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THE FAO PRECAUTIONARY APPROACH AFTER ALMOST 10
YEARS: HAVE WE PROGRESSED TOWARDS IMPLEMENTING
SIMULATION-TESTED FEEDBACK-CONTROL MANAGEMENT
SYSTEMS FOR FISHERIES MANAGEMENT?
ANDRÉ E. PUNT
School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, Box 355020
University of Washington, Seattle WA 98195-5020
E-mail address: aepunt@u.washington.edu
ABSTRACT. It is almost ten years since the FAO Technical Consultation on
the Precautionary Approach to Capture Fisheries took place in Lysekil, Sweden.
One outcome from this Technical Consultation was a set of guidelines on the
precautionary approach to capture fisheries and species introductions. These
guidelines include the need to incorporate harvest control rules in management
plans. Harvest control rules should specify what action is to be taken when
specified deviations from the operational targets and constraints are observed. The
specification should include minimum data requirements for the types of
assessment methods to be used for decision-making. Combinations of harvest
control rules, assessment methods and data collection schemes are referred to as
management procedures. It is now well-recognized that using management
procedures is likely to lead to improved conservation of fishery resources, and
that they should be evaluated to assess whether they are likely to achieve the goals
for fishery management given the types of uncertainties that are likely to frustrate
this venture. In general, evaluation of management procedures has been based on
simulation modeling. This paper reviews the progress that has been made in
various fisheries jurisdictions in terms of implementing management procedures,
and why and where it has proved difficult or even impossible to implement
management procedures.
KEY WORDS: Management procedure, precautionary management, fisheries,
uncertainty.
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1. Introduction. Fisheries management involves developing and implementing
regulations that aim to achieve fishery management goals. These goals are as diverse as
the fisheries themselves, but generally include conserving the resource (for future
generations), achieving high long-term catches and minimizing socio-economic
dislocation. The goals for fisheries management are usually in conflict to some extent so
that fisheries management decisions inevitably attempt to achieve some socially-desirable
trade-off among these goals.
Making fisheries management decisions would not be difficult if the decision makers
had perfect information about the resource, the users and the marine environment, but
this is never the case. As a result, these decisions need to take uncertainty into
consideration. Uncertainty can be used to argue for lower exploitation rates (to protect the
resource) or for higher exploitation rates (to avoid unnecessary economic hardship in the
face of uncertain information that may point to a concern about the status of a resource).
The well-known failures to achieve conservation-related management goals can be traced
to either a choice by the decision makers to manage for a trade-off that places too little
emphasis on resource conservation, or to forgo management actions until the evidence
that there are resource conservation concerns becomes very strong.
The difficulty when choosing an appropriate balance between resource conservation
and exploitation has often led scientific management advice to focus on “biological (or
fisheries) reference points”. A variety of biological reference points have been developed
(e.g. Sissenwine and Shepherd [1987]; Hildén [1993]; Leaman [1993]; Rivard and
Maguire [1993]; Quinn and Deriso [1999]). Biological reference points tend to be based
either on catch (e.g. MSY – Maximum Sustainable Yield), spawning or fishable biomass
(e.g. BMSY – the biomass at which MSY is achieved), or the level of fishing-induced
mortality (e.g. FMSY – the fishing mortality rate at which at which MSY is achieved; Fmax
– the fishing mortality rate at which yield-per-recruit is maximized; and F0.1 – the fishing
mortality rate at which the slope of the yield-per-recruit function with respect to fishing
mortality is 10% of that at F=0). While it is now recognized that several of the commonly
used fishing mortality-based reference points lead, in fact, to unsustainable use for some
species (e.g. Dorn [2002]; Punt [2000]), reference points continue to provide a means of
guiding fisheries management decisions in many jurisdictions. Unfortunately, most of the
conventional biological reference points (e.g. FMSY, F0.1, FMAX) fail to take account of
uncertainty, specifically that associated with the data used for their calculation.
The FAO Technical Consultation on the Precautionary Approach to Capture Fisheries
which took place in Lysekil, Sweden in 1995 (FAO [1996]) can be considered one of the
most important fisheries meetings of the 20th century. One outcome from this Technical
Consultation was a set of guidelines on the precautionary approach to capture fisheries
and species introductions. These guidelines include (but are not restricted to) the
following principles:
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a level of precaution commensurate to risk should be applied at all times to all
fisheries;
potentially irreversible changes should be avoided (to maintain options for future
generations);
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undesirable outcomes should be anticipated and measures be taken to reduce their
likelihood;
corrective measures should be applied immediately and be effective within an
acceptable time;
precautionary limits should be placed on fishing capacity on highly uncertain
resources;
all fishing activities should be subject to prior authorization and periodic review;
the burden of proof should be appropriately (realistically) placed;
standards of proof commensurate with the potential risk to the resource should be
established; and
the approach should be formalized in a comprehensive legal and institutional
framework.
