UK Inshore Fisheries Sustainability Pilot project

Last week (16th March 2010) Huw Irranca-Davies, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Marine and Natural Environment launched our latest report - prepared on behalf of the Sussex Sea Fisheries Committee. At a mid-day reception at Fishmongers Hall, London Bridge, the dissemination report for the UK Inshore Fisheries Sustainability Pilot was launched (copies can be downloaded here). The technical reports that describe the three stages of the project will be made available on the Sussex SFC website shortly.

The work was undertaken by Food Certification International in association with Nautilus Consultants, and the project team comprised Crick Carleton (team leader), Paul Medley, Tristan Southall, Fiona Nimmo and Martin Gill. The work constitutes a major step forward in providing a systematic approach to the improving the management of small-scale fisheries. And in the context of inshore fisheries in England, dovetails well with the government's new initiative, SAIF - the Sustainable Access to Inshore Fisheries project.

The UK Inshore Fisheries Sustainability (IFS) Pilot, has examined marine fisheries in the area managed by the Sussex Sea Fisheries Committee (SSFC) against the Marine Stewardship Council environmental standard for well-managed fisheries.

A total of twenty six separate inshore fisheries were evaluated using the most recently available information concerning existing population biology, catch statistics, fisheries management and environmental information available for the region.

The pilot programme identified strategies for improving management into the future and examined the use of existing and new risk based methodologies for the assessment of fisheries where information on biological stocks and the fisheries maybe insufficient for established scientific assessment techniques.

The Pilot has been able to demonstrate that:

• assessment of each species / gear combination against the MSC standard has clearly distinguished fisheries that would be expected to meet the standard.

• this pre-assessment or audit process has been able to clearly identify systemic weaknesses in current knowledge or practice which, if remedied, will impact positively on the management of a wide range of fisheries; it has also been able to reveal strengths and weaknesses that might not otherwise be readily or normally considered by local managers;

• the nature of some of these systemic weaknesses has proved revealing, identifying:

- at the local level – mismatches between the normal operations of the SFCs and the operations that might be required to meet best management practice;

- at the wider level – inconsistencies in the roles played by industry, science, local managers (SFCs), national managers (MFA) and policy makers (Defra) in the management of local fish resources and fisheries;

- a lack of adaptive management in many of the less commercially important species, meaning that it cannot be currently guaranteed that changes in stock status would be responded to by management in a sufficiently timely and appropriate way;

• some fish stocks can be effectively managed within a local regime (i.e. bounded by a six mile seaward limit), but for others such an approach lacks credibility;

• where whole stocks cannot be managed within a local regime, the fisheries might still be effectively managed locally such that they can be shown to comply with a responsible and precautionary approach to stock management i.e. it should be demonstrable that if the local fishery management regime was applied globally, the stock would not be overfished;

• the audit has given focus to the strengths and weaknesses of the local management systems with respect to the structures used to involve stakeholders in policy formation, management procedures and decision-making, and the extent to which such processes are supported by and engage the economic actors in the industry.