How commercial fishing effort is managed

Abstract

Wild capture fisheries produce 90 million tonnes of food each year and have the potential to provide sustainable livelihoods for nearly 40 million people around the world (http://www.fao.org/3/a-i5555e.pdf). After decades of overfishing since industrialization, many global fish stocks have recovered, a change brought about through effective management. We provide a synthetic overview of three approaches that managers use to sustain stocks: regulating catch and fishing mortality, regulating effort and regulating spatial access. Within each of these approaches, we describe common restrictions, how they alter incentives to change fishing behaviour, and the resultant ecological, economic and community‐level outcomes. For each approach, we present prominent case‐studies that illustrate behaviour and the corresponding performance. These case‐studies show that sustaining target stocks requires a hard limit on fishing mortality under most conditions, but that additional measures are required to generate economic benefits. Different systems for allocation allow stakeholder communities to strike a locally acceptable balance between profitability and employment.

Effects of Management on the Profitability of Seasonal Fisheries

“…Such dynamics are likely manifested in limited entry fisheries that harvest fast-growing and short-lived species. Owing to the life-history characteristics of the exploited species (e.g., high recruitment variability) and restricted fishing technology, Anderson et al (2018) indicated that these seasonal fisheries experience minimal capital stuffing, and hence rent dissipation compared with other fisheries operating under limited entry licensing. For example, in Australia's prawn and rock lobster fisheries with restricted entry programs, fishing fleets show strong sensitivity to decreasing income per time fishing when biomass declines, as measured by the difference between the realized and potential fishing efforts represented by multiplying the fleet size f times season length t (Smith and McKelvey, 1986;Walters and Martell, 2004).…”

“…Notable examples are British Columbia and Bristol Bay salmon fisheries, where in the latter example vessel owners compete to situate their nets nearest to the river mouth (Walters, 1998;Anderson et al, 2018).…”

How do commercial fishing licences relate to access?

“…By limiting and authorizing the free exchange of licences and adopting catch share programmes, a fisheries management system transitions away from state‐governed allocation to an allocation regime‐grounded private property arrangements and free market principles (Anderson et al, ; Bromley, ; Mansfield, ). Economic efficiency, managerial feasibility and resource conservation are often the stated rationale, while incentivizing payments towards management costs from those that remain is also prioritized.…”

“…By limiting and authorizing the free exchange of licences and adopting catch share programmes, a fisheries management system transitions away from state-governed allocation to an allocation regime-grounded private property arrangements and free market principles (Anderson et al, 2019;Bromley, 2008;Mansfield, 2004).…”

Classifying fishing behavioral diversity using high-frequency movement data

“…fisheries | human mobility | movement ecology | natural resource management | resilience B etter understanding of human behavior is now an important component of the natural-resource management toolbox (1). The big data revolution that is taking place across multiple social systems and scales holds great promise for incorporating human behavioral data into management.…”