The precautionary approach has now been adopted widely, including by a number of
fishery management organizations (CCAMLR, IPHC, IWC, ICES, NAFO, NASCO,
ICCAT, MHLC, SEAFO) as outlined by FAO [1996]. One of the elements of the
precautionary approach to fishery management is “A management plan must indicate
which management measures are to be applied, and the circumstances under which the
measures are to be varied. This should involve the formulation of decision rules, which
specify in advance what action should be taken when specified deviations from the
operational targets and constraints are observed. The specification should include
minimum data requirements for the types of assessment methods to be used for decisionmaking”. The precautionary approach further notes that “To be precautionary, decision
rules are required for responding to unexpected or unpredictable events with minimum
delay. All foreseeable contingencies should be considered when developing the plan” and
“The precautionary approach is made more effective by development of an understanding
of the sources of uncertainty in the data sampling processes, and collection of sufficient
information to quantify this uncertainty. If such information is available it can be
explicitly used in the management procedure to estimate the uncertainty affecting
decisions and the resulting risk. If such information is not available, a precautionary
approach to fishery management would implicitly account for the unknown uncertainty
by being more conservative”.
Decision (or harvest control) rules have often formed an integral component of the
way in which fisheries management advice has been developed. For example, the
Canadian Atlantic Fisheries Scientific Advisory Committee (CAFSAC) based TAC
recommendations on a target fishing mortality rate of F0.1, given Canada’s adoption of
F0.1 as its target fishing mortality rate in 1977 (Rivard and Maguire [1993]). This is a
very simple example of a constant effort-based harvest control rule. Nevertheless,
implementation of even this harvest control rule requires that an age-structured stock
assessment can be conducted. Although this policy was in operation for many years,
Rivard and Maguire [1993] report that fishing mortality off eastern Canada seldom
dropped as low as F0.1 in actuality due to the socio-economic impact to which this would
have lead. A somewhat more conservative constant effort-based harvest control rule than
F0.1 was applied to develop TAC recommendations for the Cape hakes (Merluccius
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capensis and M. paradoxus) from 1977-95 (Payne and Punt [1995]; Geromont et al.
[1999]).
The harvest control rule used to provide recommendations for the management of
groundfish resources off the U.S. west coast includes several precautionary elements. For
example, there is a population size below which there is a requirement to develop a
rebuilding plan that will return the spawning output to a proxy for BMSY within a prespecified number of years. Perhaps the major problem with this, and several similar,
harvest control rule relates to the general inability to FMSY. Initially, a proxy for FMSY for
west coast groundfish of F35% (the fishing mortality rate at which spawning output-perrecruit is reduced to 35% of its unfished level) was adopted, based on analyses by Clarke
[1991]. However, this fishing mortality rate over-estimates FMSY for many of the low
productivity rockfish (Sebastes spp.) species off the U.S. west coast (Dorn [2002]) with
the result that a number of west coast rockfish species have been depleted to alarmingly
low levels (Ralston [1998]).
There are many reasons for failure of harvest control rules to prevent depletion to
undesirably low levels. Amongst these are that most harvest control rules were never
evaluated formally to determine whether they are sufficient to achieve the goals for
which they were designed, given the uncertainties inherent in the system being managed.
As noted by Kirkwood and Smith [1996] “Even though a management strategy may
incorporate elements that are intended to make it precautionary .. it does not follow that it
will actually be precautionary in practice”.
Simulation has been suggested as the means to determine the extent to which
candidate harvest control rules can satisfy management goals (Kirkwood and Smith
[1996]; Cooke [1999]; McAllister et al. [1999]). Butterworth et al. [1997] define a
management procedure as a set of rules which utilize pre-specified data to provide
recommendations for management actions, where the performance of the rules has been
evaluated using simulation. Management procedures therefore appear to be a way to
implement harvest control rules in a manner that satisfies the requirements of FAO’s
precautionary approach to fisheries management.
