UCSB team offers 7 recommendations for fisheries managers to respond to climate change

A team of researchers at the University of California-Santa Barbara has issued seven recommendations to aid fisheries management organizations adapt to the impacts of climate change.

The recommendations, published in a research paper titled “Harvest control rules used in U.S. federal fisheries management and implications for climate resilience,” include a focus on harvest control rules (HCRs) with pre-agreed guidelines for how much a target stock can be fished based on indicators of the stock’s status.

UCSB Research Scientist Chris Free said his team studied harvest control rules used in 507 United States federally-managed fish stocks and stock complexes. The team made summarized recommendations that would adjust fishing rates based on stock status, implement better buffers in catch limits, and use indicators of stock health to create HCRs when full stock assessments are not available.

"These uncertain and changing conditions in the seafood industry call for several adjustments. The first recommendation is to adjust fishing rates based on stock status rather than a certain percentage by using ramped harvest control rules to help avoid overfishing," Free told SeafoodSource in September 2022. "Managers also need to adapt and finetune the precautionary buffers that are set lower than the maximum stock that can be caught before overfishing occurs."

The Ocean Foundation International Fisheries Conservation Project Director Shana Miller said the study represents an important new field of intellectual thought for the seafood industry.

“We’ve been talking mostly about reducing climate change, which is still important, but we need to start to research and explore what to do in the event of climate change. This paper starts talking about how we can build that resilience assuming that there will be some climate change.” Miller said. “After all, climate change will be disastrous for some fisheries, some there won’t be as many impacts, and for others it might expand their distribution and abundance. It’s important to look at all those different scenarios and then start planning for how to manage that system. Because it will likely look quite different.”

The recommendations in the paper call for more explicit accounting for climate change’s impacts on management rules and calculations. They also ask fisheries managers to begin accounting for interactions between species, and to use management strategy evaluation (MSE) to compare different harvest strategies.

The UCSB team also calls for fisheries managers to replace constant F rules, which set catch limits based on a fixed proportion of current stock sizes, with threshold F rules, which require HCRs to reduce fishing rates once a stock falls below a specified threshold.

“Threshold F rules apply a little extra precaution when fish populations are reduced to small sizes, whether because of climate change or overfishing,” Free said. “This extra precaution helps the populations to recover faster and to avoid especially low population sizes. This is good for conservation because it maintains healthy populations and good for fishermen because it returns populations to their most productive levels quickly.”

Environmental Defense Fund Senior Vice President Eric Schwaab said the UCSB recommendations are a positive step in opening up a national conversation in the U.S. about how fisheries managers must adapt to climate change.

“Creating more climate-resilient fisheries requires a broad approach with many different strategies, tools, and partnerships. There isn’t one change that will be a silver bullet, but the recommendations laid out by UCSB can be a key piece of the puzzle,” Schwaab said. “Climate change is already affecting fisheries in the U.S. and around the world. We need to take steps now to ensure hard-won gains in U.S. fisheries are protected against shifting stocks and changing productivity. Combined with other recent steps industry, regulators, NGOs, and others are taking, like the East Coast Climate Change Scenario Planning Initiative undertaken by councils on the East Coast, or to implement electronic monitoring and reporting programs to improve the reliability and timeliness of data, these recommendations provide additional insights for fishery managers working to enhance fishery resilience.”

Schwaab said the most-important recommendation issued by the team is the implementation of the use of management strategy evaluations.

“Each fishery is unique – so changes that will be most impactful for one fishery won’t necessarily maximize climate resilience for another,” Schwaab said. “Some fisheries have extensive stock assessment data available, while others are data limited. And some fisheries are more impacted by climate change than others. Using management strategy evaluations can incorporate unique understanding of the conditions for each fishery and provide important insights across a range of information and ecological conditions, helping managers choose the best approach.”

Miller said though many fisheries in the United States, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia have already put in place HCRs tested with management strategy evaluations, they are a newer tool that does have some barriers to implementation.

“The tool of MSE really is second to none [in] really harness[ing] the power of it to develop these adaptive management approaches and HCRs. You’re likely to have a much more-effective HCR from going through the MSE process but it requires an upfront investment that is sometimes difficult for managers to commit to regarding finding analysts and experts in MSE and more facilitation of stakeholders every step of the way,” Miller said. “[But it’s] so important because HCRs are one of the few tools we already have to actually start planning for climate change and getting a system in place that can adapt quickly to climate change and present more extreme negative impacts. There are even MSE software packages that can be used. Instead of modeling an entirely new system from the ground up, these software packages can be very rapidly applied to different fisheries. The tool is here, it just needs to be used.”

Photo courtesy of Claudine Van Massenhove/Shutterstock