Development of an integrated economic and ecological framework for ecosystem-based fisheries management in New England

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2012. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Elsevier B.V. for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Progress in Oceanography 102 (2012): 93-101, doi:10.1016/j.pocean.2012.03.007.We present an integrated economic-ecological framework designed to help assess the implementation of ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM) in New England. We develop the framework by linking a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of a coastal economy to an end-to-end (E2E) model of a marine food web for Georges Bank. We focus on the New England region using coastal county economic data for a restricted set of industry sectors and marine ecological data for three top level trophic feeding guilds: planktivores, benthivores, and piscivores. We undertake numerical simulations to model the welfare effects of changes in alternative combinations of yields from feeding guilds and alternative manifestations of biological productivity. We estimate the economic and distributional effects of these alternative simulations across a range of consumer income levels. This framework could be used to extend existing methodologies for assessing the impacts on human communities of groundfish stock rebuilding strategies, such as those expected through the implementation of the sector management program in the US northeast fishery. We discuss other possible applications of and modifications and limitations to the framework.This work was supported by the NOAA Saltonstall-Kennedy Grant Program (Award No. NA09NMF4270097), the MIT Sea Grant College Program (NOAA Award No. NA10OAR4170086, Subaward No. 5710002974), and the Johnson Endowment of the WHOI Marine Policy Center