This paper provides an overview of how management procedures are evaluated using
simulation and then reviews the extent to which the use of management procedures for
fisheries management has increased from 1993 (prior to the Technical Consultation
which led to the FAO precautionary approach), to 1999 (the year in which a special issue
of the ICES Journal of Marine Science on including uncertainty in management systems
(Stokes et al. [1999]) was published), to the present. It then considers the reasons for the
adoption (and non-adoption) of management procedures and hence highlights the
challenges that will need to be overcome if management procedures are to be adopted
more widely for fisheries management.
2. Management procedures and their evaluation. The process of evaluating
management procedures by means of simulation involves a number of steps (Fig. 1).
These steps have been summarized and discussed by several authors (e.g. Kirkwood and
Smith [1996]) and so only an overview is provided here.
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Specifying the management goals and representing them quantitatively is amongst the
most difficult steps in the process. This is because the management goals that can be
derived from fisheries and other environmental legislation are often very broad
(Sainsbury et al. [2000]) and because managers often have difficulty making explicit
statements regarding their goals (Kirkwood and Smith [1996]). The difficulty defining
management goals quantitatively is compounded when goals not related to maintaining
(or enhancing) single species stocks and fisheries are involved.
The operating model (the model that represents the truth for the simulations) needs to
be sufficiently complicated (in general much more complicated than that used as the basis
for management advice) to capture all of the key biological processes and uncertainties to
which an ideal management procedure would be robust. Several operating models rather
than just one are usually developed so that the extent to which the set of candidate
management procedures are robust to uncertainties can be examined. The operating
model must also be able to generate the types of data available for use by the
management procedures in a realistic manner.
The first management procedures are conventionally considered to be those
developed for anchovy (Engraulis capensis) off South Africa (Bergh and Butterworth
[1987]; Butterworth and Bergh [1993]). The evaluation of these management procedures
considered a narrow range of uncertainties (primarily process and observation error).
Subsequent evaluations have considered a much broader range of uncertainties (see, for
example, the review by Butterworth and Punt [1999]). The number of uncertainties
considered in operating models is increasing, with observation, process, model and
implementation uncertainty (Francis and Shotten [1997]) all now included regularly when
evaluating management procedures. However, most of the operating models upon which
management procedures have been based have not considered multi-species interactions
and spatial factors (Schweder et al. [1998]; Punt et al. [2005] and IWC [2004a] being
noteworthy exceptions).
In most cases, a small set of factors that are likely to impact the performance of the
candidate management procedures to the greatest extent (e.g. the extent of sampling error
when conducting surveys; the value for key parameters such as natural survival), and
specific levels for those factors, are selected and these used to a create a “base case” set
of simulation trials. The levels of the factors that make up the base-case simulation trials
are often those that are “most plausible” and are consequently given greatest weight when
a management procedure is selected. The sensitivity of the results to alternative (often
less plausible) specifications for the operating model is examined to determine the extent
of robustness to unlikely, but highly consequential, factors. Although this base-case-andsensitivity test approach has been used most commonly, some evaluations of
management procedures (e.g. Schweder et al. [1998]; Polacheck et al. [1999]) have been
based on a more balanced design of factors and levels to enable the impact of interactions
among factors to be determined quantitatively.
A management procedure consists of a combination of the data to be collected, how
those data are to be analyzed, and how the results of the analyses are be used to determine
a management action. As a result, the management procedures developed to date have
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tended to be very case-specific. Two basic classes of management procedures exist: those
based on fitting population dynamics models to data and those that involve a more
empirical approach to determining management actions. The bulk of management
procedures implemented to date are model-based. This is primarily because model-based
approaches have been shown to outperform more empirical approaches in terms of
reducing variability in catch levels (IWC [1992]). Empirical approaches (based primarily
on following trends in abundance) have, however, also been adopted fairly extensively
because they tend to be simpler, and hence easier to explain to decision makers.
3. Reasons for the adoption of management procedures. The reasons for adopting
management procedures have varied, but generally include the ability to address
uncertainty in all aspects of the management and assessment process, and consequently to
identify the data and analyses needed to be robust to uncertainties. These reasons also
usually include that adoption of management procedures forces decision makers to define
management goals clearly and quantitatively, that an evaluation of alternative
management procedures leads to a clearer representation of the trade-offs inherent in
managing any natural population, that all parties are forced to take a long-term view of
managing the system, and that all stakeholders have greater certainty/transparency
regarding the future.
Management procedures provide certainty to different stakeholders in different ways.
