Ecological-Economic Fisheries Management Advice—Quantification of Potential Benefits for the Case of the Eastern Baltic COD Fishery

Abstract

Fishing is a social and economic activity, and consequently socio-economic considerations are important for resource management. While this is acknowledged in the theory of Ecosystem-Based Management (EBM) and its sector-specific development Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Management (EBFM), currently applied fishery management objectives often ignore economic considerations. Year-to-year management, however, implicitly responds to short-term economic interests, and consequently, regularly resorts to tactical short-term rather than strategic long-term decisions. The aim of this article is to introduce a new way of estimating management advice referred to as an "ecologically-constrained Maximum Economic Yield" (eMEY) strategy, which takes into account ecological criteria as well as short-to medium-term economic costs. We further illustrate what net cost reductions per year are possible applying the eMEY strategy compared with the existing way of setting total allowable catches (TACs). The eMEY approach aims at maximizing the economic benefits for the fishery as well as society (consumers), while safeguarding precautionary stock sizes. Using an age-structured optimization model parameterized for the Eastern Baltic cod case study, we find that application of eMEY advice results in more stability in catch advice. Quantification and visualization of the costs of deviating from eMEY advice offers a transparent basis for evaluating decision-making outcomes. The costs of overfishing are mainly borne by the commercial fishery, while fishing less than optimal is particularly costly for the processing industry and consumers. To foster the uptake of our eMEY approach in current advice given by the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) and the EU fishery management system, we suggest an easy-to-implement scheme of providing integrated advice, also accounting for economic considerations.

Providing Integrated Total Catch Advice for the Management of Mixed Fisheries with an Eco-viability Approach

“…It is worth noting that maximising the fishery's net profits after 10 years requires to harvest hake below and sole above their respective F MSY reference points. The fact that fisherywide reference points (multispecies MSY or MEY) can lead to the under-or over-exploitation of individual stocks has already been highlighted by many authors [16,23,43,71,72]. Finally, we observed that the dynamic MEY is sensitive to the value of the discount rate, and, as expected, the higher the discount rate, the higher the associated harvest rates.…”

“…Based on the observation that ICES catch advice is often disregarded by EU member states' fisheries ministers [19,20], who are ultimately constrained by the social acceptability of their decisions, ICES has recognised the need to provide more integrated management advice [21] in order to increase the transparency of the decision-making process. The work presented in this paper contributes to the ongoing debate among the scientific community on how to incorporate social and economic considerations in their recommendations to decision-makers, with particular emphasis on mixed fisheries total allowable catch (TAC) advice [22,23].…”

Use of existing hydrographic infrastructure to forecast the environmental spawning conditions for Eastern Baltic cod

“…As discussed during relevant ICES workshops (e.g. WKDEICE) [ 48 ] such information might be used in different ways to inform stock assessment and advice [ 49 ]:…”

Quantifying socio‐economic novelty in fisheries social‐ecological systems

“…Larger scale international factors, which influence the Baltic fisheries, such as changes in prices at the world market, are manifold (Voss et al, 2017(Voss et al, , 2019. They can be summarized in the effect of trade, as fish has become a more and more globally traded commodity.…”