The COVID-19 pandemic altered almost every aspect of people’s lives and undermined human wellbeing. Now that restrictions have lifted, we need to identify the lingering effects of the pandemic to strategically direct the ongoing recovery process. We conducted a mixed-methods longitudinal analysis of material, relational and subjective wellbeing in five coastal fishing communities in Kenya before, during and after the implement...

The global community has been faced with multiple shocks in recent years, including the COVID-19 pandemic and increasing climate-driven environmental changes. Whether and how people can respond to such shocks depends on multiple factors, collectively referred to as adaptive capacity. Here, we explore how people in five coastal Kenyan communities drew on multiple domains of adaptive capacity to respond to the food security, liv...

Multispecies coral reef fisheries are typically managed by local communities who often lack research and monitoring capacity, which prevents estimation of well‐defined sustainable reference points to perform locally relevant fishery assessments. Recent research modeling coral reef fisheries globally has estimated multispecies sustainable reference points (i.e., the maximum reef fish yields that can be harvested sustainably and...

Both the ecological and social dimensions of fisheries are being affected by climate change. As a result, policymakers, managers, scientists and fishing communities are seeking guidance on how to holistically build resilience to climate change. Numerous studies have highlighted key attributes of resilience in fisheries, yet concrete examples that explicitly link these attributes to social‐ecological outcomes are lacking. To be...

Natural resources are widely managed through collaborative governance arrangements (e.g., co-management) which often result in the uneven distribution of costs and benefits among fishers. Discrepancies in how a fisher is impacted by co-management relative to other fishers or others in the community (i.e., disparity) can negatively affect fishers’ wellbeing, their support for management, and subsequently, ecological outcomes. Y...

Advocates, practitioners and policy‐makers continue to use and advocate for marine protected areas (MPAs) to meet global ocean protection targets. Yet many of the worlds MPAs, and especially no‐take MPAs, are plagued by poaching and ineffective governance. Using a global dataset on coral reefs as an example, we quantify the potential ecological gains of governing MPAs to increase compliance, which we call the ‘compliance gap’....

Nearly a billion people depend on tropical seascapes. The need to ensure sustainable use of these vital areas is recognised, as one of 17 policy commitments made by world leaders, in Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14 (‘Life below Water’) of the United Nations. SDG 14 seeks to secure marine sustainability by 2030. In a time of increasing social-ecological unpredictability and risk, scientists and policymakers working toward...

Scientists and managers rely on indicator taxa such as coral and macroalgal cover to evaluate the effects of human disturbance on coral reefs, often assuming a universally positive relationship between local human disturbance and macroalgae. Despite evidence that macroalgae respond to local stressors in diverse ways, there have been few efforts to evaluate relationships between specific macroalgae taxa and local human‐driven d...

In a changing climate, there is an imperative to build coupled social‐ecological systems—including fisheries—that can withstand or adapt to climate stressors. Although resilience theory identifies system attributes that supposedly confer resilience, these attributes have rarely been clearly defined, mechanistically explained, nor tested and applied to inform fisheries governance. Here, we develop and apply a comprehensive resi...

Many conservation interventions are hypothesized to be beneficial for both the environment and people's well‐being, but this has rarely been tested rigorously. We examined the effects of adoption or nonadoption of a conservation intervention on 3 dimensions of people's well‐being (material, relational, and subjective) over time. We focused on a fisheries bycatch management initiative intended to reduce environmental externalit...

Markets are increasingly being incorporated into many aspects of daily life and are becoming an important part of the conservation solution space. Although market‐based solutions to environmental problems can result in improvements to conservation, a body of social science research highlights how markets may also have unforeseen consequences by crowding out or displacing 3 key types of behaviors potentially relevant to conserv...

The depletion of natural resources has become a major issue in many parts of the world, with the most accessible resources being most at risk. In the terrestrial realm, resource depletion has classically been related to accessibility through road networks. In contrast, in the marine realm, the impact on living resources is often framed into the Malthusian theory of human density around ecosystems. Here, we develop a new framew...

No‐take marine reserves are increasingly popular tools for conservation and fisheries management. While much attention has been paid to evaluating the effects of design aspects (size, location, etc.) in achieving reserve objectives, less emphasis has been placed on the role of stakeholder compliance. Therefore, the first aim of this study was to evaluate the state of compliance literature and examine the methods used to measur...

We evaluate the current status of the global marine fisheries using the frameworks of conflict, food security and vulnerability. Existing trends suggest that there is likely to be greater food insecurity and fisheries conflicts due to issues such as: declining fishery resources; a N orth– S outh divide in investment; changing consumption patterns; increasing reliance on fishery resources for coastal communities; and inescapabl...

Artisanal coral reef fisheries provide food and employment to hundreds of millions of people in developing countries, making their sustainability a high priority. However, many of these fisheries are degraded and not yielding their maximum socioeconomic returns. We present a literature review that evaluates foci and trends in research effort on coral reef fisheries. We describe the types of data and categories of management re...

Coral reef fisheries support the livelihoods of millions of people but have been severely and negatively affected by anthropogenic activities. We conducted a systematic review of published data on the biomass of coral reef fishes to explore how the condition of reef fisheries is related to the density of local human populations, proximity of the reef to markets, and key environmental variables (including broad geomorphologic r...

Spillover of adult fish biomass is an expected benefit from no‐take marine reserves to adjacent fisheries. Here, we show fisher‐naïve behaviour in reef fishes also spills over from marine reserves, potentially increasing access to fishery benefits by making fishes more susceptible to spearguns. The distance at which two targeted families of fishes began to flee a potential fisher [flight initiation distance ( FID )] was lower...