Fisheries management planning and support for strategic and tactical decisions in an ecosystem approach context

Management planning is a hierarchical process that translates objectives to strategies, ‘what’ will be done, and strategies to tactics, ‘how’ it will be done. A strategy specifies what will be done about a human pressure using a reference to signal when the pressure is unacceptable. The reference is established from consideration of the response by valued attributes to alternative references. Two types of management decisions are invoked by the planning process, strategic decisions that establish a suitable reference for the pressure and tactical decisions that identify levels of a management measure that keep the pressure acceptable relative to the reference. An Ecosystem Approach for Management can be made operational through a progressive evolution of traditional fisheries management that extends strategies beyond consideration of productivity for only the harvested resources to productivity, biodiversity and habitat of the ecosystem and then integrates the cumulative effects across managed human activities. The consideration of more pressures and attributes will require some sort of triage to identify priorities for first attention.