An approach for assessing and ranking fisheries management scenarios in spatially delimited marine areas

Spatial restrictions to human activities such as bottom trawling are increasingly used to improve the ecological condition of disturbed habitats. Such management interventions typically have socio-economic consequences, which creates a challenge for those making decisions about which activities should be restricted and where restrictions should apply. We present an approach for predicting the effects of fisheries management scenarios in spatially delimited marine areas and ranking them—using a loss function—according to how well they achieve desired outcomes across a set of ecological and socio-economic indicators. This approach is demonstrated by simulating alternative fishing gear restrictions and zoning options within a hypothetical marine protected area (MPA). Relative benthic status (RBS; an indicator of ecological condition) and relative catch value (RCV; an indicator of potential economic cost) were estimated for the baseline environment and 21 potential management scenarios. The rank order depended on which indicator was prioritized (i.e. whether RBS or RCV was given greater weighting in the loss function), with the top-ranked scenarios in each case involving considerably different management measures. The methods presented can be applied anywhere using locally or strategically relevant indicators to help identify spatial fisheries management measures that minimize ecological and socio-economic trade-offs

A window into land managers’ preferences for new forms of agri-environmental schemes: Evidence from a post-Brexit analysis

Securing the provision of environmental public goods from agriculture is central to addressing the critical challenge of ensuring global food security while halting ecosystem degradation. Agri-environment schemes (AES) are considered to have a key role to play in supporting the transition to more sustainable ways of producing food. Existing evidence suggests that farmers are generally willing to enrol in AES for the delivery of environmental features, but robust policy support requires further exploration of land managers’ preferences and how these interplay with contract features to achieve higher environmental targets. We undertook a discrete choice experiment with land managers in post-Brexit UK, with what can be considered a ‘benchmark’ sample of younger AES-inclined land managers. This provides a window into the future of the UK farming landscape, but also, given the revision of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy and other international discussions, it also provides insights into land managers’ preferences for new contract features more widely. Our results suggest that (such type of) land managers are likely to be receptive to a transition to result-based, collaborative schemes supporting landscape-wide interventions in alignment with net zero agendas. These interventions could be done in exchange for levels of compensation similar to current levels. While this raises promise, our results also emphasize challenges, particularly to attract those less generally AES-prone land managers. Payments levels probably need to remain close to the current ones (not lower), farmers’ awareness and support for net-zero agendas need to be reinforced and more interaction between land managers and policy makers will be needed