Conduct ESE Interpretive Analyses

Subtask Description:
Conduct ESE Interpretive Analyses
Scope of Social Component model: results, limits, relevance to sustainable development, role of stakeholders and governance.

Action points of the implementation:
Each of the ESE component models need to be fully checked to ensure that they represent the part of the system that they are designed to represent. A series of runs will be carried out on each of the component models to identify any problems prior to their inclusion in the full simulation model. These analyses and descriptions interpret the simulation results of the SC model and its objectives.

Result: Documentation showing the interpretive analysis of the social component model.

Area:
Chalastra sea area, Thermaikos Gulf , Greece

Policy Issue:
Sustainable management of mussel culture in the area of Chalastra, Thermaikos Bay

Human Activities:
Mussel aquaculture, agriculture, urban and industrial activities, fisheries.

General Information:
About half of the national mussel harvest is produced in the area. The unique environmental conditions resulted in mussels with very high condition index achieved in a very short time and also in two reproduction and growth circles in the same year. During the last 10 years, mostly due to excessive cultivation techniques, an annual reduction of the mussel production is taking place, both in means of quality and quantity along with an elongation of the growing period. At the same time due to a number of institutional failures, there is an important legal gap creating institutional problems and obstructing the management of the activity, allowing black market, illegal employment, etc. The main stakeholder concerns are connected to the design and implementation of the legal framework and the optimization of the mussel production.

Example of Implementation:
The functionality of the social component in the model relies first on a comparison between the legal status of mussel farms which affects both the ecological and economical components of the model. A secondary approach relates to local spillover effects of the activity in terms of household income and retributive benefit, in order to identify the community welfare under several scenarios.

Functional component of the social part of the model and social analysis.

The baseline scenario (no institutional management i.e. illegal mussel farming activity, fines, farms that do not comply with the legal sizes and fulfil the regulations and arbitrary positioning) is tested against the “institutional management” scenario (i.e. if the all the farms were of the same size, legally operating and positioned in a sustainable and well-designed way) through a switch. The community welfare is measured through an accumulator that provides the opportunity to compare and examine this welfare under several scenarios.

Comments:
Scope and Limitations of the implementation: For the first SAF applications, we were necessarily limiting the scope of the social assessments. The example of social assessment chosen for simulation analysis must be limited to the virtual system and treat one or more of its scenarios. This is partially pre-determined in the expression of the scenarios.

Contact: Zoi Konstantinou, zkon@civil.auth.gr.