Advocating Socially Responsible Management in fisheries Na Wang & You-Gan Wang Centre for Applications in Natural Resource Mathematics (CARM), School of Mathematics and Physics, The University of Queensland, Australia 1 Introduction 5 Conclusion When exploiting aquatic resources, we often 1. Optimal harvesting is appealing in fisheries management. need to consider, • environmental sustainability • economic profitability • social benefits 2. Achievement of optimality depends on our inference domain. 3. Appropriate gain functions can lead to better optimal effort and hence make more efficient use of our resource for the whole society. The management objective of Australian Commonwealth Fisheries is “maximising net economic returns to the 4. The benefits of socially responsible management to the broader society outweigh the economic profit loss in the fishery industry. community, within the context of ecological sustainability.’’ 5. MEYSRM is more suitable for deriving harvest strategy. 2 Objective 3 Application to Commonwealth fisheries 4 Result MEYSRM > MEYECO Figure 1 Revenue (solid lines) and cost (stippled lines) as a function of fishing effort for the fishing fleets (MEYECO, thin lines) and the whole economy (MEYSRM, thick lines). MEYSRM is related to the whole economy. MEYSRM has higher harvest and effort levels than the traditional economic approach which based on MEYECO, but still within the context of sustainability. References Bromley, D.W. (2009) Abdicating responsibility: the deceits of fisheries policy. Fisheries 34, 280290. Christensen, V. (2010) MEY = MSY. Fish and Fisheries 11, 105-110. Wang, Y.G., and N. Wang. (2012) Implications of gain functions in fisheries management. Reviews in Fisheries Science 20(2), 103-109. Wang, N., Wang, Y.G., Courtney, A.J., and O'Neill, M.F. Deriving optimal fishing effort for managing Australia’s Moreton Bay multiple-species fisheries with aggregated effort data. submitted.