Study including Dal researchers finds strategies that can help make fisheries sustainable

Researchers from Dalhousie University and other institutions have published a new study that looks at what strategies can help create sustainable fish stock management.

Right now, only 29 per cent of Canadian fish stocks are at healthy levels, while 17 per cent are considered to be critical. With Canada committing to manage all marine life sustainably by 2025, researchers are looking for an understanding of effective strategies.

Those issues are the basis of work by researchers at Dalhousie, Carleton University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Researchers decided to try to determine what drives fisheries health in Canada by looking at stocks doing better than expected to figure out what institutional, economic and social factors play the biggest roles in the health of fish stocks.

Laurenne Schiller, now part of Dalhousie’s biology department but working in Carleton’s school of public policy and administration when the study started, said researchers took a comprehensive look at all 230 commercial stocks in Canada.

“We wanted to understand what factors predict the health of our fish populations, so whether they’re being fished sustainably or not,” Schiller said.

The first part of that was to look at what contributes to the average Canadian fish population, “and then we wanted to look at outliers; we wanted to figure out not just what makes a stock healthy, but in cases where you expect a fish population to not be doing well, why are they doing better than you’d expect.”

She said that’s something that hasn’t been done a lot in environmental sciences.

Researchers tried to predict stock health from ecological and economic factors like fishery value and the life history attributes of the species.

Their report was published Tuesday.

“In the end, we found out that the health of Canadian fish populations is related to what regions they are fished in, what gear is used to catch them and whether or not there are incentives for sustainable fishing,” Schiller said.

She said the healthiest populations were the ones that had more reliable data through better estimates of how many fish are being caught every year and not just those in the commercial fishery.

“We also found that there is less conflict between different fleets and stakeholders in those fisheries, and that there is more stakeholder engagement between the different groups with an interest in fishing.”

As part of that, the study found that there is a co-operative relationship rather than an adversarial one between those who fish and those who manage the fishery.

“I don’t want this to be a doom and gloom study,” Schiller said “We saw a lot of hopeful examples.”

She said she hopes that some of the successes researchers saw in West Coast fisheries, where they have 100 per cent monitoring and excellent estimates of total mortality and total catches, can be used by Fisheries and Oceans Canada and fisheries management on the East Coast.

“The bigger picture is that we need industry involved in decision making, but we don’t need industry dictating decisions, and I think that that’s something that is very important.”