Page - 9 - in options, Volume winter 2019

Science into policy CO-GENERATING POLICY OPTIONS FOR RISK MANAGEMENT SCIENCE FOR A MORE SUSTAINABLE FISHING INDUSTRY Governments, businesses, and civil society worldwide increasingly realize that the risks afflicting modern societies require transformational governance strategies that go far beyond business-as-usual practices. Engaging multiple actors with their alternative problem frames and aspirations for sustainable futures is now recognized as essential for effective governance processes and ultimately for robust policy implementation. The IIASA Risk and Resilience Program is at the forefront of addressing this issue by developing and implementing model-informed stakeholder co-generation processes that apply system concepts to co-design, co-assess, and co-produce policy options that respect the plural perspectives and frames of stakeholder groups. www.iiasa.ac.at/RISK/Governance-Transition Almost a third of the world’s fished marine stocks are overexploited and fishing activities often have detrimental effects on aquatic ecosystems. The large proportion of overexploited marine fish stocks underscore the importance of implementing sustainable harvesting practices and further improving modern fisheries- management methods. IIASA researchers contributed to a study, which shows that balanced harvesting – a concept that aims to spread the load as evenly as possible across the ecosystem – can be used as a framework to strategically guide the development of fisheries policies towards a more explicit ecosystems approach, while simultaneously allowing for increasing food production. pure.iiasa.ac.at/15970 Informing better groundwater management policies Groundwater collects and flows beneath the Earth's surface, filling the porous spaces in soil, sediment, and rocks. At least 400 million people in sub-Saharan Africa depend on this hidden resource for their domestic water needs. With demand continuously rising across the continent due to a growing population and rapid socioeconomic development, it is clear that policymakers will have to put mechanisms in place for the sustainable management of this valuable resource. To ensure sustainable groundwater resource decision-making, policymakers need reliable information and data. There is, however, a severe lack of data on groundwater resources for Africa, which has caused regional governments to rely heavily on large-scale hydrological models to obtain estimates of potential groundwater resources for their water security assessments. Unfortunately, these models remain unvalidated by groundwater observations, which means that the estimates derived from them contain a high degree of uncertainty. To address these issues, IIASA researchers collected available groundwater data from nine countries across sub-Saharan Africa to analyze climate impacts on groundwater. The resulting multi-decadal hydrographs and accompanying precipitation records cover a wide range of climate zones from hyper-arid to humid, as well as a diverse range of geological and landscape settings, and highlight the episodic nature of groundwater recharge events and how they are influenced by variations in climate. According to the researchers, this confirms the need to understand potential changes to climate processes in longer, multidecadal climate-change projections, which is a major challenge for current climate models. “The data generated over the course of the study have clear implications for understanding potential changes to groundwater levels and fluxes under climate change, and therefore also for developing sustainable strategies for groundwater availability for water supply or improved food security in sub-Saharan Africa,” concludes study coauthor and IIASA Acting Water Program Director, Yoshihide Wada. Yoshihide Wada: wada@iiasa.ac.at Further info: pure.iiasa.ac.at/16023By Ansa Heyl Hyper-arid Semi-arid Arid Sub-humid Humid Fig. 1: Long-term groundwater and precipitation records in the context of varying aridity across sub-Saharan Africa. 9Optionswww.iiasa.ac.at Winter 2019/20