Review on the Progress of Marine Ecosystem Management

Abstract

Along with the industrial development, adverse impacts on the natural environment become more serious, and ecosystem health and ecological security have also been deteriorated. The traditional environment management focused on the short-term and economic benefits. Such managing pattern is not accommodating to the new situation of increasingly global environment problems and large scale marine environment problems. This paper introduces the advance and definition of a new managing pattern—ecosystem management. Meanwhile, the connotation of ecosystem management was summarized as seven points: Sustainability; Human is an important aspect of ecosystem management; Cooperation is the foundation of ecosystem management; Maintain health and security of ecosystem; Ecological diversity protection characters ecosystem management; Maintain the integrity of ecosystem; Ecosystem management must be founded on scientific theories and precise information. Somebody said Ecosystem Management is “a new label of old ideas”. However, there is an essential difference between ecosystem management and traditional environmental management. In the last part of this paper, the differences of the approaches between ecosystem management and traditional environmental management are compared.