Evaluation of fisheries-management systems with respect to sustainable development

Australian legislation requires Commonwealth fisheries to be managed according to the principles of ecologically sustainable development. This imposes a complex set of potentially conflicting, multiple objectives on the management agency. The Bureau of Rural Sciences, a professionally independent scientific bureau within the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Forestry, has developed a framework for specifying these objectives and evaluating progress over time using a variant of multi-criteria analysis. The framework allows trade-offs to be recognized, compared, and integrated. It involves a hierarchical structure of objectives that can be developed to any level of detail desired. There are at least three ways in which uncertainty can be incorporated into or investigated by the framework. First, objectives at any point in the hierarchical structure can be specified and evaluated in terms of probabilities. Second, subjective weights can be used to quantify and explore the consequences of individuals attaching different values to particular objectives. Third, the framework itself can be the basis for evaluating performance of different management systems using Monte Carlo or other modelling techniques. Sensitivity to subjective weights is illustrated with a case study of the south-east fishery, a multi-species trawl fishery providing much of the fresh seafood to south-eastern Australia. The framework is proving to be a flexible evaluation tool as it is applied to the major Australian Commonwealth fisheries.