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Comprehensive Fishery Wealth: A Bioeconomic, Ecosystem-Based Approach to Measuring Fisheries Sustainability

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  • Fisheries sustainability is a much sought-after goal. Yet, “sustainability” is often too ambiguously defined to be of much practical guidance to policymakers. Furthermore, fisheries managers are increasingly expected to assess and manage fisheries in an “ecosystem-based” manner – accounting for the ecological interdependencies of species and their coupling with the physical environment. We build upon the green accounting and sustainable development literatures to downscale indices often used to measure sustainability at the nation-state scale to measure the current and projected future sustainability of exploited fishery ecosystems. We argue that the sustainability of a fishery ecosystem can be assessed by whether the properly measured value of the natural, physical and human capital stocks embodied within the fishery (i.e., the comprehensive fishery wealth) is non-decreasing over time. We extend our published work (Fenichel and Abbott 2014) to show how ecosystem models of fisheries can be integrated with bioeconomic models of human “predators’” responses to changes in multispecies fish stocks and policy to provide rigorous “shadow prices” for all species within the system and fishing capital. These prices can then be multiplied by their associated capital stocks to provide an index of inclusive fishery wealth. Changes in this index (i.e., comprehensive investment) allow managers to assess the ability of past and current fishery management regimes to maintain wealth within the fishery for future generations. Finally, we show how our wealth accounting approach – when coupled with ecosystem-based bioeconomic models – can be leveraged to prospectively evaluate the sustainability and efficiency of alternative management approaches.
  • KEYWORDS: Ecosystem Based Management, Fisheries economics
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  • Abbot, Joshua K. and Eli P. Fenichel. 2015. Comprehensive Fishery Wealth: A Bioeconomic, Ecosystem-Based Approach to Measuring Fisheries Sustainability. In: Proceedings of the Eighth Biennial Forum of the North American Association of Fisheries Economists, May 20-22, 2015, Ketchikan, Alaska: Economic Sustainability, Fishing Communities and Working Waterfronts. Compiled by Ann L. Shriver and Melissa Errend. North American Association of Fisheries Economists, Corvallis, Oregon, USA, 2015.
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  • Alaska Sea Grant, North Pacific Fishery Management Council, North Pacific Research Board, Northern Economics, Pollock Conservation Cooperative Research Center, Rasmuson Foundation, University of Alaska Fairbanks, School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, University of Alaska Southeast, Ketchikan
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