For example, industry consider that one of the advantages of using management
procedures is that management arrangements will not be changed arbitrarily given a
slight drop in, for example, an abundance index. Conservation stakeholders on the other
hand are given greater certainty that reductions in, for example, TACs will occur if there
are signs of resource depletion (or lack of sufficient increase in biomass for depleted
resources). The use of management procedures replaces the “default” of “no change” by a
pre-specified reduction in, for example, TAC if there are signs of reductions in
abundance, but there is no scientific consensus on whether abundance has really declined.
Use of management procedures to determine management actions is therefore pro-active
rather than the norm for fisheries management decisions which has generally been reactive and is clearly consistent with the FAO Precautionary Approach.
In some jurisdictions (South Africa, Namibia, and New Zealand), management
procedures are seen as a way to reduce the need for annual formal assessments and the
annual debates on recommendations for management actions because a management
procedure can operate on “auto-pilot” for several years. There appears to have been a
reduction in the need for formal stock assessments in New Zealand, while routine annual
assessments of hake, sardine, anchovy and west coast rock lobster in South Africa are
simpler because, rather than each annual assessment involving many runs of the
assessment model, annual assessments now usually only involve a single “reference case”
run, in particular to check that the resource remains within the bounds for which the
management procedure was tested. The time for assessments in South Africa to be
conducted has been reduced further because there has been no need to “haggle” over how
the results of any assessment pertain to the size of the TAC.
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Management procedures that include specified data requirements provide some
leverage to ensure that management agencies and stakeholders commit to consistent
methodology and funding to provide the information needed to apply the management
procedure. The focus on data requirements can, however, have negative consequences in
that funding could increasingly be focused towards the data needed to apply the
management procedure and less on the basic science needed to qualitatively change the
understanding of the system (and hence possibly the design of the management
procedure). One feature of an evaluation of management procedures that has perhaps not
been used as extensively as might have been expected is the ability to comment on the
‘value of research’ to reduce uncertainty in achieving management goals. Some studies
(e.g. Bergh and Butterworth [1987]; Punt et al. [2001]) have examined the ‘value of
research’ in the context of the data requirements for management procedures, but there is
no evidence that the results of these studies have influenced funding of research and
monitoring.
One of the major concerns that industry often have with management systems is that
they result in fluctuations in TACs from one year to the next that are disruptive
economically. Fluctuations in TACs can be caused by the management system “following
noise in the data”, and can be reduced by imposing limits on how much TACs can be
varied from one year to the next and by setting minimum (and maximum) limits on the
TAC. However, setting limits on inter-annual TAC variability that are too rigid can result
in TACs not being reduced quickly enough if, for example, a recruitment failure occurs.
The simulation framework used to evaluate candidate management procedures allows the
relative merits of alternative specifications for these limits to be compared properly
through quantitative evaluation (e.g. De Oliveira and Butterworth [2004]).
4. Examples of management procedures. Management procedures have been
implemented in several fisheries jurisdictions. Table 1 lists the stocks / species for which
management procedures have been developed and implemented. Table 1 examines how
the use of management procedures has changed from 1993 to 1999, and to the present.
The information on which Table 1 is based was obtained from the literature, the web, and
from discussions with the scientists who were tasked with developing (and revising) the
management procedures concerned. The bulk of the implementations have occurred in
the southern hemisphere, although there are some noteworthy exceptions on the west
coast of North America, in Iceland, as well as in the management of whaling. Table 1 is
restricted to cases where management procedures have been implemented. There are
many studies in which the basic approach used when evaluating management procedures
(Fig. 1) has been used to examine the properties of a management system, but the results
have not been used in practice. For example, Eggers [1993], Punt [1997, 2002], Kell et al.
[1999], Polacheck et al. [1999] and Hilborn et al. [2002] all evaluated the performance of
management procedures, but the results were not used as the basis for actual management
decisions. These studies did, however, inform decision makers and scientists regarding
the relative merits of different feedback-control approaches to fisheries management.
Management procedures have been used in South Africa for several resources (Table
1), including hake, anchovy and rock lobster (the nation’s three most valuable fisheries)
and the use of management procedures is now considered “standard” for the major fish
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resources of that country. For example, since the late 1990s, there have been no cases
where the decision makers have modified recommendations for TACs based on
management procedures, unless scientists have provided advice that new information
justifies the revision of the procedure. These management procedures tend to be updated
every 3-5 years based on new information that indicates the need for an appreciable
refinement of perceptions concerning resource status or productivity (Bergh and
Butterworth [1987]; Butterworth and Bergh [1993]; Butterworth et al. [1997]; Geromont
et al. [1999]; De Oliveira and Butterworth [2004]; Johnston and Butterworth [2005]).
