While new and emerging technologies are helping to solve some of the most serious challenges we face in fisheries, they are mostly being applied in developed, industrialized fisheries where business efficiencies, maintaining relationships with international supply chains and complying with complex management actions are major imperatives. However, small scale fisheries (SSFs) account for over half of the world’s wild caught seafood and engage 90% of all fishermen. Hundreds of millions of people rely on SSFs as a significant source of their livelihoods so the threats of overfishing, environmental pollution and climate change are all threatening not just fish stocks, but the livelihoods they support. New technologies have a critical role to play in safeguarding these livelihoods through improving science and management, building the capacity of management and enforcement institutions, legitimizing small scale fishers and their communities, building resilience to climate change, improving access to markets, improving fishermen safety and many other areas.   

The business, regulatory and physical environments that are found in many small scale fishery contexts are markedly different to those in industrialized fisheries and so the same tools and implementation models used in the latter are rarely directly transferable to the former. And while challenges facing small scale fisheries have received less attention by technologists, they are beginning to be faced head on by a combination of innovations—in data collection, transmission, storage and analysis, in funding mechanisms, in organization and empowerment of stakeholders and in capacity building of fishery managers and scientists. Technologies that enable these innovations are constantly evolving and hold the key to sustainability, climate resilience and better livelihoods in small scale fisheries globally. 

The third session of the 2020/2021 SAFET Virtual Conference aims to foster and engage the community of practitioners, technology providers, industry members, scientists and others working in this space through an interactive and informative session that presents some of the latest implementations of technologies for improving small scale fisheries and allows ample opportunity for dialogue between participants. This session will be immediately followed by a virtual technology expo which provides opportunities for technology service providers to engage with conference participants.