Sustainable Management of a Transboundary Fishery Resource under Climate Variability : Desperate Fishing Games of Pacific Sardine Resource

Compelling evidence signaling the effects of climate change are calling for urgent measures aimed to adapt extreme environmental variations. In this regard, fishery management and industries are far from exempt. Climate variability brings uncertainties in the complex interrelationships that characterize marine environments, which include sea temperature, salinity, water column stratifications, and nutrient availability for primary production. Subsequent changes in physiological environments and food accessibility in aquatic ecosystems often lead to dramatic changes in the abundance and spatial distributions of fishery. This is a pressing challenge for fisheries management and industries which targeting fishery resources exclusively distribute or migrate competitive multiple economic excusive zones (EEZs) - transboundary fish stocks. This is particularly true for the Pacific sardine (Sardinops sagax) resource, which has exhibited extreme decadal variability in its abundance and geographic distribution corresponding to water temperature regime shifts within the California current ecosystem. Pacific sardine is a transboundary resource which is caught by Mexican, U.S. and Canadian fisheries. These two factors threaten the sustainability of the Pacific sardine resource, yet there is no formal transboundary conservation and management in place for the resource. Our study develops a three-agent bioeconomic game theoretic framework that incorporates environmental effects on sardine abundance and biomass distribution. Simulations are conducted to evaluate the conservation and economic benefits of full/partial cooperative and non-cooperative management strategies for the time variant/asymmetric shares of the Pacific sardine resource by three countries. Our results show that 1) under climate variability effective unilateral conservation and management by a country having a dominate share of the resource within its EEZ cannot be archived due to the actions of free-riders, and 2) full realization of the conservation and economic benefits from cooperative management of the resource is still greatly dependent on the domestic fishery policy of each country, and 3) climate variability prevents full cooperative exploitations by Canada, Mexico and the U.S. from stand-alone stable. In this talk, with considering results from our study, I will discuss our anticipating challenges in the North Pacific fisheries.