Community-Led Coastal Development and the Relationship between Human Activities and Ecosystem Services

The new Common Fishery Policy recognizes that an ecosystem-based approach to fisheries management needs to be implemented, and that sustainable development of fisheries areas includes the possibility of diversification of the income of fishers through the development of complementary activities. This study presents a theoretical framework for the analysis of the relationships between human activities and ecosystem services in coastal and marine environments. In a more specific way, we want to focus on the environmental changes caused by human activities and how these environmental changes, in turn, affect the outcome and the behavior of fishers. A Bayesian network approach is used to build a generic model starting from a traditional ecosystem services cascade framework. Literature on ecosystem services is increasingly interested on the definition and quantification of their social value. In this work, we focus on the private benefit generated by the use of ecosystem services, and we model fishers’ behaviors on the base of the potential benefits provided by alternative economic activities making use of ecosystem services. Preliminary results according to our alpha-level generic model show how changes in driver variables (e.g. tourism level and fish stock state) may influence the decision of fishers to take advantage of alternative economic activities (e.g. tourism services) instead of depending only on fisheries.