Management procedures have been developed for Namibian hake and the component
of the Cape fur seal, Arctocephalus pusillus pusillus, population off Namibia, but have
not been adopted formally as a basis for formulating management decisions. The seal
management procedure is in need of revision, but this is currently on hold while a
management plan is being developed. In any case, harvests of pups are currently below
sustainable levels. A management procedure for hake off Namibia (Rademeyer [2003])
was used as the basis for TAC recommendations in 2002 and 2003, but in 2004 the
output from this management procedure was not accepted as the basis for setting the TAC
for hake for the 2004/05 season. This was, in part, because of concerns by decision
makers about whether to use a management procedure for hake in Namibia, and also a
possible need to revise this management procedure as the key data inputs (CPUE and
survey abundance indices) may be conflict, a possibility that was not envisaged during
the development of this procedure.
Management procedures have been evaluated for a wide range of species in Australia,
and are used in various ways to determine management actions. They have, however, not
been adopted in a formal sense (in that they have been included in fishery management
plans). A key reason for this is that it would be difficult (slow) to amend a management
procedure that is part of a fishery management plan if new information were to show that
it is flawed (or that a better management procedure exists). Therefore, practice in
Australia tends to be that Fishery Assessment Groups and Management Advisory
Committees will select methodologies (including data collection schemes, assessment
methods, management reference points, and harvest control) as being appropriate, but not
formally adopt them. At the Federal level, the Board of the Australian Fisheries
Management Authority also makes such decisions. Thus, while there is no formal
adoption of management procedures, there is a relatively strong commitment to use of
what amount to management procedures, but with the caveat that changes to management
procedures can be made as deemed necessary.
Evaluations of management procedures for the two target species in Australia’s
southern shark fishery (school shark, Galeorhinus galeus, and gummy shark, Mustelus
antarcticus) have been undertaken (Punt et al. [2005]). These evaluations led to
agreements on assessment methods and goals for recovery, but not on specific rules for
setting TACs. Management procedure evaluations were conducted for the orange roughy,
Hoplosthesus atlanticus, stocks off eastern Australia and a set of harvest control rules
was devised. However, these harvest control rules, which involved closure of the fishery
at low stock size, were never formally agreed to, and were implemented only when stocks
had fallen to much lower levels than originally intended.
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The management procedure evaluations for the swordfish fishery off the east coast of
Australia (Campbell and Dowling [2003]) formed the basis for setting an initial Total
Allowable Effort level for this fishery, but no management procedures (or even
assessment methods) are agreed for this fishery. Similarly, management procedure
evaluations are being conducted for the key target species of the Northern Prawn Fishery
(C.M. Dichmont, CSIRO Marine Research, Cleveland, pers. commn), but while the
results of these evaluations are likely to guide decisions regarding data collection,
assessment methods, and the process for determining the annual level of fishing effort,
they are not likely to lead to management procedures that are adopted formally.
The rules used to set the TACs for the fishery for Patagonian toothfish, Dissostichus
eleginoides, at Macquarie Island use catch rates to suggest whether the fishery is
operating on a stock that is resident to Macquarie Island or on the resident stock as well
as a transient stock. These rules were evaluated using scenarios in which there was a
single stock, a single stock with poor recruitment, and two stocks (Tuck et al. [2003]).
Polacheck et al. [1999] conducted an initial evaluation of management procedures for
the southern bluefin tuna, Thunnus maccoyii, resource which accounted for uncertainty in
the methods for estimating the size of the plus-group, the interpretation of CPUE for
areas with no fishing effort data, rates of natural mortality, actual catch levels in recent
years, and the age-at-sexual maturity. While this effort did not lead to agreements
regarding the management of the fishery for southern bluefin tuna, a subsequent effort is
currently underway within the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin
Tuna (CCSBT) which should lead to a management procedure to determine catch limits
for southern bluefin tuna for all CCSBT member nations, also taking account of likely
catches by non-members (e.g. Anon [2003]).
