Comparing Voluntary and Government-Mandated Management Measures for Meeting Stock Status Targets

MELNYCHUK, MICHAEL C.; RASAL, JENNIFER; BAKER, NICOLE; VEIGA, PEDRO; KOERNER, LAUREN; PONS, MAITE; KUROTA, HIROYUKI; MACE, PAMELA; PARMA, ANA M.; MANNINI, ALESSANDRO; LITTLE, RICH; DE MOOR, CARRYN L.

Seattle

Congreso; 9th World Fisheries Congress; 2024

Americn Fisheries Society

Fisheries management has traditionally involved top-down approaches in which government agencies set and enforce regulations. More recently, market-driven approaches have been used in which the fishing industry or other stakeholders voluntarily engage in practices that align with management objectives and sustainable fishing practices. While these are often intertwined, we attempt to disentangle and compare these approaches as they apply to the sustainability status of nearly 300 assessed target fish stocks around the world. Voluntary measures taken by fisheries include eco-certification against the Marine Stewardship Council’s (MSC) Fisheries Standard as well as Fishery Improvement Projects (FIPs). A variety of government-mandated measures are implemented for individual stocks, or else at national and international levels. Using a hierarchical ARIMA time series analysis, we treated each of these measures as independent interventions potentially affecting trends in stock fishing pressure and biomass. Supporting earlier findings, we confirmed support for a strong effect of rebuilding plans which sharply reduced fishing pressure and allowed stock biomass to recover. Other government-mandated measures operating either at the stock level or at national/international levels further contributed to reducing fishing pressure. We did not find any direct evidence of stock status trends being further influenced by implementing FIPs or by the MSC certification process. Compared with these voluntary measures, the stronger apparent influence of government-mandated measures on changes in target stock status should be expected given their more direct control of fishing pressure. Sustainability-related incentives associated with voluntary measures may still help to promote more desirable conservation outcomes for target stocks (as well as for non-target stocks which were not considered here) if used in parallel with more traditional top-down approaches to fisheries management.