[Seminar] Predicting safe operating spaces for the Northeast Arctic cod fishery in a warming ocean using a coupled bio-socio-economic model

Speaker

Dr Jaideep Joshi: Researcher at the University of Bern, Switzerland, and a Guest Researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Austria

Abstract

In this work, we identify the current and future safe operating spaces (SOSs) of a commercially important fish stock, the Northeast Arctic cod (Gadus morhua).  We define SOSs through the concept of Joint Stakeholder Satisfaction (JSS), as has been proposed by Dankel et al. (in prep.), which allows for integrating the views of diverse stakeholders, and to capture trade-offs in achieving multiple socio-ecological utilities. We develop a bio-socio-economic model of the cod fishery, which takes temperature and harvesting regime as model inputs, and predicts as model outputs, four socio-economic utility components. We consider five different stakeholders, who assign different weights to the utility components, and whose satisfaction levels depend on the weighted sum of the utility components. Integrating across stakeholder satisfaction levels, we find the joint stakeholder satisfaction. We successfully calibrate individual model components statistically and use population-level data to tune the most uncertain model parameters that connect the component processes to population-level properties. We find that with increasing harvesting rate, the spawning stock biomass continuously decreases, whereas employment, yield, and profit peak at intermediate harvest rates. Under a fixed harvesting rate but with increasing temperature, all population level utility components increase. Further, we find that for a given harvest rate, JSS increases continuously with temperature, and the optimal harvest rate, i.e., the harvest rate with maximum JSS, increases with temperature. Thus, while increasing harvest rates threaten to collapse the Northeast Arctic cod fishery, future increases in temperature have the potential to offset these effects and rescue the fishery from collapse.

Biosketch

Jaideep Joshi is currently a researcher at the University of Bern and a Guest Researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. He obtained his PhD working on the spatial and evolutionary dynamics of cooperation, and since then has worked in diverse fields including evolutionary dynamics, plant physiology, fisheries science, vegetation modelling, and high-performance computing. He joined IIASA as a Marie-Sklodowska Curie Individual Fellow working on eco-evolutioanry vegetation modelling, and thereafter joined the COMFORT project to work on fisheries science. 

Zoom Info

• Meeting URL: https://oist.zoom.us/j/94799400298
• Meeting ID: 947 9940 0298