TRANSITIONS AND RESILIENCE IN THE FROZEN COMMONS : LINKING AQUACULTURE, KRILL FISHERY, GOVERNANCE AND ECOSYSTEM CHANGE IN THE SCOTIA SEA, SOUTHERN OCEAN

Abstract: The Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba) is a forage fish species that is increasing inimportance for Southern Ocean fisheries and world aquaculture production. However, thisspecies also has a fundamental role in the Scotia Sea food-web and is the main conservationtarget for the region’s natural resource management organization - the Commission for theConservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR). The aim of this thesis istherefore to examine the inter-relationship between CCAMLR, krill fishery and the Scotia Seaecosystem in the Southern Ocean, as well as broader socio-economical and ecological settingssince 1970s and measure system resilience. The premise here is that the current krill-regime inthe Scotia Sea must be understood as a complex adaptive system (CAS) of social, ecologicaland economical attributes that operates over different temporal and spatial scales. Thus, byapplying the framework of a social-ecological system (SES), together with the adaptive cycleheuristic model, both quantitative and qualitative data is revised and integrated. Two alternatemanagement states are identified within the krill-regime; an early krill fishery state (1972 –1991), and an ecosystem based governance state (1991 - 2010). Resilience is however fadingin the Scotia Sea due to a combination of cross-scale attributes, in a range from low krilldensity (n/m¯²), increased competition for marine resources between predators and krillfishery, to elevated demand and global market prices of non-food commodities by theaquaculture sector in Asia, thus, moving the Scotia Sea towards an unknown fish-regime.Although such future regime is still retained by the region’s slow changing physical variablessuch as sea ice and seasonality, as well as the adaptive management capacity of CCAMLR,the sudden appearance of an undesirable regime in the Scotia Sea would probably havecomprehensive socio-ecological consequences if reached.