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Projects
Belize Reef Summit
The Oak Foundation, through NFCC, put together this education event in conjunction with the Belize Reef Summit.
Hundreds of Belizians and international supporters gather on an island on the Barrier Reef off the coast of Belize City, Belize, on November 13, 2010 to form a human banner asking if the end is near for endangered coral reefs and calling for harmony with the natural world. The event was on the final day of the three-day Belize Reef Summit which urged global leaders to take strong action to protect reefs at the U.N. Climate Talks in Cancun, Mexico. The summit included a variety of speakers on a wide range of topics related to climate change impacts on the Mesoamerican Reef.
Photo by Lou Dematteis / Spectral Q
Kids’ Ocean Day
NFCC together with the California Coastal Commission helped put together “Kids’ Ocean Day” across California.
“Talking Fish” comprised of over 8,800 students appear at five different California beaches marking Kids’ Ocean Day
Students learn about the ocean and marine debris, conduct beach cleanups, and form giant aerial art messages photographed from the sky (see http://www.oceanday.net/2011.html).
San Francisco, CA – Over 8,800 students from Humboldt to San Diego formed giant talking fish designs on various California beaches to publicize the need to prevent ocean pollution. The group art projects, viewable from the air, took place after beach clean up events, part of the 18th Annual Kids’ Adopt-a-Beach Cleanup. The cleanup events were part of a series of Kids’ Ocean Day Adopt-A-Beach Cleanups at six beaches up and down the California coast and one in Marineland, Florida. Kids’ Ocean Day, honoring World Oceans Day on June 8th, was organized statewide by the California Coastal Commission.
Each event was organized locally and each design depicted a fish with an ocean conservation message. The participants were as follows:
- San Diego County: Nearly 1,000 students led by I Love A Clean San Diego cleaned Crown Point Shores and created a mako shark saying, “Coexist.”
- Orange County: 875 kids led by Orange County Coastkeeper cleaned Huntington State Beach and formed a flounder saying, “Clean Seas Please!”
- Los Angeles County: Over 5,500 students organized by the Malibu Foundation for Environmental Education cleaned up Dockweiler State Beach and sat in formation to make a giant fish saying, “Kelp Us!”
- San Francisco County: 550 students led by Richardson Bay Audubon cleaned Ocean Beach and created a bat ray saying “Turn the tide,” referring to the need for people to reverse our pollution-creating behaviors and prevent trash from flowing into the oceans.
- Humboldt County: 900 students organized by Friends of the Dunes cleaned up the South Spit and formed a salmon saying, “Coexist.”
- Monterey County: 185 students taught by Fresno Chaffee Zoo were bused all the way from their hometown of Fresno to clean and enjoy Monterey Municipal Beach. No aerial art was formed.
Over 5,500 students organized by the Malibu Foundation for Environmental Education cleaned up Dockweiler State Beach and sat in formation to make a giant fish saying, “Kelp Us!”
Bering Crab Quotas Prove Their Worth
Safer, fairer, and saner than expected, “crab rationalization” rewards value creators, aiding one crabber’s fuel-efficiency venture.
By Brad Warren
This is a story I never expected to write. It’s about a Bering Sea crabber whose ingenious startup venture got an unlooked-for boost from the quota system he and I (like many others) once viewed with deep suspicion. It’s also about the fishermen and processors who transformed their industry from a wasteful scramble for crab into a highly functional business that aligns their interests in efficient production. The result is not flawless, but it is a far, far better fishery than it could otherwise be.
After a rainy summer packing salmon around Petersburg, Alaska, the crew of Erling Skaar’s Marco-built crabber North American delivered their final load and gratefully turned the bow southeast. Cruising home to Seattle, Erling and his crew proudly showed several visitors that the 110-foot vessel, driven by a muscular 1,100 horsepower Caterpillar main, was making 10 to 13 knots while burning well under 20 gallons per hour for nearly the entire 75-80 hour trip.
Throughout the summer, the North American burned about 20-25% less diesel than similar-sized vessels hauling salmon nearby. Seine skippers who climbed aboard got a glimpse of technology that can make even a Bering Sea crabber work something like a Prius. That fuel efficiency helps Erling compete for charters when the boat isn’t crabbing. It may soon do much more.
