Jackie Alder

Global trends in world fisheries: impacts on marine ecosystems and food security.

This contribution, which reviews some broad trends in human history and in the history of fishing, argues that sustainability, however defined, rarely if ever occurred as a result of an explicit policy, but as result of our inability to access a major part of exploited stocks. With the development of industrial fishing, and the resulting invasion of the refuges previously provided by distance and depth, our interactions with fisheries resources have come to resemble the wars of extermination that newly arrived hunters conducted 40 000–50 000 years ago in Australia, and 11 000–13 000 years ago against large terrestrial mammals arrived in North America. These broad trends are documented here through a map of change in fish sizes, which displays characteristic declines, first in the nearshore waters of industrialized countries of the Northern Hemisphere, then spread offshore and to the Southern Hemisphere. This geographical extension met its natural limit in the late 1980s, when the catches from newly accessed stocks ceased to compensate for the collapse in areas accessed earlier, hence leading to a gradual decline of global landing. These trends affect developing countries more than the developed world, which have been able to meet the shortfall by increasing imports from developing countries. These trends, however, together with the rapid growth of farming of carnivorous fishes, which consumes other fishes suited for human consumption, have led to serious food security issues. This promotes urgency to the implementation of the remedies traditionally proposed to alleviate overfishing (reduction of overcapacity, enforcement of conservative total allowable catches, etc.), and to the implementation of non–conventional approaches, notably the re–establishment of the refuges (also known as marine reserves), which made possible the apparent sustainability of pre–industrial fisheries.

HABITAT LOSS, TROPHIC COLLAPSE, AND THE DECLINE OF ECOSYSTEM SERVICES

The provisioning of sustaining goods and services that we obtain from natural ecosystems is a strong economic justification for the conservation of biological diversity. Understanding the relationship between these goods and services and changes in the size, arrangement, and quality of natural habitats is a fundamental challenge of natural resource management. In this paper, we describe a new approach to assessing the implications of habitat loss for loss of ecosystem services by examining how the provision of different ecosystem services is dominated by species from different trophic levels. We then develop a mathematical model that illustrates how declines in habitat quality and quantity lead to sequential losses of trophic diversity. The model suggests that declines in the provisioning of services will initially be slow but will then accelerate as species from higher trophic levels are lost at faster rates. Comparison of these patterns with empirical examples of ecosystem collapse (and assembly) suggest similar patterns occur in natural systems impacted by anthropogenic change. In general, ecosystem goods and services provided by species in the upper trophic levels will be lost before those provided by species lower in the food chain. The decrease in terrestrial food chain length predicted by the model parallels that observed in the oceans following overexploitation. The large area requirements of higher trophic levels make them as susceptible to extinction as they are in marine systems where they are systematically exploited. Whereas the traditional species-area curve suggests that 50% of species are driven extinct by an order-of-magnitude decline in habitat abundance, this magnitude of loss may represent the loss of an entire trophic level and all the ecosystem services performed by the species on this trophic level.

Lessons from Marine Protected Areas and Integrated Ocean Management Initiatives in Canada

There is a wave of interest in Marine Protected Areas (MPA) and Integrated Management (IM) as tools for addressing declines in marine environments through ecosystem-based management. Lessons learned from seven MPA and two IM initiatives in Canada show how engaging stakeholders results in: building and maintaining momentum through social capital; using the collective knowledge of stakeholders; consensus through formal and informal rules; and developing leadership capacity. However, as the number of issues or the number of stakeholders increases—especially where fisheries are involved—time, resources, and challenges in gaining support and participation increase. Political and administrative obstacles and resistance to change still constitute much of the challenge. Finally, funding and political commitment must be allocated from the start; otherwise momentum stops and it is hard to regain even when funding becomes available.