There were no management procedures in use in New Zealand in 1993 although
harvest control rules were in place for several species. By 1999, a management procedure
had been put in place for red rock lobster, Jasus edwardsii, off southern New Zealand
(Starr et al. [1997]). This management procedure was developed collaboratively by
scientists employed by the New Zealand government and by the fishing industry. It was
revised in 2003 based on consideration of a broader range of uncertainties and a revised
management goal (Bentley et al. [2003a]).
Harvest control rules that have been evaluated using simulation are used to determine
the harvest guidelines for Pacific Mackerel, Scomber japonicus (Parrish and MacCall
[1978]; MacCall et al. [1985]) and Pacific sardine, Sardinops sagax caerulea (Anon
[1998]). The harvest control rule for Pacific sardine is unique in that the target level of
fishing mortality depends on an environmental variable (temperature). Note that, as in
Australia, the method of analyzing the data collected from the fishery to calculate the
information needed to apply the harvest control rule is not pre-specified although the
same assessment method has been used to conduct assessments of both Pacific sardine
and Pacific mackerel for the last several years. Harvest control rules are used to provide
management advice for many other stocks in the U.S. However, except for those for
Pacific mackerel and Pacific sardine, these harvest control rules have not been formally
evaluated using simulation.
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Europe has been progressing towards formal harvest control rules (e.g. for North Sea
herring, Irish Sea cod, West Scotland cod, Kattegat cod, North Sea cod and Northern
hake) and discussions are taking place to implement harvest control rules for several
other species / stocks in European waters. These harvest control rules are better
considered formal ways of implementing recovery programs rather than long-term
approaches to management, and have not been tested using simulation. There are,
however, two exceptions; cod, Gadus morhua, off Iceland and Northeast Atlantic cod.
The harvest control rule used to set TACs for Icelandic cod was evaluated by means of
simulations that considered both biological and economic factors (e.g. Baldursson et al.
[1996]; Danielsson et al. [1997]). The rule was implemented in 1995 and replaced in
2000 after it was discovered that the fishable biomass had been overestimated
substantially. The 1995 harvest control rule included a minimum TAC. This minimum
TAC was eliminated, and a constraint on inter-annual variation in catches imposed,
during the 2000 revision to the harvest control rule. The harvest control rule for Northeast
Atlantic cod is based on a fixed harvest rate (0.4yr-1) when spawning output is high,
reduced fishing mortality if spawning output is below a threshold, and a limit on the
extent of inter-annual variation in catches. It should be noted that the analyses used to
evaluate alternative harvest control rules for Northeast Atlantic and Icelandic cod did not
simulate the application of the types of assessment method used in actuality.
Management procedures have been developed by the International Whaling
Commission (IWC) for baleen whales subject to commercial harvest on their feeding
grounds (Cooke [1995]; IWC [1999]) and for the subsistence harvest of bowhead whales
in the Bering-Chukchi-Beaufort Seas and gray whales in the eastern North Pacific (IWC
[2003, 2005a]).
Catch limits for whales exploited commercially were based on the results of stock
assessments and a pre-specified harvest control law (see IWC [2004b] for the
specifications of the harvest control rule) prior to the declaration of a moratorium on
commercial whaling in 1982 by the IWC. The reasons for moving from (the then)
conventional methods of providing management advice for stocks of whales subject to
commercial harvest to an approach based on a management procedure related in large
part to the difficulty that the Scientific Committee of the IWC had experienced in
reaching consensus on stock status and other parameters needed to apply the agreed
harvest control law given uncertainties about data and their interpretation (Kirkwood
[1997]; Kirkwood and Smith [1996]). The testing of candidate management procedures
for whaling involved a very large number of scenarios to examine the impacts on
performance of, for example, bias in estimates of abundance (and how that bias may
change over time), the precision of the estimates of abundance, uncertainty about the
magnitude of historic catches, and changes over time in the values for key biological
parameters of the population. The management procedure eventually selected (the
“Revised Management Procedure”, RMP) was generic in that it can be applied to any
stock of baleen whales on their feeding grounds. It includes rules to handle situations
when stock structure is uncertain. Although the RMP is generic, prior to recommending
that the RMP be implemented for any species in a region, case-specific simulations are
conducted by the Scientific Committee of the IWC to examine the performance of the
RMP for that species and region, and to recommend which of the rules used to handle
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stock structure uncertainty should be applied. To date, case-specific simulations have
been developed for the north Atlantic, southern Hemisphere and western North Pacific
minke whales (IWC [1993, 2004a]), with a similar exercise for western North Pacific
Brydes whales in progress.
Although the Revised Management Procedure is undoubtedly the most thoroughly
tested of the management procedures developed to date, it has yet to be used by the IWC
to set catch limits. This is because, although the scientific aspects of the management
regime are complete, the procedures for ensuring compliance are not yet agreed. Norway,
which lodged an objection to the moratorium (IWC [2004b]), has used a less conservative
variant of the RMP when setting catch limits for its fishery for minke whales in the
eastern North Atlantic.
5. Why have management procedures not been adopted more extensively? The
selection of a particular management procedure from a set of candidate management
procedures remains the most difficult part of implementing the approach. As noted by
Butterworth and Punt [1999], a management procedure should be sufficiently robust to
all plausible scenarios regarding the future state of the system, but what constitutes
“sufficiently robust” and “plausible” is not easy to decide. While some guidelines for
assigning plausibility to scenarios have been developed (Butterworth et al. [1996]; IWC
[2005b]), these have yet to be adopted widely.
Most management procedure evaluations consider future performance over 10-25
years (100 years in the case of baleen whales). The projection period therefore
considerably exceeds the tenure of most decision makers. Many politicians will have
little incentive to make decisions, the benefits of which will only be realized well after
their terms are completed (Daw and Gray [2005]). Therefore, there is likely to be a
tendency to avoid adopting management procedures that will lead to short-term
reductions in catch. A related issue is that changes in government may lead to changes in
fisheries management goals. This could lead to recommendations from management
procedures being ignored because the goals on which the management procedures were
based do not reflect those of the government presently in office.
The scientists polled informally provided a number of other reasons why management
procedures had not been adopted more extensively. Specifically, some noted that it would
be more difficult to develop and implement management procedures for stocks for which:
a) there is no credible index of abundance,
b) there is substantial inter-annual variability (although others remarked that many of
the applications have, in fact, been to species such as sardine, anchovy and
mackerel which do vary substantially from one year to the next),
c) there are substantial non-fishing related perturbations, and
d) the data available for assessment purposes are in conflict to some extent.
Implementing management procedures in the face of multi-species interactions (both
biological and technical) is challenging because, in addition to the trade-off between risk
and reward, there is a need to trade-off the harvest of one species against that of another.
12
Situations in which there are biological interactions tend to be more complicated than
those in which there are only technical interactions owing to the difficulties associated
with quantifying such interactions. Although dealing with multi-species interactions is
difficult, it is not impossible (Sainsbury et al. [2000]; Butterworth and Punt [2003]). For
example, De Oliveira et al. [1998] developed management procedures for sardine and
anchovy off South Africa in which the amount of bycatch of sardine in the anchovy
fishery depended on the form of the management procedure adopted for anchovy. The
analyses used to select the anchovy and sardine TACs explicitly examined the trade-off
between catches of anchovy and those of sardine.
Management goals are not generally sufficiently well quantified in legislation, and the
cost of developing a consensus regarding management goals may take much time and be
costly. This is because the process of identifying quantitative management goals may
require a series of workshops with key stakeholder groups (e.g. Bentley et al. [2003b]).
The technical requirements of implementing management procedures are very
substantial, particularly for fisheries for which the scenarios that need to be represented in
the operating model are complicated (involving, for example, spatial structure and / or
multispecies interactions). The computer programs needed to evaluate a management
procedure can often be several orders of magnitude more complicated than that needed to
implement the management procedure itself. This complexity is compounded by a lack of
population modelers in most management agencies. The ability to communicate
effectively with a broad range of stakeholders and the time needed to iterate with
stakeholders regarding management goals and when selecting among candidate
management procedures is another challenge for the scientists who are tasked to provide
advice regarding potential management procedures.
Except for the IWC’s Revised Management Procedure, the management procedures
referred to in this paper were designed in a case-specific manner (because the key
uncertainties for any one fishery are unlikely to be those for any other fishery). The need
for case-specific management procedures will almost certainly prevent widespread
adoption of management procedures for the reason discussed in the previous paragraph.
One way to overcome this problem is for “generic” management procedures to be
implemented. Such management procedures would need to be robust to a wide range of
uncertainties and could be used “off the shelf”. Unfortunately, any “generic”
management procedure would have to be very conservative to be robust to all key
uncertainties.
Management procedures are generally no more complicated than the traditional tools
used to provide management advice (e.g. the use of Sequential Population Analysis to
estimate population size) and are often much simpler. Unfortunately, stakeholders tend to
see the management procedure and the approach used to test it as a single “package”,
which appears much more complicated than the traditional approach.
