Validating RAPFISH sustainability indicators: Focus on multi-disciplinary aspects of Indian marine fisheries

In determining the importance of fisheries sustainability indicators, stakeholders' interest plays a defining role in the fisheries management practices. The indicator based tools such as RAPFISH have been available for sustainability assessment of fishery resources. In the present study, procedures to validate the pre-selected RAPFISH, which is a multidisciplinary indicator based evaluation tool for measuring the sustainability of fishery resources, are applied. The sustainability indicators were subjected to validation process based on feedback from resource owners, users and experts, using Multi-Criteria Analyses such as Weighted Sum Model and Analytic Hierarchy Process. Based on the validation results, suggestions have been made to improve methodology and its effective application in practice. This paper demonstrates RAPFISH as a potentially effective multidisciplinary tool for evaluation of sustainability of fishery resources.