Fishery Allocation Challenges Under Climate Change: Principles and Tools for Advancing Management.

Errend, Melissa¹, Katie Westfall², Melissa Mahoney³, Alice Thomas-Smyth², Jacqui Vogel², Kim Howe⁴, ¹Northern Economics, ²Environmental Defense Fund, ³Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust, ⁴Co-Creative Labs

Climate change is impacting our oceans in unprecedented ways and will continue to bring major challenges for U.S. commercial and recreational fisheries. On every coast, climate change is causing shifts in the range and distribution of many stocks and altering their productivity and availability. However, modern management approaches largely grant access and fishing rights based on historical participation and often create static divisions of quota between groups that are difficult to change once set. A key question, therefore, is how to address allocation questions going forward while achieving a balance between efficiency and equity amidst changing conditions and uncertainty. Through interviews and a workshop with fishery stakeholders around the country, we propose eight shared, stakeholder-backed principles for allocation decisions in a changing world. In addition, we created an indicator of allocation complexity for US Fishery Management Plans that supports the identification of where allocation challenges may arise under climate change and combine this with species distribution projections to generate a hotspot analysis.