Law

December 19, 2022 — The following was released by UC SANTA BARBARA:

Fishermen and conservationists are praising a new paper from the University of California-Santa Barbara that provides recommendations for helping U.S. fisheries and fishing communities adapt to the effects of climate change. The paper, published this week in Fish and Fisheries, identifies actionable steps fishing managers can take to adjust the rules that guide how much of a stock can be fished, known as Harvest Control Rules (HCRs). “While climate change is undoubtedly affecting fishing communities across our coasts, new management approaches can help reduce these impacts,” said Eric Schwaab, senior vice president at Environmental Defense Fund. “UCSB’s research and recommendations lay out the concrete actions for more resilient management.”

Fisherman Chris Brown, president of Seafood Harvesters of America, said this is the kind of work that will help create climate-resilient fisheries and protect fishermen’s livelihoods. “We are the canary in the coal mine—we are already seeing the impacts of climate change out on the water every day. Black sea bass and fluke have moved north,” said Brown. “We are alldeck hands on planet Earth. We need unconventional thought that leads to reasonable solutions.”

The recommendations laid out in the paper include using catch limits based on stock population size, accounting for potential impacts of climate change in the rules, and evaluating which management approaches are best for a specific fishery. They were developed by a team of researchers led by Chris Free at UCSB, who evaluated the management of over 500 fisheries across the United States with a specific focus on the HCRs.

“The recommendations in our paper will help fisheries managers improve the climate resilience of the nation’s fisheries in the short and long term,” said Free.

Read the full study here and see a summary of the recommendations below.

● Adjust fishing rates based on stock status. Too often, managers will allow a certain percentage of a fish stock to be caught regardless of the current size of the population. But use of what’s known as “ramped harvest control rules” aligns the percentage that can be caught with the current size of the stock. This helps avoid overfishing and makes harvest levels more responsive to changing conditions.

● Better buffers. Managers need to fine tune and adapt the precautionary buffers that are used when calculating catch limits. Precautionary buffers essentially set the catch limits lower than the maximum that could be caught before the stock is overfished. This helps avoid overfishing, given increasing uncertainties due to climate change.

● Some rules are better than none. Even when budgets don’t allow for full stock assessments, managers can use indicators of stock health — like information from an ecosystem monitoring survey — to create harvest control rules that take current stock size into account, maintain profits and reduce the risk of overfishing.

● Consider climate change in the management of data-limited stocks. Multiple tools, including climate vulnerability assessments, can be used to determine catch limits that consider climate change for even the most data-limited stocks.

● Deprioritize rules that explicitly incorporate environmental factors. Some species are known to do better under certain environmental conditions (like water temperature), which makes it tempting to adjust harvest strategies based on those conditions. But ecosystems are complicated, and relationships between stock size and environmental condition are often more challenging to account for than anticipated. In most circumstances, it is more effective to base harvest rules on stock abundance data.

● Explore ecosystem-based catch limits. Instead of HCRs that are specific to a single species, managers can consider catch limits that account for the interactions between many species within an ecosystem.

● Compare strategies. A tool known as Management Strategy Evaluation (MSE) can help managers and stakeholders transparently compare how different harvest strategies can meet the goals of the fishery and the comparative risks associated with each.