Arctic Yearbook 2014 | Page 343

343         Arctic Yearbook 2014 With the passage of Canada’s Oceans Act in 1997 and the adoption of Canada’s Oceans Strategy in 2002, a new ocean management paradigm emerged in Canada that attempted to unify and regulate the divergent and competing uses of the nation’s marine resources. Over the past decade, increased global attention on socio-ecological system resilience has also prompted shifts in U.S. ocean policy toward ecosystem-based management (EBM) and the use of integrated ecosystem assessments (IEA) by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) (Fluharty 2012; Murawski & Matlock 2006). As the Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat (CSAS) emphasized, the marine resource “manager’s reality is evolving – it is moving from single stock to multispecies fish management, from mostly fisheries users to multiple users (fishing, transportation, oil and aquaculture, ecotourism, recreational boating, dumping, mining, etc.), and lastly moving from management by activity to Integrated Management” (2001: 35). Described in Canada’s Oceans Strategy (2002) as “a continuous process through which decisions are made for the sustainable use, development and protection of areas and resources”, integrated ocean management has been heralded as a means to overcome fragmented and sector-specific decision-making (36). It marks an acknowledgement on the