Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the Sundarbans : Challenges, Resilience, and Policy Pathways

The book explores sustainability challenges for small-scale fisheries in the Sundarbans, spanning India and Bangladesh. It highlights multidimensional vulnerability, social-ecological systems, and resilience-based management, emphasizing local resources and the vital role of fishing communities in adapting to climate change.

This book discusses the sustainability challenges of small-scale fisheries in the Sundarbans, examining the socioecological dynamics and management approaches in this complex transboundary ecosystem shared between India and Bangladesh. Integrating oceanographic, ecological, and socioeconomic perspectives, it provides a multiscale analysis of artisanal fisheries in deltaic environments under anthropogenic climate stress. Employing multidimensional vulnerability frameworks, the work analyzes ecological risks—climatic threats, oceanographic shifts, pollution dynamics—alongside the gender-disaggregated livelihood in fishing communities and the socioeconomic constraints creating poverty traps. The narrative moves beyond the Sundarbans to explore mangrove fisheries across Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America, identifying cross-regional sustainability patterns and innovative solutions. Resilience-based adaptive management frameworks are presented to help combat these issues, and the authors explore policy innovation and governance design frameworks for empowering small-scale fisheries at the intersection of ecological stewardship and socioeconomic equity. This book is beneficial for postgraduates, undergraduates, professionals, researchers, fishery managers, policy makers, and academic scholars in fisheries science, environmental engineering, environmental management, sustainable development, and social ecology.