Revising an empirical harvest control rule to strengthen climate and market resilience

Fisheries are increasingly needing to grapple with the need to consider human dimensions and external drivers such as fuel prices and climate change. In response, explicit adaptive approaches such as harvest strategies are being redesigned to strengthen the resilience of feedback management approaches and reduce the need to evoke exceptional circumstances. This can be achieved using Management Strategy Evaluation (MSE) to forecast alternative future scenarios and bound the range of plausible uncertainties. However, this process is also challenged by heterogeneous preferences and aspirations of stakeholders, especially for cross-jurisdictional multi-sector fisheries that are shared between Indigenous owners and non-Indigenous stakeholders. Here, we considered the Torres Strait tropical rock lobster Panulirus ornatus fishery, for which the empirical harvest control rule (eHCR) needed revision to improve resilience to extreme climate events, geopolitical influences on the supply chain and rising fuel prices. Based on consultation with the ‘Group of Rights holders, Advisors, Managers, Partners and Stakeholders’ (GRAMPS), a range of specially-tailored eHCR candidates were developed and tested using MSE, resulting in the successful adoption of a revised rapidly-adaptive eHCR in 2025. The preferred decision rule outputs annual recommended biological catch limits based on medium-term trends in fishery-independent and fishery-dependent data, adjusted by a catch multiplier that is weighted further by the most recent survey index and its associated precision. The success of this process was attributable in part to use of communication strategies to explain highly technical concepts to the GRAMPS to support their evaluation of trade-offs between competing management goals.