MacAlister Elliott & Partners Ltd services

Adequate planning is vital for effective fisheries management. Good planning establishes participation, a sense of direction and purpose, coordination and responsibilities of those involved, and financial forecasting. A comprehensive fisheries management plan also identifies targets and what to do when indicators against those targets show deviation from the desired path.

Institutions are critical to fisheries management. Besides biology, the socio-economic situation and the dynamics between a range of institutional arrangements - legislation, policy processes, mechanisms for cooperation, information collection and so on - need to be understood if a fishery is to be adequately managed. It is vital that sufficient institutional capacity exists to carry out the tasks of modern fisheries management.

EBFM (also called the ecosystem approach to fisheries, EAF), in essence, extends the principles for sustainable fisheries management to cover the ecosystem as a whole. EBFM is increasingly enshrined in international agreements and frameworks as it becomes increasingly clear that single-stock management methods are prone to failure. EBFM aims to ensure that, despite variability, uncertainty and likely natural changes in the ecosystem, the capacity of ecosystems to produce the multitude of benefits that they do, is maintained indefinitely for the benefit of the present and future generations