Report of the Study Group on Socio-Economic Dimensions of Aquaculture (SGSA)

The first meeting of the Study Group on Socio-Economic Dimensions of Aquaculture (Chair: Gesche Krause, Germany) was held in Bremen (Germany) from 12–14 April and was attended by 6 participants from Germany, Spain and Sweden (and Norway via Skype) (Annex 1). The objective of the meeting was twofold: (1) to create a new group that has an explicit focus on socio-economic issues of marine resource uses and (2) to work on the Terms of Reference that were decided upon at the SCICOM meet-ing in 2010. The ToRs were addressed separately within subgroups, followed by ple-nary sessions where subgroup activities were discussed by the full membership of SGSA. Since it was the first meeting of this group and a novel topic to ICES that pulled together scientists with a wide range of different scientific backgrounds, the group agreed on a common scope and perspective which the SGSA will have in the future. These are summarized in a background section in the beginning of this report (Section 3).