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Incorporating Climate Change Impacts Within Harvest Strategies: An Overview of Approaches
Biodiversity Conservation
Available Online

Bessell-Browne, Pia. et al.

2025
Ensuring that harvest strategies are robust to climate change is a top priority for many fisheries jurisdictions globally. This is because climate change is altering ecosystem structure and the productivity of marine species. We outline a range of approaches for incorporating climate change impacts within harvest strategies, including how a harvest strategy is specified and changes to monitoring requirements. Approaches evaluated include the use of extended stock assessments, multi-species and ecosystem models, revised management reference points, implementing regime shifts in model parameters, the provision of climate-sensitive catch advice, projections under alternative climate change scenarios and expanded use of management strategy evaluation. We evaluate the utility of these approaches against cost, data needs and uncertainty criteria; highlight key learnings from a range of global jurisdictions and demonstrate the broad array of options available outside of direct incorporation of climate variables within stock assessments. We identify approaches that have been successfully implemented and show that the most complex responses are not always the most successful. While there is no one-size-fits-all way to incorporate climate change within harvest strategies, we outline the need for flexible management arrangements. We also provide examples of approaches that have been successfully implemented, demonstrating that many of the most data-intensive responses will only be applicable in a few cases, necessitating the application of cheaper, less data-intensive approaches that are associated with greater uncertainty.
Freedivers harvest thousands of sea turtles a year in the Solomon Islands
Biodiversity Conservation
Available Online

Hamilton, Richard

2023
1. Sea turtles are harvested in many small-scale fisheries (SSFs), but few nations have quantified the impacts that SSFs are having on their sea turtle stocks. This study provides the first assessment on the catch composition, national harvest rates,and long-term trends in sea turtle catches in the Solomon Islands SSFs. 2. Between October 2016 and May 2018, 10 community monitors located in eight of the nine provinces of the Solomon Islands were trained and employed to work alongside fishers in their respective communities to document, photograph, and geo-reference the reefs where sea turtles were harvested. Local ecological knowledge (LEK) surveys were then conducted with 32 experienced fishers to infer whether the harvest rates of sea turtles had changed in recent decades. 3. Community monitors recorded information on 1,132 sea turtles that were harvested on 529 fishing trips:1,119 sea turtles were identified to species level, with harvests consisting of 73.3% (n=818) green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas), 25.7% hawksbill sea turtles (n=291) (Eretmochelys imbricata), and 0.9% (n=10) olive ridley sea turtles (Lepidochelys olivacea). 4. The great majority (92.6%) of sea turtles were captured by night-time and daytime freedivers who use masks, snorkels, fins, hooks, spears, and underwater flashlights to target a wide range of fauna that inhabit coral reefs.