Comprehensive Fishery Wealth: A Bioeconomic, Ecosystem-Based Approach to Measuring Fisheries Sustainability

We build upon the green accounting and sustainable development literatures to downscale indices often used to measure sustainability at the nation-state scale to measure the current and projected future sustainability of exploited fishery ecosystems.  We argue that the sustainability of a fishery ecosystem can be assessed by whether the properly measured value of the natural, physical and human capital stocks embodied within the fishery (i.e. the comprehensive fishery wealth) is non-decreasing over time. We show how ecosystem models of fisheries can be integrated with bioeconomic models of human “predators’” responses to changes in multispecies fish stocks and policy to provide rigorous “shadow prices” for all species within the system and fishing capital. These prices can then be multiplied by their associated capital stocks to provide an index of comprehensive fishery wealth. Changes in this index allow managers to assess the ability of past and current fishery management regimes to maintain wealth within the fishery for future generations. Finally, we show how our wealth accounting approach can be leveraged to prospectively evaluate the sustainability and efficiency of alternative management approaches.