Risk and Sustainability: Assessing Fishery Management Strategies

V Martinet (1) , J Peña-Torres (2) , Michel de Lara (3) , Hector Ramirez Cabrera (4, 5)

1 ECO-PUB - Economie Publique
2 Peña & Sanchez Consultores Ltda
3 CERMICS - Centre d'Enseignement et de Recherche en Mathématiques et Calcul Scientifique
4 CMM - Centre de modélisation mathématique / Centro de Modelamiento Matemático [Santiago]
5 Inria Chile

We develop a theoretical framework to assess the sustainability of fishery man-agement strategies, when the bioeconomic dynamics are marked by uncertainty and several conflicting objectives have to be accounted for. Stochastic viability ranks management strategies according to their probability to sustain economic and ecological outcomes over time. The approach is extended to build stochastic sustainable production possibility frontiers representing the trade-offs between sustainability objectives at any risk level, given the current state of the fishery. This framework is applied to a Chilean fishery faced with El Niño uncertainty. We study the viability of effort and quota strategies when catch and biomass levels have to be sustained. We show that i) for these sustainability objectives, whatever the level of the outcomes to be sustained, quota-based management results in a better viability probability than effort-based management, and ii) the fishery's historical quota levels were not sustainable given the stock levels in the early 2000s.

Mots clés: sustainability; risk; fishery economics and management; stochastic viabil-ity

Domaines: Mathématiques [math]

V Martinet, J Peña-Torres, Michel de Lara, Hector Ramirez Cabrera. Risk and Sustainability: Assessing Fishery Management Strategies. Environmental and Resource Economics, 2014, 64 (4), pp.1-34. ⟨10.1007/s10640-015-9894-0⟩. ⟨hal-01096439⟩