Building Capacity for Risk-Based Management in a Changing Environment

The national discussion around the treatment and communication of uncertainty is undergoing a conceptual shift, as federal fishery managers take a more strategic and comprehensive perspective on the costs, benefits, and limitations of addressing uncertainty and risk in decision-making. This shift is prompted by factors that include resource limitations, the evolution of council risk policies and control rules, potential changes to national policy guidance, and increasingly, the prospect of large-scale ecosystem changes beyond the control of fishery managers.

 Fishery managers can respond to uncertainty through risk-based management approaches that involve identifying key sources of uncertainty, considering how uncertainty may impact the achievement of management objectives, and explicitly evaluating both the likelihood and severity of consequences. Risk-based management can be implemented and supported in a number of ways. These include strategic investments in science and data collection, mechanisms for phasing in new information and scaling accountability with regard to biological, ecological, social, and economic consequences, the use of tools such as decision tables for communicating the implications of uncertainty, and the use of management strategy evaluation (MSE) to simulate the performance of harvest strategies relative to management objectives.