Deriving harvest control rules for fisheries management
Current deficiencies in fisheries management within the EU are the lack of a formal framework for drafting and ranking specific stakeholder objectives, in conjunction with the lack of a transparent and communicable approach to management. The aim of this research is to work towards the development of such a framework. To achieve this, I will derive harvest control rules (HCRs) using models representing generic fish stocks that reflect the trade-offs between different objectives of fisheries management. I will maximize utility functions and use discount theory to help quantify and rank different biological, social, or economic objectives in order to derive objectives for an HCR. The objective-derived HCRs will then be applied and updated in stochastic population models to finally assess its performance in relation to the original objectives. This process outlines how HCRs can formally be tailored to facilitate communication and support a higher level of transparency to promote stakeholder consensus, incentives, and success in fishery management.