Print PageLocal Environmental Knowledge (LEK) is endowed with intrinsic value and forms a repository of practical knowledge for indigenous and long-time resident local peoples with a strong sense of place. LEK concerns the ecology of place-based resources and ecosystems, and their history of responses to climate and other potentially perturbing environmental events. LEK has been contrasted with science, sometimes with a connation that it may be in some way unethical to use the two together: recent work suggests that this need not be the case.
Results/Conclusions
This paper argues that a conflation of scientific analysis and LEK can be especially valuable for ensuring the future sustainability of depleted or threatened fishery resources. Traditional fishery science often fails to consider LEK in any tangible fashion but here we demonstrate LEK as an integral part of three analyses that are critical to establishing policy that can remediate past mistakes in management and ensure place-based fishery sustainability in a just and ethical fashion. I discuss the role of LEK in analysing shifting baselines, the estimation of true fishery extractions and ecosystem status as revealed by ecological models. Case studies are taken from the Canadian west coast and a tropical coral reef ecosystem in Indonesia.