6. The future. The level of effort directed towards evaluating management
procedures is clearly increasing (e.g. Europe, Australia and South Africa) and there is
clear evidence for increased use of management procedures in many parts of the world
13
(Table 1). However, the response of management authorities to the results of
management procedure evaluations differs among regions. In Europe and Australia, the
results inform decisions (through an improved basis for selecting assessment methods
and data collection schemes, and by identifying ways of making decisions that do not
work) rather than determining a particular decision. In contrast, South Africa and the U.S.
have tended to mimic the IWC’s process of more formal adoption. Decision makers in
Namibia are currently indicating that they would prefer implementations which admit
some flexibility, rather than providing only a single TAC recommendation.
The types of calculations and processes used to evaluate management procedures may
have substantial benefits even if they do not lead to an agreed formula for determining
management actions in response to the data collected from a fishery. They force scientists
to avoid thinking that is focused on determining the “best” appraisal of stock status and is
focused instead on uncertainty (in the dynamics of the resources, the implementation of
management actions, and the data). This is because the results of management procedure
evaluations always highlight that it is the combination of these uncertainties that
determines the ability (or inability) to satisfy the management goals. Also, the processes
that lead to agreed management goals and quantifiable management objectives have
benefits that may be much more long-lasting than the management procedures
themselves.
The use of simulation-tested feedback-control management systems is an ideal, and
represents the endpoint of a process which started with the identification of what are now
known as target reference points (e.g. F0.1), harvest control (or decision) rules, and limit
reference points. Development of reference points and harvest control rules outside of the
context of the process of evaluation by means of simulation still occurs (e.g. Caddy
[2004]; Smith and Rago [2004]) although the value of this development process will be
enhanced if it is possible to evaluate these tools in terms of how likely they are to achieve
the management goals.
The future will undoubtedly likely see more applications. However, paucity of formal
adoption of management procedures within, for example, Management Plans, seems
likely to continue outside of international fisheries management bodies (such as IWC and
CCSBT). Finally, it would be unfortunate if management procedures do not focus more
on a broader range of uncertainties than is presently the case, for example, by paying
more attention to ecological interactions and spatial management strategies.
Acknowledgments. Funding for this work was provided by NMFS Grant NA07FE0473.
I would like to thank Paul Breen, Doug Butterworth, Rob Campbell, Jose De Oliveira,
Laurie Kell, Alec MacCall, Rick Methot, Paul Nichols, Ken Patterson, Keith Sainsbury,
Tony Smith, and Paul Starr for outlining how management procedures are used around
the world. Any mistakes of interpretation remain, of course, mine.
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17
Table 1. Overview of the use of management procedures. “No” denotes that a management procedure was not in use for the species
concerned and “yes” that this was the case.
Region / stock
Australia
School and gummy shark
Northern prawn
East coast tuna
1993
1999
Present (2004)
No
No
No
No
No
Testing
Yes *
No
No
Eastern stock of gemfish
Patagonian toothfish
No
No
Yes
No
N/A
Yes
Iceland
Cod
No
Yes
Yes
Revised in 2000
Namibia
Cape fur seals
Cape hakes
No
No
Yes
Yes
In abeyance
In review
Revised in 2002
New Zealand
Rock lobster
No
Yes
Yes
Revised in 2003
Norway
Minke whales
No
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
Norway-Russia
Cod
South Africa
No
Comments
Testing underway
Used as the basis to set a
TAE
Directed fishery is closed
18
Anchovy
Yes
Yes
Yes
Sardine
Yes
Yes
Yes
Cape hakes
Yes
Yes
Yes
West coast rock lobster
No
Yes
Yes
USA
Pacific sardine
Yes
Pacific mackerel
Yes
* TAC rules not formally adopted.
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Revised in 1999, 2002,
and 2004
Revised in 1999, 2002,
and 2004
Revised in 1999;
currently under revision
Revised in 2000 and
2003
19
Specify Qualitative Management Goals
Specify Quantitative Management Goals
(Performance Measures)
Develop and Parameterize the
Operating Model
Generate Annual Data
Develop
Management Procedures
Data
Stock Assessment Model
Apply Management Procedure
Update Population Dynamics
Management
Action
Harvest Control Rule
Calculate Performance Meausures
Figure 1. Flowchart of the approach used to evaluate management procedures.