Harvest control rules used in US federal fisheries management and implications for climate resilience

Abstract

Climate change is altering the productivity of marine fisheries and challenging the effectiveness of historical fisheries management. Harvest control rules, which describe the process for determining catch limits in fisheries, represent one pathway for promoting climate resilience. In the United States, flexibility in how regional management councils specify harvest control rules has spawned diverse approaches for reducing catch limits to precautionarily buffer against scientific and management uncertainty, some of which may be more or less resilient to climate change. Here, we synthesize the control rules used to manage all 507 U.S. federally-managed fish stocks and stock complexes. We classified these rules into seven typologies: (1) catchbased; (2) constant catch; (3) constant escapement; (4) constant F; (5) stepped F; (6) ramped F, and ( 7) both stepped and ramped F. We also recorded whether the control rules included a biomass limit ("cutoff") value or were environmentally-linked as well as the type and size of the buffers used to protect against scientific and/or management uncertainty. Finally, we review the advantages and disadvantages of each typology for managing fisheries under climate change and provide seven recommendations for updating harvest control rules to improve the resilience of U.S. federally-managed fisheries to climate change.

Impact of the 2014–2016 marine heatwave on US and Canada West Coast fisheries: Surprises and lessons from key case studies

“…Third, fisheries management must be adaptive and/or robust to the impacts of heatwaves and climate change. This need has been well‐described in many reviews (e.g., Holsman et al, 2019; Karp et al, 2019; Pinsky & Mantua, 2014), but key suggestions are to account for shifting productivity by incorporating climate variables into stock assessments (Marshall et al, 2019) and to design harvest control rules (HCRs) that are robust to climate impacts (Free et al, 2023; Wainwright, 2021). For example, Pacific sardine might have benefited from the application of an HCR that was more robust to process uncertainty in the assumed relationship between temperature and productivity in the years leading to the heatwave.…”

Re‐imagining the precautionary approach to make collaborative fisheries management inclusive of Indigenous Knowledge Systems

“…Using the literature and our combined experiences and positionalities in Two‐Eyed Seeing, fisheries science and co‐governance processes involving First Nations, we have illustrated how the precautionary approach, including biological reference points and harvest control rules broadly applied in Canadian and international fisheries (Free et al, 2022; Froese et al, 2011; Marentette et al, 2021), could be revised to make collaborative fisheries management compatible with IKS and improve biodiversity and fisheries protections. Our proposed revisions to the PA policy include higher biomass levels for reference points and objectives for maintaining large size and old age structures.…”

“…The policy has been largely exclusive of IKS. Whether intentional or not, that exclusivity is no longer socially acceptable or even legal under the FRRA and MPAN‐NSB co‐governance agreements, prompting us to examine how the precautionary approach inherent to the policy, including biological reference points and harvest control rules germane to fisheries management internationally (Free et al, 2022; Froese et al, 2011), could be re‐imagined to make collaborative fisheries management compatible with IKS.…”