For seven years, Erling has poured his retirement savings and much of the boat’s annual earnings into engineering and assembling the fuel-efficiency improvements that his new venture, Gentech Global, is now bringing to market. The North American has become a floating showcase for the technology. The main elements add up to a patiently honed form of common sense: a super-efficient, computer-controlled shaft-generator, plus a FloScan fuel meter that allows the crew to track fuel use. Together, these tools permit optimal engine loading and exploitation of the “sweet spot” in RPM that squeezes maximum value from each gallon of diesel.
The North American saves thousands of dollars in fuel on each trip between Alaska and Seattle. Now distributors around the world are lining upto represent Gentech in major marine markets, and some commercial vessel owners and fleet managers are .Characteristically, Erling had humbler aspirations in when he hatched the technical concept that grew into this enterprise: he just wanted to pull stable 60-cycle power from a shaft drive despite varying engine speeds.
Erling’s venture reflects not only a personal mission, but an evolving culture of efficiency that is gaining traction worldwide in fishing and commercial marine operations. High fuel prices are an obvious spur. But the trend also gathers force as fishing fleets embrace individual quota management systems. Those schemes generally enable vessel owners and processors to make their operations more cost-effective, safer, and better tuned to markets than they could be under old-style “race-for-fish” regimes.
Erling has funded his ambitious startup—at a cost exceeding $1 million for engineering, testing, and business development so far—mainly through stubborn thrift. But to his surprise, the complex system of individual fishing and processing quotas hatched by the Bering Sea crab industry in 2005 has eased the burden ofthat outlay.
Erling’s chief engineer Henry Pagh, who has helped run numerous sea trials to test and refine the Gentech system, described this advantage during the run back to Seattle: “Once we got quotas, it became much easier to plan and invest, because we knew what the boat could earn. For the first time, we knew what we could catch, and we pretty much knew the price because it’s based on a formula for dividing the wholesale value. So Erling could plan how much of the boat’s income to put into maintenance and how much he could put into Gentech.”
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Initially, Erling was no fan of the new quota regime. “You could say we were pretty skeptical when it started,” he recalls now. After the North Pacific Fishery Management Council approved the quota plan, Erling explored legal options to block the new scheme. He worried that it would erode fishermen’s bargaining power because it assigned a handful of processing companies the rights to buy 90% of the catch from most boats. I volunteered to help him write up his arguments for a lawyer to evaluate the case. The lawyer’s advice: drop it.
During the early 2000s, while the Bering Sea crab industry wrangled over how to restructure itself to survive on smaller harvests, I wrote a string of editorials for this magazine arguing against the creation of processor quotas. I respected the processors’ right to press for inclusion in the benefits of any new quota system, but I figured that handing them a lock on most of the catch would tilt the bargaining table against fishermen. I also reckoned the new system’s elaborate “checks and balances”—designed to protect not just fishermen but processors, crew, and communities — might inadvertently become shackles. I doubted whether crabbers could expect the big gains in price, market access, and safety that fishermen reaped from quota systems in fisheries like halibut and blackcod.
Sometimes it’s good to be wrong. A detailed report on the “crab rationalization” program’s first five years went to North Pacific Fishery Management Council this fall, together with a review of the crab fleet’s safety performance prepared by the Coast Guard and the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). Together, these documents provide an independent assessment of how crab fishermen, processors, and fishing communities have fared under the new system. The reports lay a lot of worries to rest.
Are fishermen getting shafted on prices? No. Crabbers now receive a slightly larger slice of the wholesale pie than they did before rationalization. True, crews are getting thinner slices of vessel revenues, but thanks to consolidation their paychecks have increased.
The fleet has downsized sharply, shrinking to about a third its former number, and some communities have seen their role in the crab industry dwindle. But these losses probably were inevitable in a time of reduced catches. Rationalization didn’t cause them. When the resource declined, no management plan on earth could keep every deckhand working and every port awash with crab money.
Did the new arbitration and management system burden fishermen with heavy costs?No. For arbitration, crabbers have paid no more than a penny a pound since the program began, and nothing at all in some years because the fee generated a surplus in earlier years. Cost recovery fees for fishery management and enforcement, capped at 3%, also run a surplus, so they were dropped to just over 1% two years ago, and waived completely last year.
The industry’s safety record has improved dramatically. Most of the credit goes to mandatory Coast Guard vessel safety checks. But ditching the derby-style “race for fish” has certainly helped. In the fishery that inspired the “Deadliest Catch” television series, no one has died due to a vessel catastrophe since the quota system took effect. Fishermen are no longer charging out into lethal storms just to avoid losing catch to their rivals.
