SEAFOODNEWS.COM By Peggy Parker – May 8, 2015 – Healthy fisheries don’t necessarily lead to an economically healthy industry that can support coastal communities. A team of economists have developed a “triple bottom line” (TBL) measurement model that integrates economic and community goals alongside stock health.
The economists developed the Fishery Performance Indicators (FPIs), a rapid assessment instrument for measuring the fishery-derived benefits being created not only in the fish stock in the water, but also in the harvest and post-harvest sectors and fishing communities.
“This tool is designed to help us evaluate a fishery system’s performance toward achieving economic, community and ecological sustainability – the ‘triple bottom line,’” said co-author James Anderson, director of the Institute for Sustainable Food Systems at the University of Florida.
Anderson and University of Washington associate professor of aquatic and fishery sciences Chris Anderson are two of the lead authors of a paper published May 6 in the journal PLOS ONE describing the new methodology.
The authors found that globally, less healthy fish stocks usually lead to worse economic and community outcomes. However, they identified several cases where weaker stocks contribute importantly to the livelihoods of harvesters and their communities, and healthy fish stocks generated meager economic or community benefits.
“It is often assumed that economic and social benefits always follow healthy stocks, but this is rarely tested due to the lack of social data,” Chris Anderson said. “Our strategy was to develop a rapid assessment instrument that would organize the knowledge of local fishery experts to help us understand how harvesters and processors are performing economically and how the fishery is supporting its community.
Economically effective management, access to high-value markets and having other income opportunities often play a larger role in human outcomes than stock health, especially in communities where fishing is a large share of the economy.”
Anderson and 26 co-authors at the World Bank and other universities and organizations around the world chose 61 fisheries as initial case studies to build the assessment tool.
Since 2008, they have visited and studied fisheries ranging from Oregon Dungeness crab to Norway cod, Louisiana shrimp, Nile perch in Uganda and blue swimming crabs in Indonesia to gather information and refine the tool.
Here’s how it works: The authors created dozens of measurable statements that capture the range of three performance indicators – ecology, economics and community. Example statements relate to the degree of overfishing, price trends, the capacity of processors to export to the U.S. and E.U., health care access for processing workers, captains’ earnings relative to other jobs in the region and the social standing of the crew.
Then, to characterize a fishery, the authors drew on the knowledge of local experts who work with fishermen, processors and community leaders, scoring each statement from one to five, with five being the best, based on carefully defined categories of performance. The responses in each category were then averaged.
The co-authors used several international workshops and pilot cases with different users to refine their final set of statements to make the instrument robust across many different fisheries. They plan to add data from more fisheries and associate differences in performance with fishery management and governance factors.
“An overarching purpose is to be able to compare fisheries systems across species, management approaches and nations. With our new metric, I would argue you can now compare fisheries systems in Ghana to those in Iceland,” James Anderson said.
“Researchers will be able to make meaningful comparisons between large-scale and small-scale fisheries, nearshore and offshore fisheries, operations in industrialized countries compared to ones in developing countries, seafood aimed at export markets versus seafood primarily consumed locally, and a host of other possibilities,” said co-author Martin Smith, a professor of environmental economics at Duke University.
Instrument development and case studies were funded by the International Coalition of Fisheries Associations, the World Bank, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Walton Family Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
This story originally appeared on Seafood.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.