UiT participated in an open meeting at Kystens Hus in Tromsø. As part of the meeting, project leader Margrethe Aanesen presented previous work on aquaculture expansion and how people in Northern Norway regard this. She also presented the MarES project, which at that time was just started up.

September 2018: How do people want to manage the coastal cod?

Fishing tourism is a growing industry along the coast of Arctic Norway. One of the target species for fishing tourists is the coastal cod. At the same time, this species is also important for commercial fishers and for local inhabitants’ recreational fishing. It is a fact that many local stocks of coastal cod has been in continuous decline for decades, and are now well below critical limits. To inform a survey among inhabitants in Arctic Norway about how they prefer to allocate the rights to harvest on this dwindling resource, project team members set up 2 focus groups; one in Tromsø and one in Svolvær  inviting inhabitants from these two places. The groups aroused lively discussions, and gave us a lot of useful input to the survey. Interestingly, the viewpoints differed significantly across the two geographical locations, with people in Svolvær being more critical to the tourism fishing compared to people in Tromsø.

September 2018: How do commercial companies want to manage the coastal cod?

Along with the focus groups (see above), team members also interviewed a few selected companies operating within the marine fishing tourism industry and coastal fisheries. Interestingly, the fishing tourism companies all agreed that more strict control with tourism fishing should be implemented. They welcomed the new rules from the Fisheries Directorate, distinguishing between fishing tourists staying at facilities owned by companies registered in a Fishing tourism registry set up by the Directorate, and fishing tourists not staying at such facilities.    

May 2019: Vest-Finnmark regionråd: Conference on the mining industry in Finnmark

The regional council for Western Finnmark set up a conference for industry, management and local population on the presence and expansion of the mining industry in Finnmark county. The venue took place in Kvalsund municipality, where the abandoned copper mine from the 1970s is planned to re-open during 2020. As the project is implementing a survey among the population in Finnmark, rest of Arctic Norway, and a sample in Oslo, about the reopening of this mine, project team members took the opportunity to participate in the conference to listen and learn about other, existing mining activities in Finnmark county, and the planned reopening of the mine in Kvalsund. The planed re-opening of the copper mine in Kvalsund is controversial because it is based on storing mine tailings in the Repparfjord. This fjord is a national salmon fjord. Although investigations have been implemented and the biological foot-print on the fjord of the tailings have found to be acceptable, there is some concern about long-term effects on the marine life in the fjord.