Instead of rewarding the most reckless competitors, the new system of fishing cooperatives binds fishermen together with each other and with processors in mutual quest to maximize earnings from a limited resource. They schedule deliveries and seasons to contain operating costs and to reach markets ahead of competing fisheries—not to cork each other. Through the cooperatives and the price formula established under the new regime, participating fishermen and processors share in the upside from these efforts. They manage crab production like colleagues working together in a business, not like gladiators in a coliseum.
The system isn’t perfect. Processors grumble that the price formula saddles them with an unfair share of price risk, while the rewards go to fishermen. Crew complain they are getting squeezed by some quota owners. Both groups have a point. But now that the incentives in the fishery mostly reward the creation of value, there is a better chance of reaching a fair deal for all. Meanwhile, the same incentives will help innovators like Erling Skaar provide vessel operators with tools to keep more of their money instead of burning it up in diesel fuel.
“Insurance” for Bycatch Article
“Insurance” for bycatch
Pooling risk eases fear of disaster tows
By Brock Bernstein
When Dave Smith, skipper of the Lisa Melinda out of Newport, OR heads out to fish for whiting, he worries about whether he’ll be going back out the next day. Bycatch caps for four species of rockfish are so tight that a single bad tow can put a boat in the shoreside whiting sector out of commission for the rest of the season. “I have one pound of yelloweye bycatch quota and that’s not even the head of a fish that can weigh 15 pounds,” says Smith. “And I’m not alone—there are a whole bunch of us who have only one or two pounds.”
Welcome to “zero tolerance” management. Fishermen in the shoreside sector have been shut down early in the season when one or two bad tows put them over the bycatch cap for any of four overfished species. But further offshore, fishermen delivering to motherships this year found a way to dodge rockfish bycatch and lessen the chance of a draconian shutdown. How? They embraced a series of sharp-edged rules imposed by their own cooperative.
The rules ban fishing for whiting in nine areas identified as “hot spots” for rockfish and require several other practices, such as short test tows, to minimize bycatch. What’s more, fishermen authorized Sea State, an independent contractor that tracks bycatch in real time, to instantaneously close additional areas when required to avoid bycatch hot spots that might emerge during fishing. Violate the coop rules, and you can face fines, legal action to collect damages, restraining orders, prohibitions against fishing, or other actions the board deems appropriate to enforce the coop’s bycatch agreement.
What’s going on here? This seems like a lot of freedom for skippers to give up. But the risks of getting “hit by lightning” by a single bad tow are high enough that, as Dave Fraser, the coop manager for the whiting mothership sector says, “It’s better to be in a game where risks are being actively managed than out on your own.”
The rules of this new game were established by several amendments to the groundfish fishery management plan, culminating in Amendment 21 in August 2010. This amendment assigned catch shares to participants in the mothership sector based on catch histories of permits within the sector and allowed them to form coops, at one stroke creating the incentives and the regulatory framework for a sector coop to manage both whiting and bycatch quotas. Boats could then either join a coop or remain independent and participate in a derby-style fishery. None of the permit holders were willing to go it alone, so all 37 joined a single cooperative.
As Dave Fraser puts it, the key to the coop’s success is its attempt “to design a cooperative program that provides for individual accountability without giving individual ownership of the constraining bycatch species – the four allocated overfished rockfish species.” The result works a bit like insurance. The coop pools the entire bycatch quota associated with each permit’s catch history while crafting rules that hold skippers and owners individually accountable for their bycatch performance. Participants retain ownership of their whiting quota but not of their bycatch quota and the bycatch agreement all coop members sign includes a mix of collective risk sharing and individual accountability that is triggered when specific thresholds are crossed.
This seems to be working. The season opened May 15 and by late September the participants were still happy with the results. “We are way ahead of the game in terms of bycatch rate,”said Bob Dooley, one of the mothership skippers. And at least one skipper in the fishery would have been out of business early in the season without the coop’s risk pool to cover his bycatch.
But it’s taking some time to figure out how best to apply the coop’s system of requirements, incentives, and sanctions. The season is divided into four periods.Permit holders must declare (at least 15 days before each period opens) how much of their quota allocation they want to put into that period. The coop then puts an equivalent percentage of the bycatch quota for the four overfished rockfish species into a risk pool for that period.
