The Impacts of Climate Change on Fleet Behavior in the Bering Sea Pollock Fishery

Purely ecological studies have observed a northward shift in the distribution of arctic and subarctic marine species, and predict further shifts as the ocean warms. Utilizing a robust oceanographic and economic dataset, we find that when making predictions about capture fisheries (as opposed to fish stocks), it is crucial to consider the profit maximizing behavior of harvesters. Commercial fishermen choose where to fish based on observable and unobservable characteristics of the area and the fisher, including the expected revenue in an area, fuel and fish prices, the distance to areas, vessel characteristics, institutional factors, and environmental conditions.  We develop a discrete choice model to investigate the behavior of the catcher-processor (CP) sector of the Bering Sea pollock fishery, which is the largest commercial fishery in the United States and the largest food-fish fishery in the world.  The catcher-processor sector accounts for approximately half of the total catch obtained from the fishery (about 500,000 metric tons and ex-vessel revenue of about $500 million in 2008). The fish caught by the CP vessels is immediately processed into products such as fillets, surimi (an intermediate product used to make other products including imitation crab meat), and roe in a factory onboard the vessel.  While a vessel’s optimization of profit involves the standard maximization of total revenues less total costs, in this fishery revenues are a function of expectations about the prices that can be received from the various productions that can be produced from the catch as well as expectations about catch-per-unit effort (CPUE) over the extent of the Bering Sea.

This research is one component of the BEST-BSIERP Bering Sea Project, a broad and inter-disciplinary investigation of the effects of climate change on the Bering Sea. Key among these effects is the role of climate on fish location and abundance and the impact that weather plays in daily participation and location choices for vessels.  The spatial economic model incorporates climate data (for example, ice cover and sea surface temperature) into the model, permitting us to determine the relative impact of observable contemporaneous environmental conditions on location choices.  We include predictions of changing pollock abundance in the model, which directly affect the total allowable catch (TAC) available to the fishery. This allows us to predict fisher responses to scenarios developed by oceanographic and ecosystem modelers involved in Bering Sea project.