Plenary lecture: Challenges and achievements in rebuilding fisheries: uncertainty, prescriptions and scientific advice"​

PARMA, A.M.

A Coruña

Congreso; ICES Annual Science Conference 2014; 2014

International Council for the Exploration of the Sea

Global evaluations of fish stock status indicate that a more positive outlook for fisheries is beginning to emerge in many regions in response to new, stronger mandates to curve overfishing and to rebuild depleted stocks. Legal frameworks have become increasingly prescriptive, requiring implementation of rebuilding plans and specifying clear benchmarks for tracking progress. Effective reductions in fishing pressure have been achieved in response to stringent management regulations, leading in many cases to a reversal of declining trends in stock size. While successful on many accounts, however, prescriptive frameworks have forced reliance on specific management approaches, often inadequate for specific fisheries, restricting the range of acceptable options and discouraging innovation. In the US, for example, a legal management framework built around the concept of maximum sustainable yield (MSY) mandates rebuilding to the MSY level within a predefined time frame once a stock has been classified as overfished. Such policy dependency on uncertain determinations of stock status relative to thresholds and targets often causes abrupt changes in management, exacerbating the impact of the inherent variability of stock assessments. While these problems manifest themselves even in fisheries that can be classified as ?data-rich?, the limitations of prescriptive frameworks are much more severe in data-poor situations. Major technical challenges still remain for rebuilding many world fisheries for which quantitative assessments are not available. For those fisheries, prescriptive management frameworks based on MSY exacerbate the consequences of data deficiencies and distract resources away from due consideration of alternative innovative approaches. Empirical decision rules for adjusting regulations (input or output controls), based on simple indicators of resource status and trends, may prove adequate to support ?direction-oriented? strategies aimed at improving resource status. Although progress in evaluating performance of such rules is underway and useful guidelines are emerging, data limitations often go hand in hand with other structural features that hamper centralized management capabilities. In those cases, the most pressing challenges are not in resource assessment but in broader issues of fisheries governance.