Things get interesting once bycatch starts to occur. If the boats can catch the entire whiting quota for a period without hitting a bycatch cap, then everyone is home free, regardless of how much bycatch any individual has. But there may be times when the fishery has to shut down when it reaches one of the limiting rockfish caps. When that happens, any individual with more than 125% of their prorated allocation of that rockfish species may be done for the year.
Here’s where it starts to get complicated and the planning becomes challenging. If a boat hits 125% of its prorated bycatch share in period 1, and hasn’t declared its intended catch for subsequent periods, then it is done for the year. It can lease its remaining whiting quota for the year but can’t continue fishing itself. However, if a boat reaches the 125% limit for period 1, but has already declared an intended catch for other periods, then it can fish in those later periods, but will have to leave on the table any whiting quota that remained uncaught in period 1 when the fishery was shut down.
The closures, bycatch rules, and authority to sanction violations seem to have created a system of balanced incentives that is allowing boats to catch their whiting quota while avoiding bycatch problems and fostering individual responsibility. This is complemented by a willingness to share information among skippers. For example, Bob Dooley has collected a set of bycatch avoidance tips from the most experienced skippers and has encouraged skippers to “consult your fellow fishermen” to learn more about best practices and the risks of particular fishing areas. Joe Sullivan, a Seattle lawyer who has participated in the design of several catch share and coop programs, says the key is “rewarding the skippers involved for modifying their view of the world from information hoarding to a more collective, information sharing view.”
The shoreside whiting fleet has no comparable “insurance” from pooled bycatch quota.Instead fishermen own their individual bycatch quotas. Even though about 60% of the inshore whiting quota had been caught by late September and, overall, rockfish bycatch remained below that 60% mark, several boats had been forced to quit fishing because they reached their individual bycatch caps.In principle, tradeable permits allow unlucky fishermen to buy their way back into bycatch compliance. But in reality, those with excess bycatch quota remaining were reluctant to put it on the market.
This appears to reflect a structural disadvantage of individual—as opposed to cooperative—ownership of quota. As Dave Fraser describes it, “everyone is concerned about lightning hitting them” and is reluctant to trade bycatch quota until they have caught their target quota for the year. As a result, the shoreside sector may end up using its bycatch quota less efficiently than the mothership sector. This realization has prompted shoreside fishermen to begin considering creating their own risk pool. “We’re doing this because there is safety in numbers,” says Dave Smith, the skipper from the shoreside fleet.
The coop and its risk pool have eased some of the risk facing vessels in the whiting mothership sector. But the rules and the need to fish as carefully as possible have increased the stress involved. It’s a far cry from Bob Dooley’s recollection of what fishing was like a few decades ago. Still, in a world where one pound of yelloweye can shut him down for the year, he and the other skippers in this sector wouldn’t have it any other way.
Ocean Acidification Events & News
EVENTS
Upcoming conference: The Oceans in a High-CO2 World, Sept 24-27, 2012, Monterey CA
http://www.ocean-acidification.net
NEWS & REPORTS
Seafood producers tackle ocean acidification at annual Summit
FIS.com, February 21, 2011
Click here to find out more
Click here for a great story on ocean acidification from KUOW
Pribilof Islands Collaborative
NFCC helped plan and then facilitated the ongoing work of the Pribilof Islands Collaborative (PIC), a cooperative effort that included the representatives from the two islands, major fishing industry sectors (e.g., pollock, crab, longliners), and conservation groups (e.g., The Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund). PIC’s goal was to create opportunities to share scientific and technical information, build relationships both within and across interest groups, and identify collaborative efforts that would improve knowledge and sustain resources. PIC focused separate meetings on fur seals, seabirds, crab and halibut, climate change, and economic development. The January 2005 workshop on fur seal ecology included presentations from all the leading fur seal researchers and resulted in a prioritized list of research needs that influenced NOAA’s funding decisions.
See the presentation materials
NFCC Invites Discussion on Rights-Based Management
NFCC has begun collecting and sharing videos regarding rights-based management in various fisheries, and will soon produce some of our own (see our Vimeo channel). We invite submissions of fair-minded videos and commentary on this subject from interested parties. Please avoid inflammatory content, but if you have a serious critique, NFCC wants to hear it. What are the pros and cons of quotas? What are the problems and challenges? What advantages has your fishery experienced as a result of rights-based management?
