Boom not bust: Cooperative management as a mechanism for improving the commercial efficiency and environmental outcomes of regional scallop fisheries

Abstract

The environmental impacts of food production are increasingly influencing consumer’s food choices. To maintain market access in this context, the fishing industry must adopt strategies and technologies that reduce their carbon emissions, environmental footprint, bycatch and seabed impact. In this study, closure of a depleted scallop fishing ground, to enable stock recovery, coupled with a transition to a cooperative management system, based on territorial user rights, promoted fishers to make management decisions that have improved the environmental outcomes and economic efficiency of this fishery. Innovative cooperative management systems like territorial user rights that decentralise decision making and provide users rights to a defined fishing area, could help mitigate against the negative impacts and issues traditionally associated with scallop dredge fisheries, and help maintain both stock biomass and consumer demand in a market increasingly dominated by sustainably certified food products.

Introduction

Bottom-towed fisheries account for 25% of global seafood landings. Of these, scallop (Pectinid) fisheries make an important contribution with 632,000 t landed, worth $US 1579 million in 2017 [11], [12]. Despite their economic and food security relevance, many scallop fisheries lack the robust management regimes required to regulate effort and landings [42], and this is especially true of most European scallop fisheries as they are not an EU-regulated quota species. In the absence of biologically referenced fishing effort and harvest limits the habitat specificity and sessile nature of scallops makes them vulnerable to over fishing [43] and can result in significant decreases in catching efficiency and profitability (e.g. reported reduction in landings per unit effort in the United Kingdom, [7]).

The environmental impacts of scallop dredge fisheries on the seabed are well documented and result in reduced habitat complexity, habitat fragmentation, loss of biodiversity and reduced ecosystem functioning of marine seabed habitats (e.g. [18], [23], [46]). The nature and extent of these impacts are dependent on the physical characteristics of the seabed, the specific gear type, and the composition of the benthic communities (e.g. [5], [6], [18], [20], [23], [46]). Hiddink et al. [18] estimated that bottom-towed fishing gears remove 6–41% of faunal biomass per pass with average post-trawl recovery times of 1.9–6.4 years, depending on the fishery and environmental context. As scallop fisheries increase fishing intensity, this will correspondingly increase their ecological ‘footprint’ on the seabed and the recovery period for seabed biota in relation to the frequency of past trawling impacts and the recovery rates of the biota present [18], [25], [26], [27]. Furthermore, future scallop spat settlement and recruitment success may be linked to the presence of benthic biota that act as settlement substrata, thus the fishery has the potential to significantly limit its own long-term sustainability if the impact of benthic biomass removal is not managed appropriately [26].

Direct impacts on the seabed are not the only concern associated with declining productivity of scallop fisheries. Commercial fisheries, which rely heavily on the use of fossil fuels, are known to be a significant contributor to global CO₂ emissions (e.g. [15], [35], [36], [47]) equating to 2–3% of the total emissions from global food production in 2016; Mbow et al., 2019). Inefficient fishing practices (for example scallop vessels targeting low density scallop beds) leads to greater average CO₂ emissions per tonne of target-species landed. This is an emerging pattern which has developed in recent years in commercial fishing across the globe (e.g. [36]). As with other food production industries, commercial fisheries are required to take action to reduce Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions following the ratification of the Paris Agreement in 2015, which aims to keep global warming optimally under 1.5 °C [38], [48]. This is particularly relevant to scallop dredge fisheries that already have a poor public perception for environmental impacts. Since fuel is a major expense in fishing industry business models (e.g. [35]), as well as CO₂ emissions from fuel use representing a major externalised cost to the environment, lower carbon fisheries represent a motivating win-win opportunity for commercial fisheries [15].

Globally, the centralised top-down governance of fisheries and conventional input controls have proven inadequate in resolving many issues associated with modern exploitation of fisheries resources (e.g. [14], [37]), particularly on a local scale. Without robust limits on access, effort or the allocation of individual rights to the fishery resource or area, fishers are incentivised to compete in a short-term ‘race to fish’ (e.g. Tragedy of the commons; [16]) rather than investing in protecting species and habitats for longer-term sustainability (e.g. [2]) and reducing wider environmental impacts, such as GHG emissions. By contrast, bottom-up decentralised or co-management governance systems, where management decisions are delegated to local communities or fishers’ organisations (e.g. [2], [29]), seem to be proving their effectiveness as fishery management tools, especially for sessile or sedentary species [13], [31]. This includes the use of rights-based management systems that can promote incentives for fishers to protect and invest in the resource. Examples of such systems include Individual Quotas (IQs) or Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs), which provide licenced individuals with a share of the total allowable catch (TAC), and Territorial User Rights Fisheries (TURFs), which provides user rights within a defined fishing area.

Territorial user rights fisheries (TURFs) are a form of rights-based management (RBM) system that is decentralised and allows for a more complete conveyance of property/resource rights to members by defining harvesting access within a defined fishing area. Self-governing associations or organisations are usually established for TURFs with the role of managing and protecting the resources within the fishing area, deciding on allocation of resources to its members and ensuring compliance with regulations [28]. A TURF can therefore provide a suitable context for fishers to adopt management measures that promote economic and harvesting efficiency, encompass ecosystem based management (EBM) and enhance economic viability through stock security, whilst simultaneously eliminating the ‘race to fish’ found in many open-access fisheries (e.g. [2]). For scallop dredge fisheries, a move towards TURFs may incentivise fishing behaviours that consider the wider ecosystem and fleet economic efficiency, which is timely given the current increasing economic and environmental concerns related to scallop fisheries. This type of rights-based cooperative approach has been previously conceptualised for the Atlantic Sea Scallop fishery as a means of incentivising rational and sustainable management [1].

Territorial user rights fisheries (TURFs) are the focus of this paper, which quantitatively evaluated the performance of a fishery management experiment within the Pecten maximus scallop fishery of the Isle of Man (Irish Sea). This opportunity arose when one of the fishing grounds within the wider scallop fishery had been fished to commercially unviable levels under the status quo management system. This ground was closed for three seasons to enable stock recovery, and then re-opened as a TURF located within a multi-zoned marine protected area (MPA). Both the TURF and the remaining fishing grounds within the RCA fishery were monitored for a range of performance indicators including commercial (i.e. landings per unit effort; LPUE) and environmental (i.e. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and area of seabed impacted per tonne of live shell weight (LSW) of scallops landed). In this way we assessed to what extent the TURF had improved the environmental and economic efficiency of scallop dredge fishing.