Fishing opportunities are agreed on an annual basis in the EU Fisheries Council of Ministers on the basis of a proposal produced by the European Commission. In order to examine the implications for Ireland, a Sustainability Impact Assessment (SIA) of the proposal is conducted and brought before the Dáil before fisheries negotiations commence.
The SIA draws its conclusions from a consultation process with all major stakeholders, a public consultation and expert contributions from the Marine Institute (MI) and Bord Iascaigh Mhara (BIM). The objective of the SIA is to look at the overall impacts the proposal could have on the sustainability of the fishing sector from a biological, economic and social perspective.
The MI carries out a biological assessment of the Commission's proposal including a breakdown of stocks that are fished sustainably, overfished and stocks with unknown status. The percentage of stocks of interest to Ireland which are being fished sustainably has increased from 34% in 2013 to 45% in 2020.
BIM advises on the economic effects of the proposal and, in turn, the potential effects it can have on employment and coastal communities. The assessment examines the monetary value of the possible increases and decreases from the previous year's national quota for each stock and estimates the potential effects of the proposal; either through reduced incomes, partial lay-offs or redundancies, or a combination of these.
The purpose of the current socioeconomic assessment carried out by BIM is to evaluate the short to medium term impacts of the European Commission's proposal for Total Allowable Catches (TACs) and quotas. The methodology utilized in this assessment has undergone a peer-review process.
The European Commission's proposal is informed by the scientific advice on the various fish stocks published by the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), which advises the catches that can be taken for a given stock at the level of maximum sustainable yield (MSY). Fishing at MSY for a given fish stock means the highest possible annual catch that can be sustained over time, by keeping that stock at the level producing maximum growth.
The outputs from an assessment that predicted over and beyond the European Commission’s proposal, while technically possible, would be extremely difficult given the inherent complexities involved. Modelling mixed fisheries involving multiple species and different fleets from Member States, as pertain in the waters around Ireland, all being fished at MSY would be challenging and highly uncertain. MSY estimates are not static in time. Achieving single species MSY in complex and dynamic fisheries targeting multiple species is challenging because achieving the objective for one species may mean missing the objective for another. MSY is rarely, if ever, attainable simultaneously for all species. Therefore, a predictions model based on all stocks being fished at MSY is likely to be unrealistic and potentially misleading, containing such degrees of uncertainty as to make them unusable in policy making.
