typically exclude important perspectives. Thus, new discourse and research are needed about sustainability solutions to have stronger traction in the complexity and uncertainty of justice and equity problems. Given this need, I will share emerging research on advancing Blue Justice in aquatic systems in Canada, especially in the context of small-scale fisheries. In Canada and globally, small-scale fisheries are marginalized in policy and discourse, especially for the perceived limited contributions to GDP. As such, their contributions to community wellbeing and stewardship are largely ignored and unsupported. To restore and regenerate the conditions for these fisheries to thrive, my research programme discusses the transdisciplinary dialogues, capacity building, and governance innovations for transformations that enhance the rights, needs, and priorities of marginalized resource users like small-scale fisheries, within the carrying capacities of natural systems. I draw on insights from Too Big To Ignore (TBTI) Canada. TBTI Canada, a cross Canadian research hub of TBTI Global, and in particular, a recently published e-volume, Thinking Big about Small-Scale Fisheries in Canada. TBTI Canada is dedicated to research on the recognition and support for Canadian small-scale fisheries. Leveraging contributions from TBTI Canada, the discussion contributes to research and discourse on decision-making for Blue Justice, offering insights that inform efforts to future-proof policy not only in Canada but also globally.
Bio
Evan J. Andrews is a Senior Research Fellow with Too BIG To Ignore (TBTI): A Global Partnership for Small-Scale Fisheries Research, based in the Department of Geography, Memorial University. He holds a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship, exploring the future of small-scale fisheries in Canada. He is the co-principal investigator of Moving Together for Marine Conservation (2022-2026), a project that emphasized creating outreach strategies, foster new awareness, and building governance capacity to help advance Canada’s Marine Conservation Targets in a just and equitable ocean. He is also the co-founder and lead of TBTI Canada, a cross Canadian research hub of TBTI Global. In these efforts, he is deeply committed to working across disciplines to bridge knowledge silos in pursuit of sustainability solutions, especially those that foreground justice and equity for marginalized aquatic system users. He focuses co-learning and making change with natural resource users and leaders, as well as building future opportunities for students, colleagues and staff.