UW Aquatic & Fishery Sciences Quantitative Seminar

André Punt

UW Aquatic & Fishery Sciences

Developing management procedures that are robust to uncertainty: Lessons from the International Whaling Commission

Abstract

Historically, the stock assessments on which fisheries management advice has been based considered only the 'best' set of assumptions and, if considered at all, only quantified the uncertainty arising from observation and process error. Unfortunately, uncertainty due to a lack of understanding of the true underlying system and how management decisions are implemented may dominate the sources of error that must be accounted for if management is to be successful. The 'management procedure' approach has been advocated as the most appropriate way to develop management advice for natural living resources. This approach, pioneered by the IWC Scientific Committee, takes politically-agreed management objectives and incorporates all scientific aspects of management including (1) data collection and analysis, (2) development of robust catch control laws and other regulations, and (3) monitoring. A primary feature is that uncertainty (including that arising from sources conventionally ignored) is taken explicitly into account through population simulations for a variety of scenarios. This paper highlights the nature of the management procedures that have been developed for commercial and aboriginal subsistence whaling, the processes by which these management procedures have been developed, and identifies some of the lessons that have been learned from two decades of IWC experience and how this can be applied to other fishery situations.