Managing fisheries in an ecosystem context must be thoroughly grounded in broader systems of ocean governance, financing, and socio-ecological realities to be effectively implemented. Almost by definition, EBFM/EAFM requires bridging jurisdictions, embracing the diversity of stake- and rights-holders, and employing policy tools beyond traditional fisheries management. EBFM/EAFM must also navigate the complex policy contexts of the broader seascape of ocean uses, ensuring fisheries are effectively integrated alongside biodiversity conservation, marine spatial planning, and emerging marine industries.

This theme invites contributions on examples or advances needed in science, multi-lateral or transnational cooperation, or national governance to create the enabling conditions for effective EBFM/EAFM implementation. We particularly welcome submissions that focus on practical and tangible ways of incorporating EBFM/EAFM in broader ocean management conversations.

We welcome submissions that address enabling conditions within these areas:

• Transboundary and Multi-lateral Cooperation
  Science advances and governance frameworks needed to integrate EAFM/EBFM into transboundary ocean management and international commitments (e.g., BBNJ Agreement, GBF targets, SDGs, and climate regulations).
  
  
• Governance at Multiple Scales, Resourcing, and Ocean Justice
  Enabling conditions for turning EBFM/EAFM commitments into operational management at national and local levels. This includes securing the necessary funding and institutional capacity from multilateral to local sources, alongside co-management, utilizing traditional management practices, and exploring how EBFM/EAFM advances ocean justice, social-ecological resilience, institutional reform, and food security.
  
  
• Broadening the Fisheries Context
  Demonstrating where and how EBFM/EAFM fits into ongoing conversations regarding ocean justice (e.g., implementation through the SSF Voluntary Guidelines), social-ecological resilience, institutional reform, food security, and the broader Blue Economy. This includes sharing successful strategies for clearly communicating these complex ecosystem concepts to diverse stakeholders and policy-makers.
  
  
• Navigating Governance Trade-offs
  Governance approaches needed to make operational EBFM/EAFM work within the broader multi-sectoral context of Ecosystem-Based Management (EBM). This includes theoretical and real-world attempts at handling multi-jurisdictional issues and navigating multi-dimensional advice and trade-offs (e.g., balancing fisheries yield with saving protected species).

Fisheries management was built upon the assumption of stationarity – an assumption we now know is incorrect. Climate change and other global environmental stressors are fundamentally reshaping marine ecosystems through shifting species distributions, altering predator-prey dynamics, disrupting productivity regimes, and rebalancing the tradeoffs between fisheries yield and broader ecosystem needs. Concurrently, the geopolitical seascape is shifting. In an era of rapid socio-economic change, evolving trade dynamics, and increasing global competition for ocean resources, fisheries must navigate both ecological volatility and political instability.

To deal with these unprecedented changes, we must embrace holistic management approaches. This theme invites contributions that outline approaches to document the impacts of global change and implement related management solutions for ecosystem assessments, bycatch evaluations, stock assessments, harvest advice, fisheries-dependent communities, and management decision-making. We aim to move beyond the question of whether to incorporate environmental information, focusing instead on the practical challenges of how to integrate uncertainty into advice and translate it into actionable management.

We particularly encourage contributions from diverse geographic contexts, including regions where fisheries are data-limited or grappling with the impacts of conflicts, geopolitical shifts, biodiversity degradation, and acute climate events.

We welcome submissions that address practical implementation within these areas:

• Adaptive Governance and Decision Making
  Overcoming institutional, technical, and governance barriers to incorporate coupled socio-ecological and environmental information into advice. This includes methods for effectively quantifying and communicating risk and uncertainty to managers and stakeholders to support timely decision-making.
  
  
• Socio-Ecological Resilience and Human Dimensions
  Evaluating the compounding impacts of climate change, biodiversity degradation, and global socio-economic impacts on fishing communities, vulnerability, adaptation, equity, and aquatic food security. We highly encourage experience addressing socio-ecological interactions, early warning signals, and localized knowledge (e.g., Traditional Ecological Knowledge [TEK] or Indigenous Knowledge [IK]), and community-led or data-limited fisheries.
  
  
• Modeling and Assessment under Uncertainty
  Advances in propagating climate change and other global change uncertainties into stock assessments, harvest control rules, and Management Strategy Evaluation (MSE) frameworks to test robustness against non-stationary dynamics.
  
  
• Ecosystem and Spatial Shifts
  Addressing the consequences of changing distributions and predator-prey dynamics for spatial management, transboundary stock access, allocation, and renegotiation of access arrangements.

A persistent challenge for managing fisheries in an ecosystem context is the gap between what science can offer and what actually gets used in decision-making. While a rich diversity of tools is available—ranging from qualitative conceptual frameworks to fully coupled end-to-end models—implementation remains uneven across regions, governance systems, and data environments. This session puts the Global South front and center, while recognizing the value of looking at both the wide variety of EBFM/EAFM approaches side by side.

