Coasts Under Stress brings university and community partners together to explore how changes in socio-economic
structures and resource extraction patterns over the last 150 years have impacted the health of individuals,
families, communities and the environment. The objective is to develop this knowledge in collaboration with local
people and share and discuss it with communities at several points in the project. The long-term goal is to develop
policies to promote health recovery for people, families, communities and the ecosystems on which they depend for
their cultural and economic survival. We hope that by working together, we can ensure that these policies will be
appropriate and that they will be implemented by the appropriate level of government. We believe this is possible
due to the high profile of the project.
Click here for Project Summary PDF.
Coasts Under Stress is made possible by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering and Social Science and
the Humanities Research Councils with contributions from university, community and other partners on the west and
east coast of Canada. The project will examine the history of developments in all resource sectors: fishing,
aquaculture, forestry, mining, oil and gas and tourism with an eye to their individual and combined effect on the
health of environments and people. The project has a potential 10-year time span (provided it passes a 2 year review,
it will last 5 years with the possibility of renewal for another 5).
The FC is primarily involved in
Back to the Future projects in Hecate Strait and the Newfoundland shelf, and will
collaborate with other MCRI elements researching traditional knowledge. Information on climate change will be
important to determine the type of marine ecosystem that will be possible, e.g. will the west coast be dominated
by herring, as in the recent past, or sardines and anchovies? Both the Hecate Strait Newfoundland Shelf projects
will contribute to the broader MCRI aims by providing a way to consider marine ecosystem values in weighing future
options.
The Principal Investigator is Dr Rosemary Ommer, who was also one of the prime movers of the
Just Fish project . The FC team led by Dr Tony Pitcher and Nigel Haggan, includes Drs Barbara Neis, Dave Schneider, and Johanna Heymans
assisted by graduate students Melanie Power and Cameron Ainsworth and undergraduate students Aftab Erfan and Erin
Foulkes. An east coast student is yet to be identified.
The first step is to present preliminary models at east and west coast science workshops on September 11/12
and 29/30 respectively. The first west coast models will be of the present day and a 100 years ago. For the
east coast, we propose three models of the Newfoundland-Labrador shelf (NAFO Divisions 2J+3KL); a 1985-1987
model, constructed by Drs Alida Bundy, George Lilly and Peter Shelton, a preliminary 1995-2000 model, representing
a post-collapse situation; and a preliminary model of the early 1900s.
In the longer-term, we would very much like to develop a west coast model at the time of contact (late 1700s)
and an east coast pre-Cabot model.
The budget for east and west coast BTF projects is $415,000 over 3-4 years.
