Fisheries management

The management of fisheries is broadly defined as the set of tasks which guide vested parties and managers in the optimal use of aquatic renewable resources, primarily fish. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in the 2001 Guidebook to Fisheries Management there is currently "no clear and generally accepted definitions of fisheries management". Instead, the authors use a working definition, such that fisheries management is:

The integrated process of information gathering, analysis, planning, consultation, decision-making, allocation of resources and formulation and implementation, with necessary law enforcement to ensure environmental compliance, of regulations or rules which govern fisheries activities in order to ensure the continued productivity of the resources and the accomplishment of other fisheries objectives.

The goal of fisheries management is to produce sustainable biological, environmental and socioeconomic benefits from renewable aquatic resources. Wild fisheries are classified as renewable when the organisms of interest (e.g., fish, shellfish, amphibians, reptiles and marine mammals) produce an annual biological surplus that with judicious management can be harvested without reducing future productivity. Fishery management employs activities that protect fishery resources so sustainable exploitation is possible, drawing on fisheries science and possibly including the precautionary principle.

Modern fisheries management is often referred to as a governmental system of appropriate environmental management rules based on defined objectives and a mix of management means to implement the rules, which are put in place by a system of monitoring control and surveillance. An ecosystem approach to fisheries management has started to become a more relevant and practical way to manage fisheries. Current scientific consensus is oriented towards ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM) as the most viable approach for achieving the goal of balancing human needs, ensuring the longevity of ecosystem services, and mitigating adverse ecological impacts. Today, EBFM is a more comprehensive approach to fisheries management which focuses on achieving ecological health and productivity, as opposed to traditional management techniques which focus on isolated species.

In economics, fisheries are often clearly defined as a common property resource. Common property (sometimes referred to as common pool) resources suffer from issues that occur uniquely with an open access good. Fisheries are primarily faced with the challenge of overexploitation. This problem was first discussed at length by H. Scott Gordon's 1954 article, The Economic Theory of a Common-Property Resource: The Fishery and Anthony D. Scott's 1955 article, The Fishery: The Objectives of Sole Ownership. Both were published in the Journal of Political Economy. Gordon's paper discusses the optimal rent extraction from fisheries, given the production function of fisheries is non-linear, and exhibits diminishing returns. Using an effort function, cost function and profit function for a user, he is able to derive optimal amounts of effort, and see how a change in the stock affects the users' optimal effort. He posits the user cannot maximize harvest, or else he jeopardizes future profits, such that in an equilibrium, with no intervention, total value less costs will be zero. This result is applicable for common pool resources, meaning that each user believes they can fish up to the amount that covers their costs. But, with the entry of each additional user, profits dissipate.

Scott's article asks a normative question, on whether society should manage renewable resources. Both articles were foundational in the environmental economics, and gave the basic economic motivation for how and why renewable resources, primarily fisheries, should be managed.

From this early work, we are able to describe the core economic objectives of fishery management. The economic objective of fisheries management is to maximize a user's present value of the sum of all future profits. Given that fisheries suffer from the same market failure as other common property resources, one of the main market interventions is to assign property rights. The most comprehensive economic survey of fishery management policies suggests that assigning property rights in fisheries prevents population collapse.

While these objectives have remained the same, the models for finding optimal conditions for profit-maximizing fisheries have advanced. Now, economic models are able to include more sophistication, such as heterogenous technologies and costs by users, uncertainty, as well as the biological dynamics of fish population growth over time.