Things are working, and this theme aims to celebrate bright spots by highlighting the conditions, approaches, and real-world examples that have successfully bridged this gap. By comparing different jurisdictional and social contexts, we can better understand the enabling conditions, the challenges, and the different ways ecosystem-based thinking gets taken up or stalls. For example, multispecies fisheries in the US and EU often develop integrated regional plans that are constrained by historical legal frameworks focused on single-species management. In contrast, regions like SE Asia are often less constrained by single-species approaches and are deploying a wider, highly adaptable group of assessment methods and management measures. A central message of this theme is that managing fisheries in an ecosystem context does not require perfect data, perfect models, or perfect governance; it requires a suite of thoughtful, iterative, and participatory approaches that leverage available local, regional, and global knowledge.

We invite contributors to illuminate the path from theory to action, exploring how managers, scientists, Indigenous communities, and stakeholders work with available capacity to implement ecosystem approaches in real-world contexts. Specifically, we strongly encourage submissions from individuals directly connected to policy and management decisions in their countries – not just scientists and practitioners – who can take the integrating lessons that emerge from this session back with them to use in active management.

We welcome submissions that explore how we manage fisheries in an ecosystem context through the following areas:

• Comparing Global Frameworks & Policy Contexts
  Balanced evaluations describing the approaches, contexts, successes, and failures of EBFM/EAFM implementation from different parts of the world. Submissions should highlight side-by-side comparisons of enabling conditions and evaluate how differing global jurisdictional frameworks (e.g., historical single-species legal constraints vs. flexible multispecies practices) directly impact system goals.
  
  
• Scalable experiences & Working with What You Have
  Real-world examples of successful EBFM/EAFM implementation across varied systems, with a strong emphasis on community-led and data-limited fisheries. Submissions should explicitly highlight why the approach worked in its specific context and how science was used to inform management needs.
  
  
• Integrating Diverse Knowledge Systems
  Practical frameworks and challenges for incorporating Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Indigenous Knowledge (TEK/IK), and coastal community needs into ecosystem indicators, adaptive co-management, and participatory modeling.
  
  
• Operationalizing Reference Points & Limits
  The development, testing, and application of practical ecosystem indicators, multispecies reference points, and ecosystem-level catch caps designed to balance fisheries removals with broader ecosystem productivity and benefits for local people.
  
  
• Decision-Support & Evaluating Trade-offs
  Utilizing risk assessment frameworks, Management Strategy Evaluation (MSE), and structured decision-making processes (including spatial planning and cross-sector cumulative impacts) to navigate complex trade-offs between fisheries production, food security, ecosystem stability, and socio-economic objectives.

While other sessions at this symposium focus on tactical implementation and enabling policy conditions, this theme takes a forward-looking view to explore new, novel, and emerging approaches to fisheries management in an ecosystem context. Because marine ecosystems and socio-economic realities are shifting rapidly, management must move beyond traditional paradigms to embrace innovative, adaptable solutions. In looking forward, we always need to consider lessons learned in the past that can help frame the forward view.

This session shifts the focus from historical retrospectives to the frontier of ecosystem-based management. We aim to explore cutting-edge performance measures, community-driven learning laboratories, and next-generation frameworks that are redefining how we approach fisheries management. We invite papers that challenge conventional approaches and provide a visionary outlook on advancing EAFM/EBFM. We challenge contributors to share novel methodologies, identify transferable lessons from emerging models, and demonstrate what a dynamic, adaptable vision for the future should look like.

A core premise of this session is that there are multiple ways to include ecosystem considerations into the management process, or even manage fisheries as an entire system, even if a system cannot swiftly shift its entire management paradigm. We hope to attract a wide range of ideas grounded in diverse geographies, and we challenge contributors to identify what has worked well (or not), what transferable lessons can be shared, and what a shared adaptable vision for the future should look like.

We welcome submissions that explore progress and vision through the following areas:

• Measuring Success and Performance Metrics
  Answering the critical question: "How do we know if new approaches are actually working?" We invite submissions focused on the development, testing, and application of next-generation indicators, emerging performance metrics, and innovative evaluation frameworks used to assess management effectiveness.
  
  
• Learning laboratories and Adaptive Co-management
  Exploring bottom-up, community-driven approaches acting as sandboxes for innovation. Submissions should highlight how local ecological knowledge, low-cost/high-tech monitoring, and adaptive co-management in community-led fisheries generate highly transferable, operational lessons for diverse management systems.
  
  
• Validating Approaches Across Ranges of Data Availability
  Methodological advancements that compare and contrast implementation in data-limited versus data-rich systems. We are particularly interested in case studies where novel data-limited frameworks were tested simultaneously within a data-rich environment to rigorously validate data-limited approaches.
  
  
• Transdisciplinary and Innovative Trajectories
  Explorations of innovations and transdisciplinary efforts that bypass traditional management hurdles. We welcome conceptual frameworks and visionary ideas that highlight "accelerated innovation" opportunities and non-conventional methodologies to operationalize EBFM/EAFM in the future.
  
  

This session will serve as the closing plenary session that seeks to synthesize findings from the symposium. It shall employ a few distinct mechanisms to do so, and will aim to set the stage for the next 20+ years of fisheries science and management, with an emphasis on stating the value and primacy of considering the ecosystem context.