Production in the Barents Sea Fisheries: Across species and fisheries

Informations

Funding country

Norway

Acronym

-

URL

-

Start date

1/1/2020

End date

12/31/2023

Budget

1,001,835 EUR

Fundings

Abstract

The primary objective of the project is to understand how fishers in the Barents Sea decide on inputs, such as vessel, gear, labor, fuel, given availability of fish, fishing rights, and environmental and market conditions, to produce seafood and fisheries products. Moments to consider are how input use changes with productivity growth and fish stock changes, and bycatch and fisher behavior more generally. Ecologocial relationships between various species in the Barents Sea ecosystem also need to be taken into account. Other relevant factors are climate change, market forces, and regulations. A key challenge will be to distinguish between the various impacts. The project will rely on extensive knowledge and data on Barents Sea fisheries, including ecosystem models, the Norwegian fisheries profitability survey, data on fisheries and fish stocks from the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries, and Global Fishing Watch data. This knowledge and data will form the basis for an ecological and economic understanding of production in the Barents Sea fisheries under uncertainty, climatic stress, and regulatory constraints. The secondary project objective is to apply the understanding of Barents Sea fisheries production, in form of a production function, to calculate the social value of the resource use. These calculations forms basis for an evaluation of sustainable development and provide for measures of resource scarcity and limits to substitution that go beyond market-based evaluations (market prices). The project addresses knowledge gaps of linkages between biodiversity and ecological functioning on one side and ecosystem services and resource exploitation on the other. Ecological and economic knowledge will be forged into a foundation for sustainable resource use from clean and healthy oceans. We have made significant efforts on literature review, data collection, and method overview. An extension of the literature review is published in the article ‘A machine learning analysis of the recent environmental and resource economics literature’ (Kvamsdal et al. 2021, Environmental and Resource Economics). A central contribution on an ecological model for the Barents Sea that uses comprehensive data from the Institute of Marine Research and where we use machine learning methods is currently under review. Several relevant articles have been published recently, further works are under review. While meetings in the first part of the project period has been held online, the project has organized two workshops the last year; Bergen Fisheries Economics Workshop 2021 and 2022. At these workshops, relevant on-going research has been presented and discussed.