Ecosystem-based global fishing policy scenarios

The future of fisheries and marine ecosystems at the global scale, until recently, was often expressed in terms of qualitative storylines with limited quantitative information on how aspects of fisheries such as landings, profits and biodiversity would respond, which constrained the comparing of outcomes across geographic areas. However, the construction of a stratified global model, EcoOcean, has met many of the challenges of quantitatively assessing the future of fisheries under different scenarios. Using the Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) software, a series of 19 marine ecosystem models representing the 19 FAO areas of the world’s oceans and seas was constructed. The models were populated using global datasets of catches, ex-vessel prices, biomass and distant water fleets from the Sea Around Us Project and the fleet statistics from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The fleet statistics were used to develop a global database of fishing effort for the five fishing fleets in the model from 1950 to 1998, the last year for which the data are available. Modelling the five fisheries over the 19 FAO areas from 1950 to 2003 resulted in an aggregated global total that was within 10% of the reported total for any given year. This gave some confidence that the models are providing plausible results for different scenarios, in particular for the four scenarios of the Global Environment Outlook 4 and the four scenarios of the International Assessment for Agricultural Science, Technology and Development. This work also provided the opportunity to look at the future of marine biodiversity to 2048, using a depletion index as a proxy for changes in species composition and abundance under the different scenarios. This report presents the background and development of EcoOcean, the model structure, a detailed description of the effort reconstruction, and the underlying datasets that are used to construct and drive the models, especially prices and jobs. The report also discusses the implications of EcoOcean as a policy tool and how it can be further refined to be of wider use and to reduce the uncertainty of the modelled outputs. The application of EcoOcean to GEO4 and the IAASTD resulted in plausible outcomes under the different policy scenarios, and the outcomes differed across geographic areas as well as across scenarios. Some policy scenarios called for increasing landings or profits, rebuilding ecosystems, or a combination of all three with and without subsidies. In cases where effort increased, landings and therefore profits increased; however, any increase in landings was achieved by increases in groups that are not currently fished in large quantities. In many cases increased landings resulted in declining marine trophic levels, and increased depletion risks. a Cite as: Alder, J., Guénette, S., Beblow, J., Cheung, W. and Christensen, V. 2007. Ecosystem-based global fishing policy scenarios. Fisheries Centre Research Reports 15(7). Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia [ISSN 1198-6727]. Ecosystem-Based Global Fishing Policy Scenarios, Alder, Guénette, Beblow, Cheung and Christensen 4 INTRODUCTION Recent ecological studies including the recent IPCC2 have focused the world’s attention on the need to consider how future policy can be shaped to address environmental issues. Policy makers have a number of tools at their disposal to make well-reasoned policies that will effect change in the world’s ecosystems, while addressing other issues affecting humankind, especially poverty and economic development as articulated in the Millennium Development Goals (Anonymous, 2007). The global crisis in marine fisheries is included in the suite of issues to be addressed, because the world’s fisheries contributes to food security, as well as assistance in the economic development for many countries, especially so for developing coastal countries (Pauly et al., 2005). One tool that is gaining recognition for this purpose is scenario analysis. It was first used in strategic planning during the cold war (Khan and Weiner, 1967) and was key to the Shell Oil Company coping with the oil crisis of the 1970s (Wack, 1985a, 1985b). Its use assisting in policy formulation in natural resources management and sustainable development sectors, especially at the global scale, emerged in the 1970s (Raskin et al., 2005). There was little development of scenario analysis until late in the 1980s, when concerns over climate change and sustainable development took off. A number of climate change scenarios were thus developed in the 1990s with the IPCC (Raskin, 2000) providing a framework for the further development of scenarios analyses. Development of scenarios within the IPCC area has shaped much of how scenarios are used, reported and evaluated in other studies including the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, GEO43, IAASTD4, OECD5 and GLOBIO Project6. The development of the global model EcoOcean, which