Problem overview:
Meeting information requirements: The South Pacific Commission (SPC) in collaboration with the Forum Fishery Agency (FFA) and the University of Queensland have come with the bioeconomic model of Western Pacific Tuna Fisheries. This model will integrating information on the major tuna species in the Western Pacific with economic information for better decision making, which lead to efficiency and sustainability of development in the region.
Background in summary:
Environmental Economic Accounting for the Pacific Tuna industry: At present, the only major industry in the Pacific that approaches the capability of Environmental Economic Accounting (EEA) is the offshore tuna industry. Even though the South Pacific Commission (SPC) statistics programme on tuna has been active since 1981, a bioeconomic model of Western Pacific Tuna Fisheries is only now reaching completion.
Integrating information on tuna population with fisheries economic: The bioeconomic programme is a collaborative effort between the University of Queensland, the SPC and the Forum Fisheries Agency (FFA). The overall goal is to integrate the available information on the population biology of major tuna species in the Western Pacific with economic information on the fisheries and markets to provide advice to FFA member countries on the optimal economic levels of sustainable fishing effort (OFP 1997).
Tuna fishery has become the best understood industry in the Pacific: Together with the intensive statistical and economic models developed by the SPC, the Western Pacific Tuna fishery is perhaps the world's best-understood major fishery. Although the research team at the Secretariat for the Pacific Community is aware of EEA, they have not attempted to actually perform such an analysis (Lewis, personal communication).
See document in full
Good practice rating:
(1 for the best, 5 for the lowest score) |
|
Sustainability
|
Efficiency
|
| 2 |
 Improvement in either the environment of economic condition with no harm to the other. |
2 |
Cost efficient. |
| 2 |
Sustainable over time (not one-off) |
Process |
| Adaptability |
- |
Participation of the community |
| 2 |
Location adaptability (can the project be done in other places?) |
2 |
Participation of resource owners/users |
| 2 |
Socio-cultural adaptability. |
2 |
Partnerships between various actors (Governments, NGO, Academia, Private) |
| 3 |
Level of development adaptability. |
- |
Degree of coordination and cooperation between government departments. |
| 3 |
Style of government adaptability. |
2 |
Ability to attract political interest/support |
| 3 |
Degree of decentralization adaptability. |
2 |
Procedures for feedback and review. |
Comments on this example:
Assessing Renewable Resources of Pacific Island countries, as an integrated natural resource/economic account has not been a success. Statisticians and staff in the Pacific islands agree that it would be a useful activity but have decided to await a maturation of the techniques and an improvement in available information before becoming involved (Fairbairn & Tisdell 1994). In fact, most Pacific Island countries do not even do their own National Accounts.
|
Sustainability of the project:
|
|
Adaptability of the project to other situations:
|
While this system of greening national accounts could, in theory, be applied to fishery or forestry resources in Pacific Island countries, ascertaining the basic statistics for stocks, or indicators of depletion and degradation have never been accomplished for Pacific Island resources. Even data on extraction is available for only a small fraction of the resources and these data are suspect.
| Process of decision making and implementation: |
Meeting information requirements: The widespread use of resources for a mixture of subsistence & microeconomics makes it even more difficult to obtain reliable information on resource use or environmental costs, especially using the existing (and expensive) top-down research structure and management indicators. But this does not mean that a system of indicators cannot be devised, especially if the costs of information gathering can be minimised and co-ordinated between sectors and between government and the resource users.
Still, the concept of modelling resource use and examining the interrelationships as a budget is a proven ecological method. By applying this to economic, social, political, and ecological relationships it becomes possible to model how resources are used and what information and monitoring is needed for management decisions.
|
Documentation: |
Literature or other written project review references
|
Source of Information: |
ESCAP: Integrating Environmental Considerations in Economic Decision Making Processes
Synthesis B Modalities for Environmental Assessment-Pacific Islands Subregion
Pacific Island case studies for Samoa, Kiribati and the Solomon Islands (Unpublished)
|
Contacts: |
|
Submitted by: |
ESCAP
|
|
