To date, efforts to develop a multispecies management plan for the Baltic have been too focused on maximising overall catch volumes, largely ignoring ecosystem aspects and EU environmental legislation.
Together with Coalition Clean Baltic (CCB), FISH has produced a briefing paper on what we consider important aspects to include in ecosystem-based multispecies management in the Baltic Sea. In principle, we are supportive of multi-species management but it must consider broader biological interactions; we are concerned about the direction the discussions have had so far, with a strong focus on optimising overall catch volumes.
The EU as a whole has an ambition to move towards long-term multispecies management, rather than single-species management. As with several efforts in the past, the Baltic Sea region is to move ahead. For these reasons, the details of a possible Baltic multispecies management plan have been discussed for over 3 years.
After initial wider consideration, it now looks as if the plan will cover three main stocks: eastern Baltic cod, central Baltic herring and sprat. This makes the prospect a bit more manageable and is a reasonable focus, considering the challenges involved.
Due to EU inter-institutional deadlock, the process of creating a multispecies plan for the Baltic Sea has been lengthy, as well as jerky, since it has been a political ambition to establish the plan quickly; this seems to have had a negative influence on the scientific quality of the developing work.
With this paper, we stress that measures to minimise the impacts of fisheries and help maintain the ecological functions of the Baltic Sea ecosystem must be included. We also highlight the need to ensure more reliable and validated modelling, as well as best use of available knowledge and data. In the process to agree on a multispecies plan for the Baltic Sea, quality is much more important than speed.
In the briefing, we highlight eight aspects that need to be considered in ecosystem-based multi-species management in the Baltic Sea:
1. Any multispecies management plan must be in line with the ecosystem-based approach to fishery management, and not merely set out to maximise the combined catch volume of the stocks covered by the plan. A stronger focus on the state of the eastern Baltic cod population is necessary. It is the species with the longest life-span and as the dominant predatory fish it has a central role for the whole ecosystem.
2. Management should be coherent with EU environmental legislation and regional agreements such as the HELCOM Baltic Sea Action Plan, especially the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (2008/56/EC). This means that other stock-specific reference points, besides Fmsy, should be included, such as SSBmsy and size- and age distributions (ICES, 2014). Furthermore, objectives for the geographical distribution of each stock should be set, in accordance with HELCOM Baltic Sea Action Plan (HELCOM, 2007).
3. The modelling for projections of exploitation rates used in the ICES multispecies advice (ICES, 2012; 2013a) is based on unrealistic assumptions and the proposed levels of fishing mortality (F) are too high.
4. In order to restore and maintain fish populations to “above levels which can produce the maximum sustainable yield” (Art. 2.2), the exploitation rate (Fmsy) should be below Maximum Sustainable Yield, as it is not possible to manage several interlinked stocks at BMSY levels simultaneously. However, it is possible to manage each of them at or above BMSY levels.
5. Earlier ICES work on multispecies considerations for the Baltic Sea should be used to improve modelling, such as the “ensemble approach” (ICES, 2009), in which nine different models were included.
6. The current population structure of eastern Baltic cod calls for selectivity measures that will protect large cod, in addition to restrictions of Total Allowable Catch (TAC) and Minimum Conservation Reference Size (MCRS). Harvesting options must be realistic and practical and the existing MCRS for eastern cod (38 cm) should be maintained for now.
7. Fishing operators with the least environmental impact should be rewarded with priority access to fishing opportunities.
8. The multispecies plan must be adaptive and allow adjustments based on improved knowledge.
For the full briefing paper: