ASFB Home > 2001 > Our future responsibilities to meet our Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD) obligations: how should we proceed to achieve them?

Our future responsibilities to meet our Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD) obligations: how should we proceed to achieve them?

Peter Rogers

Peter Rogers is the Executive Director of the Department of Fisheries, Government of Western Australia. His address is: Department of Fisheries, Locked Bag No. 39, Cloisters Square Post Office, Perth, WA, 6850, Australia. Email: progers@fish.wa.gov.au

What I want to do is reflect a little on where we have been as fisheries managers and where we need to go from here. And how do you, as biologists and scientists, contribute to the gradual repositioning of fisheries management in Australia and probably the rest of the world.

When I look at where we have been over the last decade or so, I see that there has clearly been substantial debate about the effectiveness of fisheries management. World fisheries at large appear to be failing; and the real challenge is not only in the management of large fisheries, but also in that of the many smaller fisheries, particularly at the national level. Australia has a good reputation for management and that reputation has arisen in part from the contribution that many of you have made over many, many years.

In the last decade we have seen a suite of new legislation that has expanded gradually and positively beyond the focus of commercial fisheries into recreational fisheries. More recently, the debates have been and are progressing on issues such as Aboriginal fishing rights and Native Title. State and national legislation had, by and large, focussed on the management of commercial fisheries and the implementation of management arrangements such as licence buy-back, reduction in fishing capacity, effort restrictions, quotas, individually transferable effort allocations (ITEs), and so on. The recognition of the importance of managing recreational fishing, I believe, has only been an issue in the last decade, and certainly much of the debate has focussed on equity issues such as appropriate bag limits and legal minimum sizes; but the debate has to shift if sustainability is to be achieved.

Much is also being done in terms of new data requirements. For example, I think we have seen, over the last 12-18 months, the first national survey of significance for the measurement of catch and effort in recreational fishing. The challenge is working out what the results from the survey really mean. Are the broad national figures suitable in dealing with local debates? Possibly not, but they still provide very important positioning data (in terms of the magnitude of the recreational catch and effort relative to other sectors).

In Australia we have been developing management plans for commercial fisheries for some years and I think the first occurred in Western Australia. Since 1963 we have developed 34 or 35 effective management plans in Western Australia, and we probably now have somewhere in the order of a further 10 to 15 to finally complete the number of commercial management packages required.

We have been moving towards a regional planning model in the context of recreational fisheries with the aim of gradually focussing on the whole bioregion. When we come to managing finfish stocks in particular, it is very difficult to deal with a fishery for one stock in isolation from others and increasingly one has to look at the integration of management approaches that cover all of the species in a particular area.

The more recent ESD/sustainability debate has, in fact, refocussed our attention on where we need to go in terms of national fisheries management. I am sure many of you are aware that with the introduction of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (1999, EPBC) legislation at the Commonwealth level, exports will not be permitted from our commercial fisheries unless we can accredit those fisheries in terms of Environment Australia’s requirements (Environment Australia (EA) is the Commonwealth Government department overseeing environmental matters in Australia). The EA requirements are said to be based on sustainability and on the impact of fisheries on the broader environment, all requirements demanding new information. Within Western Australia that trend has further shifted with the State government putting in place an office for Ecological Sustainable Development. Having been picked up in other policy platforms at the State level, this step of putting in place an ESD office may subsequently flow through to the national level. Having two overseeing bodies would change the very nature of reporting: not in terms of the fish caught by the commercial fisheries, but increasingly on the interaction of commercial fisheries with recreational fisheries and, more importantly, around the impact of both fisheries on the environment and the ecosystem generally.

If one follows the ESD route, there are a number of reporting requirements that go beyond those of the environment and the ecosystem and extend into economic and social impacts as well as governance issues. State Cabinet in Western Australia has recently approved a shift towards Triple Bottomline Reporting for all departments. For biologists, triple bottomline reporting means that you must not only report on the financial management in terms of running your business, but also on the impact of your business on the environment and the contribution you [your business] is making towards social and economic development within your community. In translating this to fisheries you must ask the question 'what do we now need to do?' If we take the ESD debate, which also covers a further question of governance, you can see there is a spread of requirements for new information and data that must be developed over the coming decades to meet these challenges.

Triple bottomline reporting is not a new concept. Governments are catching up. If you follow the stock exchange, you will notice that all the big corporations around the world have already adopted some form of triple bottomline reporting: you only need to read BP, or Shell, or Western Mining Corporation reports to get a flavour of what is being intended. I think it is fair to say that these pressures are not only being driven by outside corporate responsibility but also corporate responsibility of governments in the face of this increasingly competitive world and the challenges around management of our natural resources, which go well beyond fisheries.

For those in Western Australia, one can easily recognise the greatest challenge facing this State is not so much our fish stocks but whether our agricultural industries are sustainable. We are looking at a probable 30-40% loss of our arable land in this State through salinity in the next 30-40 years. So it is not surprising that the community, in looking at natural resources, is asking for new reporting requirements which are going to place new challenges on all of us in terms of maintaining fisheries.

I was at a conference in the eastern states recently discussing the question of the management of billfish and tuna around the world. In the wake of the conference, one can only form the opinion that the world has failed. Even the Atlantic, the purported showcase for tuna management, has failed in terms of its responsibility in catch and maintenance delivery of effective management. Virtually every tuna and billfish stock in that part of the world is either collapsing or in major decline. So there is a real challenge in terms of what we must do. I might add that the American environment agencies, because of their concern over the way fisheries are managed, have used their environment legislation to close a significant part of the Hawaiian Tuna Industry. So if we use that as a backdrop, we as fisheries managers, and you as fisheries biologists, really have to meet the challenges of dealing with the future in terms of environment reporting. Otherwise the rest of the community, through legislation such as the EPBC Act, will close down those fisheries for which the community perceives reporting is not up to the mark. This is not an idle threat: it is reality in terms of where management directions are heading.

The Marine Stewardship Council, for those who are familiar with those sort of accreditation systems, is a market manifestation of the same requirement. Increasingly, I think, you will find places like Europe and the Americas (probably not Japan), will be placing greater market emphasis on accredited fisheries management as a basis of marketing strategies for their premium seafood products. So if it is not governments, it may be the markets that will initiate these changes, their initiatives emanating from the commercial edge provided in the market place from addressing community concerns about how our natural resources are managed.

So what does all this mean? It means that we must develop new processes, and later on Rick Fletcher will be explaining the ESD process that has been developed by the Standing Committee for Fisheries and Aquaculture (SCFA) in Australia with input from a number of people including some of you in this room. As a process, I am finding that the outcomes being developed will stand the test of time and it will continue to evolve as the new reporting requirements become more sophisticated and the community comes to better understand the data and what it is saying. I see this as an evolutionary process, not a revolutionary process.

The other challenge is the role of the States and Commonwealth in these issues, and I think that fisheries agencies will need to work more closely with their environmental agencies. Clearly with triple bottomline reporting, the Office of the Auditor General will want an increasing say in the accreditation performance of fisheries agencies in the delivery of their research results and in the management of fisheries. I believe we will move to independent accreditation of our sustainable yield in Western Australia by the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA), and that will form the bottomline requirement in terms of community acceptance with, perhaps, major audits every five years of our fisheries management performance.

Two or three years ago we posed the question 'how do we deal with the future?'. How can we solve the problem of increasing populations and technology changes and the issues that flow from it in terms of its impact on exploitation rates and hence the sustainability of fisheries? That debate has now taken place and dealt with the fundamental requirement that if we have to set a yield limit across all user groups, then we have to deal with the question of allocation and reallocation to user groups within the community. If we do not meet that challenge, there is one thing that can be guaranteed – we will lose fisheries. Consequently, we will have to control the total take of all user groups, not just the commercial sector. I think it is fair to say that, in the Australian context, we have focussed very much on the exploitation of the commercial fishing sector but not at all on other sectors; and that focus has to change as the population grows.

There are expectations about the outcome of any allocation decision, and in Western Australia we have two inquiries proceeding at the present time. One is under Justice Toohey who is looking into the whole question of allocation and reallocation frameworks between user groups and grappling with issues such as mediation and arbitration and the principles by which access should be allocated. One view, which is in the fisheries literature, prioritises the allocation of access first to the environment in terms of ecosystem requirements, then to recreational fishing, and what ever is left, to the commercial sector. That is a simple solution that occurs by default more than by planning, but is it the right direction for Australia?

