In conservation, we must find sustainable trade-offs acceptable to society and nature. This requires an understanding of the perceptions, values, beliefs, and emotions of different stakeholders to address socio-ecological challenges related to conservation to targeted efforts. This requires an in-depth, innovative reflection of the tools and approaches available for efficient conservation and how they are used.

We do not manage resources per se, we manage the humans who use them. This is now a well-known call to put ecology and social science in the equation for sustainable fisheries, demonstrating the importance of viewing fisheries as an socio-ecological systems (SES). Climate changes (CC) will also strain the resilience of these SES. Freshwater aquatic ecosystems face severe habitat modification and biodiversity declines, which will exacerbate CC, thereby causing social, economic, and ecological losses.

While the loss of biodiversity continues, a range of conflicts or injustices have emerged between conservation actions and other human activities and interests (i.e., fishing, hunting and ecotourism). This has raised concerns about the justice of conservation, including the distributional equity of costs and benefits, access rights, decision making processes, and the control of some dominant groups over knowledge production and interactions with nature. While important theoretical and methodological advances have recently been made in environmental justice (EJ) research, much remains to be done regarding Indigenous people. How Indigenous communities express their concerns, participate in policy decisions that impact their land, and communicate the importance of biological diversity to their culture are now of primary importance for EJ.