we report on here, was a response to a growing demand for analyses of how, especially fisheries, may impact the future of marine systems for policy making at regional and global scales. In particular, there was a demand for a global oceans model for the United Nations’ Global Environment Outlook 4 (GEO4) and IAASTD as inputs into future scenarios under different policy options. Scenarios as used here can be defined as “plausible, challenging and relevant stories about how the future might unfold which can be told in both words and numbers. They are not forecasts, projections, predictions or recommendations. They are about envisioning future pathways and accounting for critical uncertainties”(Raskin et al., 2005). In this context the EcoOcean model was developed as a tool to explore fisheries and more broadly, marine policy options and not to predict the future. As Peterson et al.(2003) note, predictive modelling works for simulating well-understood systems over the short-term, but as complexity and the modelling time frame increase, predictive power declines. In such systems, the system state is well specified and mathematical algorithms are available to describe relationships used in the quantitative predictions (Raskin, 2005). Much progress has been made in describing such relationships through ecosystem modelling (Christensen and Walters, 2005) and a natural progression has been to bring these models into the field of scenario analysis. While ecosystem modelling has been used extensively for research purposes, it is only now beginning to be used as part of the fisheries policy process, and has yet to be used for large marine regions. As fishery policy moves beyond the objectives for single-species management there is indeed no choice but to adopt more elaborate ecosystem models. Policy choices for ecosystembased fisheries management involve exploring the impact of non-traditional policy choices and our abilities to perform such explorations are severely limited. In the past, we have based comparisons of ecosystem-related policy choices on methods ranging from very simple risk avoidance models, to simple food chain or trophic cascade models, to very complex food web 2 IPCC = Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 3 GEO4 = United Nations’ Global Environment Outlook 4 (UNEP 2007) 4 IAASTD = International Assessment for Agricultural Science Technology and Development (Fernandez in press) 5 OECD = Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development 6 GLOBIO = Global Methodology for Mapping Human Impacts on the Biosphere (see www.globio.info) Ecosystem-Based Global Fishing Policy Scenarios, Alder, Guénette, Beblow, Cheung and Christensen 5 models that attempt to explore possible reverberating effects going beyond direct predator-prey interactions. Much of the recent ecosystem modelling work has been aimed mainly at assessing risks of the more complex reverberating effects such as ‘cultivation-depensation’ effects (Walters and Kitchell, 2001), on the assumption that complex interactions are likely to result in counterintuitive responses (Yodzis, 2001) Based on the Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) approach and software, we developed a new model, EcoOcean, to explore scenarios for the world’s oceans. Christensen and Walters (2004) give a detailed discussion of EwE. The model was constructed using 43 functional groups that are common to the world’s oceans including FAO’s 19 marine statistical areas. The groups were selected with special consideration for exploited fish species, but are intended to jointly include all major groups in the oceans. The fish groups are based on size categories, and feeding and habitat characteristics. Fishing effort is the most important driver for the ecosystem model simulations. The 19 FAO areas were considered large enough to encompass the range of most marine fish and invertebrates as well as accommodating the world’s major fishing fleets. Five major fleet categories, i.e., demersal, distant-water fleet, baitfish tuna (purse seine), tuna longline and small pelagic are used to distinguish different fishing effort based on historical information. This model structure allows for maximum flexibility in meeting different global assessment objectives, while still providing a valid representation of the marine systems. Background Scenario analyses can have quantitative modelling and qualitative narrative components; providing systematic and replicable representations as well as contrasting social visions and descriptions (Raskin et al., 2005). The process of developing scenarios itself often expands people’s perspectives and identifies key issues that might have been missed or dismissed at the initial stages of planning or assessment. Qualitative components help to describe values, behaviours and institutions, while quantitative components provide structure and rigour (Raskin et al., 2005). A review of previous scenarios over the last three decades illustrates the benefits and limits of using models and

