Methods for Evaluating the Impacts of Fisheries on North Atlantic Ecosystems
How Good is Good?: A Rapid Appraisal Technique for Evaluation of the Sustainability Status of Fisheries of the North Atlantic
Jacqueline Alder, Tony J. Pitcher, David Preikshot, Kristin Kaschner and Bridget Ferriss
Fisheries Centre, University of British ColumbiaAbstract
Sustainability is a key policy requirement for fisheries throughout the world. Until recently it was difficult to assess fisheries sustainability, especially when it required the integration of information on the ecology, as well social and economic aspects. Rapfish is a new multi-disciplinary rapid appraisal technique for evaluating the comparative sustainability of fisheries based on a large number of easy-to-score attributes. Fisheries may be defined flexibly as entities with a broad scope, such as all the fisheries in a marine gulf, or with narrower scope, such as those in a single jurisdiction, target species, gear type or vessel. A set of fisheries may be compared, or the time trajectories of individual fisheries may be plotted. Evaluation attributes are chosen to reflect sustainability within each discipline and may be refined or substituted as improved information becomes available. Ordinations of sets of attributes are performed using multi-dimensional scaling (MDS), followed by scaling and rotation.
The choice of MDS as an ordination technique is justified. Ordinations are anchored by fixed reference points that simulate the best and worst possible fisheries using extremes of the attribute scores, while other anchors secure the ordination in a second axis normal to the first. Randomly scored reference points act as additional anchors. Monte Carlo simulations provide an indication of the variability of the analysis and therefore reflect how reliable an analysis may be. Sensitivity of each attribute on the final scores is estimated with a step-wise jack-knife procedure.
Separate RAPFISH ordinations are performed in ecological, economic, ethical, social and technological disciplines. Status results expressing sustainability in each of these fields are reported on a scale from zero to 100%. A further evaluation field, measuring compliance with the FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries, is itself comprised of six sub-fields that articulate clauses in sections of the Code. Status scores from several fields are combined in kite diagrams to facilitate comparison of fisheries, or fisheries constructed to represent alternative policies. In this paper the method is applied to present day fisheries and some historical time series from the Gulf of Maine (39 fisheries) and the North Sea (77 fisheries). The results, which are compared with previous work from Newfoundland (19 fisheries), provide examples of the use of RAPFISH in a multidisciplinary evaluation of the sustainability component of the impacts of fisheries on marine systems, and in assessing compliance with the FAO Code of Conduct.