One alternative view is that so much of a resource be made available to the recreational community and so much to the commercial sector and that reallocation between these sectors will need to be based on solid principles whether they be market driven or are some sort of measurement of economic worth. If followed, the question is then raised of who pays for any adjustments and whether compensation should occur if rights are transferred from one sector to another. Debate around the nature of property is still not finished in Australia. Some of the law has focussed on the questions of commercial fishing rights, but what about the rights of recreational fishers: where do they stand in that debate? Even less has been said on the question of use of fish for the purpose of conservation (no-take uses) and the use of fish by Aboriginal people in terms of meeting their economic development whether it be through aquaculture, commercial fishing or customary fishing (an issue which has not been adequately described in the context of Australian law). There could also be issues around the rights that are attached to offshore waters, intertidal zones, or waters within Aboriginal reserves. I do not believe one should leave those requirements to the courts alone and we are not doing that in Western Australia. Justice Franklin is heading the second inquiry that is trying to address those very difficult issues.

The message is that data collection will move well beyond the requirements of biology and ecology. Hence the challenge lies in the adoption of the right subsets of data and accurate collections of data to help answer the questions that are bound to come.

In summary, we need to find effective arrangements to manage sector allocations. The final outcome I believe is necessary for long-term sustainable resource use in the Australian context is the adoption of effective ESD settings. In some cases it will be for individual species of fisheries; in other cases it will be for groups of fisheries. But it must be effective if we are going to maintain our fish stocks. There has to be an allocation and reallocation framework, whether by mediation or market forces, in order to maintain fisheries. Scientists will not be able to deal with that in isolation and nor will fisheries managers: it will need to involve the community and structures and processes must be placed to enable them to reach consensus decisions – if not on a year-by-year basis then at least on a decade-by-decade basis. To ensure accountability in the data and indicators used, having the performance of agencies assessed is essential whether this be by Environment Australia, or the Auditor-General, or the local Environmental Protection Authority (EPA). The value of independent accreditation processes is all-important in de-politicising the process and giving recognition to effective resource management.

You may feel this is all too difficult, but most of your work as biologists and scientists is focussed on sustainability in the long term. A sustainable management fisheries framework will, through the ESD and other processes, give you the tools to argue your case much more strongly to resource managers and politicians and hence help to bring them to account in terms of gathering the correct data and management. The logical end point in all of this sustainable resource management, within the context of temporal and spatial use of fish, is to ultimately embody the major regional plans, where the elements shift from fishery-by-fishery, to a coastal economic resource use of fish stocks. And this again, is evolutionary. I am not convinced that Oceans Policy¹ is heading in the right direction, but it is certainly a direction in the absence of other directions. But if we are serious about our natural resources, then clearly we must have an effective regional marine planning base to help defend the sustainable use of fish and the fish stocks against other perturbations and other resource use needs within the marine environment.

To return to the challenge for you, you need to question: 'what are the future data requirements?'; 'how quickly will you need to commence collection?'; and 'what techniques need to be developed?'. In the final analysis the answers may mean measuring what Aboriginal fishers take, and understanding precisely what the recreational and commercial fisheries take. It is also not just about catch, but the composition of catch. There is no question that as we become more sophisticated and more experienced in our modelling, knowledge and data collection, ecosystem and environmental assessments will improve. For example, in the rock lobster industry, although the collection of puerulus data began in 1969 it was not understood until a decade after it was introduced. Today, using this data alone, we can predict about 95% of the catch variation within that fishery on a four-year forward projection. The challenge for you is to identify required key data sets and have the conviction to start the process.

I must emphasise the urgent need for cost effective recreational fishing data because that area is probably the most under-resourced of all the data sets required. If we had a licensing system, for instance, this could be used as a tool for controls through taxation for finding more cost effective ways of gathering data around the fishery and facilitating the collection of volunteer information, log-book programs and so on. Furthermore, if we are moving to address the issue of resource sharing and managing those shares, we will need to understand the total catches taken and where the shares are becoming disproportionate in terms of what was planned, and finding new management measures to address and readjust catches so it meets the plans the community agrees upon as being a fair and reasonable outcome for all sectors. Otherwise we will not have sustainability. The other interesting challenge is that within most budgets of natural resource management agencies, compliance always costs more than research and cost recovery arrangements are not seen favourably for compliance. The challenge is to get better data around compliance activities and, on a risk assessment basis, how much effort and resources are needed to get the compliance effectiveness we require. The final big challenge in managing costs for recreational fisheries is to find sensible social and economic indicators to address both the triple bottomline reporting requirements and the long-term issues of reallocation as the population increases and resource use priorities change.

¹ Oceans Policy – the Federal Government has set up the National Oceans Office to implement a national oceans policy. For more information visit the National Oceans Office website http://www.oceans.gov.au/oceans.jsp