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This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

In February and March 2017, a coastal El Niño caused extraordinary heavy rains and a rise in water temperatures along the coast of northern Peru. In this work, we document the impacts of this phenomenon on the artisanal fisheries and the scallop aquaculture sector, both of which represent important socio-economic activities for the province of Sechura. Despite the perceived absence of effective disaster management and rehabilitation policies, resource users opted for a wide range of different adaptation strategies and are currently striving towards recovery. One year after the event, the artisanal fisheries fleet has returned to operating almost on a normal scale, while the aquaculture sector is still drastically impacted, with many people continuing to work in different economic sectors and even in other regions of the country. Recovery of the social-ecological system of Sechura likely depends on the occurrence of scallop seed and the financial capacity of small-scale producers to reinitiate scallop cultures. Long-term consequences of this coastal El Niño are yet to be studied, though the need to develop trans-local and trans-sectoral management strategies for coping with disturbance events of this scale is emphasized.

The South Pacific bay scallop Argopecten purpuratus represents a high‐value species harvested along the Peruvian and Chilean coastline for more than 60 years. Following the strong El Niño event of 1983/84, both countries experienced a boom in scallop fisheries, but catches dropped as soon as environmental conditions normalized. Aquaculture production began in Chile, which dominated the Latin American scallop market in the 1990s. Peruvian production remained small until the early 2000s, but has increased dramatically ever since, with a single location in northern Peru, Sechura Bay, contributing most (50%) to the Latin American scallop production. We review the historical trends of this species’ production and analyse the ecological and socio‐economic factors that have favoured Sechura Bay's progress, and largely displaced Chilean production through dominance of the market. Advantageous environmental conditions in Sechura Bay (e.g. low water depths, higher temperatures, high natural seed supply) result in improved scallop growth and production, and the socio‐economic factors, causing lower operational costs than those of the Chilean production favoured this development. The bottom‐up initiation of aquaculture operations by small‐scale producers likely created a personal incentive for the long‐term sustainable use, which differs from the more industrialized aquaculture activities in Chile.

Abstract With ever-expanding marine aquaculture, calls for sustainable development become louder. The concept of aquaculture carrying capacity (CC) emerged 30 years ago to frame development, though so far, most studies have focused on the production and ecological components, leaving aside the social perspective. Often, estimations are carried out a posteriori, once aquaculture is already in place, hence ignoring relevant voices potentially opposing the onset of aquaculture implementation. We argue that CC should be multidimensional, iterative, inclusive, and just. Hence, the evaluative scope of CC needs to be broadened by moving from industry-driven, Western-based approaches towards an inclusive vision taking into consideration historical, cultural, and socio-economic concerns of all stakeholders of a given area. To this end, we suggest guidelines to frame a safe operating space for aquaculture based on a multi-criteria, multi-stakeholder approach, while embracing the social-ecological dynamics of aquaculture settings by applying an adaptive approach and acknowledging the critical role of place-based constraints. Rather than producing a box-checking exercise, CC approaches should proactively engage with aquaculture-produced outcomes at multiple scales, embracing complexity, and uncertainty. Scoping CC with the voices of all relevant societal groups, ideally before aquaculture implementation, provides the unique opportunity to jointly develop truly sustainable aquaculture.

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Table S1. Comparison of species comprising the different model compartments for the steady-state models for