The Canadian Council on Animal Care (CCAC) develops guidelines on issues of current and emerging concern in response to the needs of the scientific community, advances in animal care, and the needs of the CCAC Assessment Program. Guidelines are developed by subcommittees of experts, and are based on sound scientific evidence. However, the process of guidelines' development can involve consideration of areas where there is little scientific certainty or where scientific evidence needs to be tempered by other ethical considerations. Often these are areas where recommendations to the community are most needed, to provide assistance to both investigators and animal care committees on how best to balance the well-being of experimental animals and the goals of scientific research. The process for drafting the CCAC guidelines on: the care and use of fish in research, teaching and testing (in preparation) will be used as an example of the development of guidelines in the face of uncertain science, alongside a discussion of the CCAC guidelines on: transgenic animals (1997), as an example of the employment of a precautionary approach. Fish are now one of the most commonly used laboratory animals in Canada. However, what constitutes well-being for fish is an emerging field with often conflicting scientific data, and this presents unique challenges in guidelines' development.

As a small island developing state, Mauritius needs to manage its natural assets with a precautionary approach, especially as the tourism industry is one of the main pillars of its economy. While the precautionary principle has no statutory value in Mauritius, it serves as a guiding principle in environmental decision making. Since 1993, the assessment of impact has been mandatory under the Environment Protection Act (EPA) for major development activities, to avoid activities that may have a significant adverse impact on the environment and society. The local impact assessment procedure currently includes two categories of undertakings listed in the EPA, namely the environment impact assessment (EIA) and the preliminary environment report for undertakings with less environmental and socio-economic impact. This article examines the Mauritian EIA regulatory mechanism and seeks to strengthen the EIA process with a precautionary approach, to achieve more effective regulation and implementation.

This paper addresses the distinction, arising from the different ways the European Union and United States have come to adopt precaution regarding various environmental and health-related risks, between the precautionary principle and the precautionary approach in both theory and practice. First, this paper addresses how the precautionary principle has been variously defined, along with an exploration of some of the concepts with which it has been associated. Next, it addresses how the distinction between the precautionary principle and precautionary approach manifested itself within the political realm. Last, it considers the theoretical foundation of the precautionary principle in the philosophy of Hans Jonas, considering whether the principled-pragmatic distinction regarding precaution does or doesn't hold up in Jonas' thought.

Many sea cucumber fisheries have dramatically declined worldwide due to rapid overexploitation and ineffective management. This study designed an innovative management strategy for small-scale, data-limited sea cucumber fisheries in Pacific Island countries. Firstly, a local quota-based comanagement system was implemented in New Caledonia to manage a small-scale sandfish Holothuria scabra fishery. A habitat map derived from high-resolution satellite imagery was used to stratify survey sampling and assess the harvestable stock biomass. The latter has been monitored as the reference biomass (RB) since 2008 and repeatedly used by the local fishers’ organization and Fisheries Department officers to set adaptive total allowable catches and regulations of fishing effort. Results showed the excellent performance of this fishery between 2008 and 2012, both biologically (167% increase in total stock biomass) and economically (146% increase in annual returns from catches). Secondly, the assessment of the RB was generalized to multispecies sea cucumber fisheries in Vanuatu in 2011 before the proposed lifting of a five-year national moratorium. Building upon these practical case studies in New Caledonia and Vanuatu, this paper outlines an operational framework to inform sea cucumber fisheries policy in these two countries and discusses the upscaling of the proposed management strategy.

The Galápagos Islands, a world heritage region for the protection of the unique terrestrial and marine wildlife, are also home to a small human population, dependent on fisheries. There was a lucrative sea-cucumber (Stichopus fuscus) fishery in the islands, which began in 1992. After a rapid expansion in the Galápagos archipelago, the fishery has declined and now persists predominantly around the western islands. Initially, the fishery was largely illegal and uncontrollable. Subsequently, a co-management framework developed, with fisher participation. Gradually enforcement improved, apparent corruption declined, and research capacity increased. Although stock abundance surveys have been carried out annually since 1993, the paucity of background biological and fishery information does not allow rigorous stock assessment. The achievements of co-management through the participation of fishers in research and management have been: an acceptance of management controls on numbers of fishers and quotas, a reduction in conflict and increased co-operation. Persistent problems have been: weak enforcement capacity, limited funds for patrolling and research, corruption and declining stock abundance. Proposed application of precautionary principles to management, including a range of fishery indicators, may save the fishery from collapse. The principles are applicable to many other data-poor fisheries globally.

Even when fishing effort data are not available in a developing fishery, it is often still possible to develop a simple fishery indicator to obtain information about the status of the stock. Using catch data only, Grainger and Garcia, (FAO Fish. Tech. Pap. 359, 1996) showed that the changes over time in the relative rate of catch increase (RRCI) can be used to detect when a stock reaches its over-fishing level, i.e., the year when RRCI falls to zero. The method presupposes that fishing effort increased steadily over the period concerned. We propose a generalization of this method that consists in obtaining a crude estimate of the maximum sustainable yield (MSY) by plotting the trend in catches against the smoothed RRCI. The yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares) fishery in the Eastern Atlantic was used to show the bold relationship between MSY estimates obtained from standard equilibrium production models and from this method. Given that it is very difficult to estimate effective fishing effort for skipjack tuna (Katsuwonus pelamis), we show how this simple fishery indicator can be used to obtain proxies of MSY for skipjack fisheries located in the Eastern Atlantic Ocean and in the Indian Ocean.