Assessing the precautionary nature of fishery management strategies

Abstract

A fishery management strategy has three essential components: data pertaining to the fishery (e.g. catch at age data), a method for analyzing the data to produce a stock assessment (e.g. VPA), and a decision rule taking the output from the assessment and translating it into a specification of a technical management measure (e.g. an F0.1 TAC). Even though a management strategy may incorporate elements that are intended to make it precautionary, so that it may be deemed precautionary in principle, it does not necessarily follow that it will actually be precautionary in practice. This can arise through deficiencies or uncertainties in any one of the components of the strategy. In this paper, the authors discuss how the degree of precaution in a management strategy can be assessed quantitatively