Fisheries management responses to climate change in the Baltic Sea

• We investigate the economic impacts of climate change for Baltic Sea fisheries.
• Reducing target fishing mortality of Baltic Sea cod improves fishermen performance.
• Economic gains of optimal cod management is larger under climate change.

The long term management plan for cod in the eastern Baltic Sea was introduced in 2007 to ensure the full reproductive capacity of cod and an economically viable fishing industry. If these goals are to be fulfilled under changing environmental conditions, a readjustment of the current management plan may be needed. Therefore, this paper investigates the economic impacts of managing the cod, sprat and herring stocks in the eastern Baltic Sea, given on-going climate change, which is known to affect cod recruitment negatively. It is shown that climate change may have severe biological and economic consequences under the current cod management plan and that the negative effects on the economic performance of the fishermen as well as on the abundance of cod can be mitigated by reducing the target fishing mortality rate of cod. These results are obtained by simulating three management scenarios in which the economic consequences of different management objectives for the fishing fleets are assessed through a dynamic multi-species and multi-fleet bio-economic assessment model that include both species interactions and climate change.