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Brexit, the UK's planned withdrawal from the EU, has significant implications for UK fisheries, potentially creating both opportunities and challenges regarding future governance of some of the most important fisheries in the EU. This paper presents findings of discussions with key industry representatives from two of Scotland's largest ports -Peterhead and Fraserburgh. The views of these stakeholders give a unique perspective on the opportunities and challenges provided by Brexit. Views are reported on the current management system, the importance of the EU as an export market and how industry stakeholders believe fisheries should be governed if the UK leaves the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP). Despite the view from stakeholders that the current distribution of fishing rights in UK waters is unbalanced, and the view that the CFP has moved from a positive to a negative for the industry, the implications of these results suggest that this part of the industry is not focussed solely on a quick removal from the CFP that returns 100% of fishing rights and control of UK waters, but instead seeks an improved management system that allows for the long term sustainability of the sector.

In this paper, a sustainability framework with a case application for UK’s Scottish fisheries has been developed which integrates aspects related to economic growth, social development, governance, biology, environment, and logistics. Scotland is the centre of UK’s commercial fishery sector however it faces challenges such as overexploitation, and changes in the governance structure following Brexit. The contributions of this study are threefold including (i) collecting and analysing primary data gathered from a diverse group of stakeholders in the Scottish fishery sector and scientific community, (ii) prioritising a diverse range of criteria in terms of importance in decision making from industry and scientific community perspectives, (iii) elaboration of the key management objectives in this region within the context of sustainable management of fisheries in the UK.The results of this stakeholders’ survey show that the key management objectives are reductions in overexploitation of stocks, inclusive governance, increase in transparency and simplicity of policy measures, reduction in marine litter, and increase in the efficiency of vessels. The analysis also shows that the industry group places a higher importance on socio-economic objectives such as increase in profit and employment compared to the scientific group. On the other hand, the scientific group prioritised the objectives such as reducing discards, bycatch, and impact on seafloor compared to the industry group. This study provides insight for the UK’s fisheries sector, and scientific advisory groups for the enhanced implementation of sustainable fisheries management policies.

In this paper, a systematic literature review on the impact of fisheries on the economy and the application of the computable general equilibrium (CGE) and input–output (IO) methods for assessing this impact is conducted. The importance of fisheries as a food source, the over exploitation of this resource, and, consequently, the impact of fisheries on the economy are the motivations behind this study. By reviewing the applications of two of the most common economic modelling tools, we aim to shine light on the state of the art and how the impact of fisheries on the economy has been addressed in the literature. In this analysis, three main themes of socio-economic, ecological, and environmental have been identified, and the application of these methods in each theme has been considered. The results show that while IO methods continue to be applied in the literature, the CGE method has experienced increased application recently, and future applications are anticipated due to its enhanced capabilities in comparison with IO models.