On the multiple uses of forage fish: From ecosystems to markets.

Following a brief historical review of the emergence of fisheries for forage fish that are primarily destined for reduction, and their competition with fisheries for human consumption, an account is given of landing trends in various parts of the world, and catch maps are provided for the 1970s and 2000s which allow spatial and temporal comparisons. A brief account is also given of the changing species composition of the landings, the exploitation status of the fisheries, the trophic levels trends of species destined for reduction, the fuel consumption of the global fleet exploiting forage fish which are primarily small pelagics, the fishing gear they use, and the ex-vessel prices they fetch. The discussion, finally, attempts to amalgamate this material, which is further discussed in the other chapters in this report. INTRODUCTION Historically, all fish that could be caught, including small pelagic fish, were used as a source of food for humans (see Chapter 2), and the reduction of fish to fishmeal and fish oil for indirect use is relatively recent. Seasonally abundant catches of herring and sardines, which could not be absorbed by local markets, started the fish oil industry in northern Europe and North America at the beginning of the 19th century (Huntington et al., 2004). The oil was used for lubrication of machinery and leather tanning, soap production and other non-food products, and the by-products of fish oil production were used as fertilizer. In the early 20th century the production of fishmeal for animal feed began in Northern Europe, based on Herring (Clupea harengus), and in North America, based on Atlantic menhaden (Brevoortia tyrannus) in Chesapeake Bay and South American pilchard (Sardinops sagax) in California. Once the benefits of fishmeal as an inexpensive feed supplement for animal production were realized and demand increased, the fisheries began to deliberately target fish for reduction to fishmeal, with fish oil more as a by-product. In the early 1950s, a huge reduction fishery for Peruvian anchoveta (Engraulis ringens) developed in Peru, then in Chile, which at first complemented, then replaced, the earlier indirect exploitation of this fish, in the form of guano produced by fish-eating birds (Muck and Pauly, 1987; Muck, 1989). In California, the benefits of fishmeal in the animal feed sector were quickly realized and demand for fishmeal with corresponding demands for increased landings raised concern over food supplies and sustainability of the industry (Radovich, 1981). The California legislature responded in the early 1920s with the introduction of legislation prohibiting the processing of fish for reduction if it was fit for human consumption. The controversial issue of competition between human and industrial consumption for raw material such as the ‘California sardine’ (which led to similar legislation in other areas and times) became moot when, due to excess fishing and the ‘changes in environmental conditions’ that are always evoked in such cases (see e.g., Radovich, 1981), catches peaked in the 1930s, and collapsed in the late 1940s, and the ghost of this fishery, through the works of John Steinbeck and Ed ‘Doc’ Ricketts, entered the realm of legend (Tamm, 2004). 1 Cite as: Watson, R., Alder, J., Pauly, D. 2006. Fisheries for forage fish, 1950 to the present, p. 1-20. In: Alder, J., Pauly, D. (eds.) On the multiple uses forage fish: from ecosystems to markets. Fisheries Centre Research Reports 14(3). Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia [ISSN 1198-6727]. 2 Fisheries for forage fish, 1950 to the present, R. Watson, J. Alder and D. Pauly The same scenario was replayed a few decades later, off Peru, where the annual catch of Peruvian anchoveta grew to 17 million tonnes (t) in 1970 (Castillo and Mendo, 1987), about 6 million t higher than the official catch of 12 million t–itself higher than recommended by experts at the time (Gulland, 1968; Murphy, 1967; Schaefer, 1967). The fishery collapsed in 1972/73, following an El Niño event that was subsequently seen by many as solely responsible for the collapse. As earlier in California, the Peruvian reduction fishery was seriously contested by those who felt that Peruvian anchoveta should somehow be processed for human food, e.g., in the form of fish protein concentrate (FPC) that could be used to fortify flours, an obvious product in a country with an animal protein deficiency in its highlands. Moreover, not only juvenile South American pilchard (Sardinops sagax) and Horse mackerel (Trachurus murphyi), which frequently occur in anchoveta schools (Bakun and Cury, 1999), were caught by the anchoveta reduction fishery, but also pure schools of full-sized S. sagax sardine and T. murphyi, adding to the controversy. Landing S. sagax for reduction has long been prohibited in Peru, and recently, regulations were announced which also limit the catch of T. murphyi to vessels fishing the stocks for human consumption, and not fishmeal (Fishing Information and Service, 2004). This, however, is not the main research area for scientists working on the small pelagic fishes which support the most important reduction fisheries. Rather, it is their extraordinary responsiveness to environmental fluctuations, and their apparent resilience to fishing, notwithstanding collapses in South America, California, Southern Africa, and Europe. This research has yielded some powerful generalizations (Bakun, 1996), but still does not allow for prescription on how to ensure ‘sustainable’ catch levels in the face of environmental variability, growing industry demand and climate change. In the following, we briefly review various aspects of the fisheries for ‘forage’ fish, based on geo-referenced catches, from 1950 to the present, and analyze some features of these catches and of the fleets that made them. FORAGE FISH Forage fish is a term used to describe schooling fish that are often the prey for larger fish, seabirds and marine mammals. These larger animals often ’forage’ on smaller fish because they are found in large schools and are easy to capture. Small pelagic fish (< 30 cm in length) such as Peruvian anchoveta make up the bulk of forage fish, but some medium-sized fish (30-90 cm in length) such as mackerels are also considered forage fish. Many populations of forage fish, especially small pelagics, fluctuate in response to changing oceanographic conditions, which affect their planktonic food (Cury et al., 2000). Other factors such as predation levels, current patterns for larval retention, food availability and water conditions such as temperature affect the annual abundance of these fish (Fréon et al., 2005). The schooling behaviour of forage fish allows them to be easily caught so that the fishing fleets do not require as much fuel as, for example, trawlers (Tyedmyers et al., 2005; see also Chapter 2). This translates to lower operating costs and hence cheaper fish. Forage fish that are not consumed directly by humans are extremely inexpensive compared to other fish to the extent that they can be reduced to fishmeal and fish oil and still be price-competitive with soymeal. Some of these small and medium pelagic fish are also consumed by humans (Chapter 2), and caught using the same gear, often on the same fishing grounds. GEO-REFERENCED CATCHES Reported catch data from FAO, ICES, NAFO and other regional/national sources were allocated to a global system of 30-minute spatial cells using a rule-based approach that utilized databases of fish distributions and fishing access agreements as filters (Watson et al., 2004b; see also www.seaaroundus.org). Emphasis was given to small pelagic fishes, and other species used in reduction fisheries, i.e., forage fish as defined in this report (Table 1). Also, the fuel consumed by the various gears used to catch forage fishes was estimated, based on the approach and data in Tyedmers et al. (2005). Fisheries for forage fish, 1950 to the present, R. Watson, J. Alder and D. Pauly 3

