The impact of new technologies on fisheries management

The advancement of new technologies, the rapid expansion of big data, and the deep digitalization of society that allows consumers to trace products to their origin, or firms to live stream their trawl hauls online, opens hitherto unknown potential for more effective resource control and increased value creation. There has been a surge in new technologies increasing the effectiveness of the enforcement activities, such as satellite monitoring of vessels and electronic logbooks. This opens new possibilities for fisheries enforcement. The management system must carefully consider the repercussions of new approaches to monitoring and compliance, and more generally, how new technologies affect the fisheries. This is at the heart of this research project. We approach the research problem from different angles by applying empirical, experimental and theoretical economics, as well as biological modelling and qualitative approaches from social science. To understand more generally how behavioral factors, such as social norms, affects fisheries management, we team up with the working group of marine systems (WGMARS) of the International Council of the Exploration of the Seas (ICES) to conduct a large-scale systematic review (Wieczorek et al. 2021). In one study, we have developed a model that studies capital investments in a fishery, where investment decisions are made less frequently than the allocation of variable inputs. We study how the possibility to invest in capital affects dynamics that is either unregulated or regulated through cooperation as part of community-based management. We find that the possibility to make large capital investments can destabilize cooperation especially if enforcement capacity is low. Further, we find that communities can preserve cooperation by agreeing on a resource level that is lower than socially optimal. This reduces the incentive to deviate from the cooperative strategy and invest in capital. In another study we conducted a survey on the perception of traditional and modern control activities among some 650 Norwegian fishers. We found that expectations about and experiences with traditional control activities have a significant impact on compliance behavior. The survey also shows that modern control activities, such as satellite monitoring of vessels and electronic logbooks, are far less accepted than traditional control activities - at least for now. Using the landing and vessel registry data of coastal fisheries, we have analyzed the vessel investment/disinvestment behavior after the structural quota scheme (SQS) was implemented. We find that small vessels are more likely to be scrapped, while owners of larger vessels tend to consolidate. There is also evidence of increasing consolidation of quotas geographically, with quota concentrating in some municipalities. The consolidation has implications for fleet structure and harvesting technology. This work has been presented at several international conferences and circulated as a discussion paper. This manuscript is currently under review at a journal (Abe et al. 2023) In a different study, we combined landing ticket data and logbook data for the Norwegian cod trawler fleet to investigate harvester behavior with high technology vessels. We developed and estimated a dynamic model of quota utilization for multiple species. We plan to further investigate how technological changes and differences among vessels affect in-season behavior and implications for resource management. Previous studies assume that fishers follow fish as fish follows suitable oceanographic conditions, e.g. due to climate change. We test whether fishers follow fish with a large-scale high-resolution dataset of landing tickets combined with a detailed oceanographic model to predict areas suitable for cod spawning. We do not find a significant relationship between the number of active vessels and the spawning suitability. Rather, the number of vessels in the previous week and year explain the current number of vessels in an area. This implies richer behavioral responses of fishers to changes in fish abundance than often assumed. Future projections of climate change effects should account for this nuanced behavioral response. Finally, we organized a special session on “Investment Behavior and New Technologies in Fisheries” at the 2022 IIFET conference in Vigo. We presented two own papers centered around the observation that understanding investment dynamics is key towards sustainable evidence-based fisheries. First, investment dynamics determines feasibility and effectiveness of various policy options, requiring deeper insights on the drivers of investment. Second, we looked at feedbacks between investment behavior and compliance. Non-compliant fishing companies may have an unfair advantage over their compliant competitors, which may affect quota markets and investment dynamics. The session was well attended by an international audience.

The advance of new technologies, the rapid expansion of big data, and the deep digitalization of society that allows consumers to trace products to their origin, or firms to live stream their trawl hauls online, opens hitherto unknown - and unassessed - potential for more effective resource control and increased value creation. In particular, there has been a surge in new technologies increasing the effectiveness of the enforcement activities, such as satellite monitoring of vessels and electronic logbooks. Compared to traditional fisheries enforcement, this allows for control of all operations of every vessel at all times, which significantly boosts enforcement efforts. At the same time, such approaches may also raise serious concerns about privacy and data protection that may easily undermine compliance unless they are accompanied by conscious efforts to maintain maximum transparency. This implies that the management system carefully has to take into account the repercussions of monitoring and compliance, both in the short- and long-term, which will be at the heart of the proposed research. We also analyze how new technologies may enhance the value created from the oceans, for example by allowing for finer selectivity or increased seafood traceability and how management may contribute to harnessing the full potential of the oceans. Because the impact of new technologies on compliance is difficult to study, we approach it from different angles. FishTech uses empirical, experimental, and theoretical economics as well as biological modelling and qualitative approaches from social science to understand what determines compliance behavior and generate the knowledge that informs management how to strengthen compliance behavior. FishTech brings together the Norwegian social and economic marine research centers of Bergen, Oslo, and Tromsø to join forces and further strengthen Norway's world leading position in fisheries science.