There is currently no total quota or common management plan for shrimp in the Barents Sea. The Norwegian-Russian Fisheries Commission has requested advice on a management plan for the shrimp population there.
‘The commission has asked for concrete advice on harvesting rules, which will form the basis of a joint management plan,’ said marine scientist Fabian Zimmermann at the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research.
The proposal for the harvesting rules and the framework that has now been submitted to the Ministry of Trade and Fisheries has been prepared by HI, in dialogue with the administration, the industry and Russian researchers.
‘We have run an extensive simulation analysis to evaluate different harvesting rules against a large number of stock developments,’ explained John Trochta, who has led the work on the analysis.
‘We assessed each rule based on catch, stock condition and risk of overfishing. Rules with more than a 5% risk of overfishing were rejected.’
A low probability of the stock falling below a critical limit was a strict precautionary criterion that the researchers defined together with managers and the industry.
In the end, it turned out that only four out of six harvesting rules fulfilled the precautionary principle. None of the four was a clear winner.
‘We see a clear trend in that higher long-term catches result in a higher risk of reducing the stock to a critically low level,’ Fabian Zimmermann said.
‘But because it is within what was defined as acceptable and the differences are relatively small, all four management rules provide a sufficient management basis. So the administration has several options available when they have to negotiate an implementation later this autumn.’
Image: Øystein Paulsen / Institute of Marine Research