Integrated marine planning for Cocos (Keeling), an isolated Australian atoll (Indian Ocean)

The Cocos (Keeling) Islands are located on an isolated atoll in the Indian Ocean and have a strong Malay culture owing to the translocation of a substantial plantation workforce in the early 19th century. The atoll became one of Australias External Territories in 1955. Meeting the marine resource needs of the atoll residents within an Australian legislative system by formulating an integrated marine management plan presented several challenges. Key factors in drafting a culturally meaningful plan were a commitment to understanding and accommodating the cultural and subsistence needs of the community, innovative communication strategies, and a simple approach to management. Development of the plan highlighted the limitations of current Australian marine planning legislation in cross-cultural settings and for sustainable development.The Cocos (Keeling) Islands are located on an isolated atoll in the Indian Ocean and have a strong Malay culture owing to the translocation of a substantial plantation workforce in the early 19th century. The atoll became one of Australias External Territories in 1955. Meeting the marine resource needs of the atoll residents within an Australian legislative system by formulating an integrated marine management plan presented several challenges. Key factors in drafting a culturally meaningful plan were a commitment to understanding and accommodating the cultural and subsistence needs of the community, innovative communication strategies, and a simple approach to management. Development of the plan highlighted the limitations of current Australian marine planning legislation in cross-cultural settings and for sustainable development.

Permits, an evolving tool for the day‐to‐day management of the cairns section of the great barrier reef marine park

Abstract The coastal zone is a dynamic system in which the nature of activities, levels of use, and spatial distribution of activities are in a constant state of flux. Managers are able to confront this dynamism by continually developing new roles for permits. In the Cairns Section of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, staff responsible for the assessment and issuance of permits have gradually developed a permit system that meets the particular needs of this park. Initially used to meet legislative responsibilities and control use, permits now play a critical role in day‐to‐day resource management, policy and management plan implementation, data collection, and public liaison. Managers have recognized the value of the permit system as its role changed with changing uses, and levels of use in the marine park. Users of the park have also come to realize that permits are to their benefit by: protecting their resources, providing a venue to discuss problems regarding their operations or other users, and reso...