Evaluating and Comparing the Different Dimensions of the Sustainability of Fishery Systems in Persian Gulf

Fishery is an important activity in terms of trade, income, livelihoods, food and nutrition security especially to fishing communities living close to the coast. Therefore, Fishery is an essential part of sustainable development goals. High-level experts emphasize the enormous potential of oceans and seas for wielding so much influence in offering solution to one of the greatest humanitarian crises such as rapid population growth and meeting their basic needs (High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security). The concepts of sustainability are greatly connected to "sustainable development"; as it is the development of resources for human use that modifies natural ecosystems. One of the scientific and practical ways of achieving sustainability, as first step, is evaluating or measuring sustainability. In this article, a participatory multi-criteria approach is used to evaluate the sustainability of Iranian fisheries in the Persian Gulf as a case study.

Given that the fishery is a multidimensional human activity, and for the purpose of decision-making and management, sustainability assessment is necessary in all its dimensions. Among scientific approaches, multi-criteria decision-making methods have been evaluated as a formal and scientific method for assessing sustainability. Rapfish introduces a rapid appraisal technique to evaluate the sustainability status of fisheries, with a multidimensional view at the issue of sustainability in fisheries and based on a multi-criteria approach.
 

The importance of each of dimensions for Persian Gulf is expressed by weights for three groups of stakeholders separately. Weights are obtained based on a pairwise comparison between dimensions using the AHP method for each groups. Finally, the overall weight is calculated using the arithmetic mean. For example, for the researchers groups, the ecological weight 0.43 show that ecological dimension is more important than other dimensions, while the managers groups consider the management dimension (0.35) and technological (0.22) have more weight than other dimensions. For fishermen, as the exploiters of the Persian Gulf, the economic dimension is more important which has weight of 0.41 in first priority compared to other dimensions, followed by technological dimension (0.22) and social dimension (0.21). Overall weight indicates the importance of dimensions in terms of three groups of stakeholders. For Persian Gulf, ecological and economic dimensions are equally important and dimensions of social (0.19), technological (0.17) and management (0.18) are of almost the same importance. The average score for each dimension was obtained according to the mean value of the sustainability score for each system. Based on this ecological dimension, with an average sustainability score of 37.8% in a less sustainable situation, social and management dimensions with less than 50% are also less stable(sustainable). Regarding the average sustainability score, the activities of the fishing systems in the Persian Gulf are in a sustainable state in the economic (65%) and technical (64%) areas. 

Considering the importance of the issue of fishery sustainability in the Persian Gulf, this study identify the exact dimensions of sustainability based on the fundamental studies conducted in the world and the views of local stakeholders in Iran. The evaluation is carried out in five dimensions: ecological, economic, social, technological, and management, and the significance of each of these dimensions is measured from the perspective of three different groups of stakeholders. The importance of each of these dimensions is measured from the perspective of three different groups of stakeholders. The results indicate the importance of all five dimensions, and three ecological, economic, and social dimensions are prominent. Based on this result, it is suggested that managers, policymakers and stakeholders in the south of Iran pay attention to all dimensions and also policies and plans should cover all of them. Since without a holistic view, it is doubtful to move towards sustainable fishery in Persian Gulf. In the next step, using conventional methods, the importance of indicators for each dimension is determined based on local stakeholders' opinion. In fact, these dimensions and indicators are validated and localized for Iran.