Risk and Sustainability: Assessing Fisheries Management Strategies

We develop a theorical framework to assess fisheries management strategies from sustainability perspective, when the bioeconomic dynamics are marked by uncertainty. Using stochastic viability, management strategies are ranked according to their probability to satisfy economic and ecological constraints over time. The proposed framework is useful to represent the trade-offs between the several sustainability objectives. This framework is applied to a Chilean fishery case-study, faced with El Niño uncertainty. We study the viability of effort and quota strategies, when a minimal catch level and a minimal biomass are required. For realistic sustainability objectives, effort-based management result in a better viability probability than quota-based management.