Developing Harvest Strategies to Achieve Ecological, Economic and Social Sustainability in Multi-Sector Fisheries

Ecosystem based fisheries management (EBFM) provides a framework to achieve ecological, economic and social sustainability in fisheries. However, developing harvest strategies to achieve these multiple objectives is complex. This is even more so in multi-sector multi-species fisheries. In our study, we develop such harvest strategies for the multi-species Coral Reef Fin Fish Fishery (CRFFF) operating in the waters of Australia's Great Barrier Reef. The fishery includes recreational, charter and commercial sectors, and is a provider of regional employment and supplier of seafood to both local and export markets. We convened a series of stakeholder workshops and conducted surveys to identify stakeholder objectives and priorities, as well as potential harvest strategy frameworks for the fishery. These potential harvest strategies were assessed against the objectives using a further qualitative impact survey. The analysis identified which frameworks were preferred by different stakeholder groups and why, taking into account the different objective priorities and tradeoffs in outcomes. The new feature of the work was to qualitatively determine which harvest strategies are perceived to best address triple bottom line objectives. The approach is therefore potentially applicable in other complex fisheries developing harvest strategies which, by design, strive to achieve ecological, economic and social sustainability.