Risk versus economic performance in a mixed fishery

- Balancing economic returns and their variability is a concern in fisheries management.
- Nature of this trade-off is examined for the Australian Northern Prawn Fishery.
- Analyses are based on a multi-species stochastic bio-economic model.
- Fishing effort is allocated between predictable and highly fluctuating components.
- Current effort strategy appears as a compromise between average performance and risk.

Balancing bio-economic risks and high profit expectations is often a major concern in fisheries management. We examine this trade-off in the context of the Australian Northern Prawn Fishery (NPF). The fishery derives its revenue from different prawn species with different dynamics and recruitment processes. A multi-species bio-economic and stochastic model is used to examine the trade-offs between mean profitability of the fishery and its variance, under a range of economic scenarios, fishing capacities and distributions of fishing effort across the various sub-fisheries that comprise the NPF. Simulation results show that the current fishing strategy diversifying catch across sub-components of the fishery entails a compromise between expected performance and risk. Furthermore, given the current economic conditions, increases in fleet size would improve the expected economic performance of the fishery, but at the cost of increased variability of this performance.