INCORPORATING UNCERTAINTY IN THE ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF MARINE ECOSYSTEM EXPLOITATION

Fisheries management in the past was primarily focused on maximizing sustainable yield from the fishery by regulating fishing effort. As the effects of overfishing became more apparent, fisheries management objectives shifted from maximizing sustainable yield to maintaining a minimum spawning biomass (Weeks and Berkeley, 2001). In order to determine the optimal effort levels that would satisfy fisheries management, a high degree of trust was put into fish population growth models. Fish populations, however, have not proven easy to manage with the result that many fish populations are currently overfished. In large, this was due to the fact that fisheries management tended to rely on oversimplified models that underestimated the complexity of fish population dynamics (Caddy and Cochrane, 2001).