The following are links to related articles and editorials:
Cooperative management facilitates salmon bycatch reduction
July 12, 2011
Today, the Bering Sea pollock industry took action to reduce chum salmon bycatch. Through the use of the Inter-cooperative Salmon Agreement, the pollock fishery has agreed to allow SeaState to close an additional 1,000 square nautical miles of fishing grounds to reduce encounters with chum salmon, bringing the total area allowed for closure to 5,000 square nautical miles. This is an area larger than the state of Connecticut, and twenty times larger than the Prudhoe Bay oil fields.
Catch Share program turns by-catch into new source of sustainable seafood.
July 8, 2011
Last week, the northern rockfish fishery opened up in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands. While rockfish is targeted out in Southeast Alaska, this small fishery operates differently and it’s under a somewhat new management style.
It’s only recently that northern rockfish have been treated as anything other than straight-up bycatch. Before the Amendment 80 fleet was established, catcher-processors had a set limit of how much rockfish they could take incidentally while harvesting Pacific Ocean perch or Atka mackerel.
Keep halibut catch sharing facts in mind
September 19th, 2011
The recent debate over the halibut catch sharing plan (CSP) has been plagued with misinformation. Unfortunately, a recent Daily News editorial (“Halibut? Go for two,” Sept. 18) repeats some of that misinformation.
The statement that the Southcentral (Area 3A) charter businesses were cut 30 percent by the limited entry program (LEP) misrepresents the issue. Charter operators called for limited entry because the industry was overcapitalized and charter fishing had depleted accessible areas of halibut.
In response, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council started working on the LEP in 2006 and cautioned the industry that new entrants after 2005 would likely not qualify for a permit. Nevertheless, the announcement was followed by a speculative increase in charter vessels and then a decline that coincides with the national economic recession.
Pioneering Education on Ocean Acidification
Since 2007 NFCC has been a pioneer in informing and preparing the seafood industry, coastal communities, and policy makers to respond effectively to ocean acidification.
Working closely with the Sustainable Fisheries partnership’s Global Ocean Health program http://www.sustainablefish.org/global-programs/global-ocean-health, NFCC has co-hosted workshops for fishermen and seafood companies, published articles in the fisheries trade press, supported production of educational videos, and helped to assemble an informed and capable group of stakeholders and scientists to respond to the causes and consequences of this major change in ocean chemistry.
Caused primarily by industrial society’s vast waste stream of carbon dioxide (CO2), ocean acidification has already increased acidity of the world’s surface oceans by an estimated 30% (as measured by increase in hydrogen ion concentration) since the Industrial Revolution. In many of the world’s most productive marine and estuarine waters, this change has been even more dramatic. Acidification due to CO2 compounds chemical changes induced by runoff of human-released nutrients and resulting eutrophication, freshening of surface ocean waters, and other processes. The consequences for growth, survival, and physiological functions of many shellfish are particularly serious; fish, plankton, and corals are also affected.
Stay tuned for additional information here and at SFP’s website above.
Videos on ocean acidification
NFCC has supported production of videos about ocean acidification featuring scientists and fishermen speaking about the risks it poses for families, jobs, businesses, and marine life.
We worked with the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership (SFP) and several collaborating organizations to assemble the funds, the teams, and the people interviewed in these videos. Special thanks to aerial artist John Quigley of Spectral Q Productions, videographers Leslie Morava and Mark Brinster, Alaska aerial videographer Daniel Zatz, on-the docks organizer Alan Parks, the Alaska Marine Conservation Council, and the hundreds of Alaska fishermen and mariners who poured their energy into the SOS Acid Ocean event in 2009, generating several of the images and interviews shown below.
SOS Acid Ocean and interviews with fishermen
by John Quigley, Leslie Morava, Daniel Zatz, Mark Brinster
Ocean Acidification: perspective from Dr. Mark Green, oceanographer and oyster grower in Maine
Produced by Leslie Morava, supported by SFP and NFCC
The Making of the SOS Acid Ocean Event
by John Quigley, Leslie Morava, Daniel Zatz, Mark Brinster
Steller Sea Lion Recovery Plan
NFCC facilitated the final two meetings of the Steller Sea Lion Recovery Team, in Homer, AK and Seattle, WA, in 2005. NFCC’s efforts succeeded in helping the Recovery Team complete a consensus draft of an updated recovery plan within the deadline set by NOAA.
The Use of Marine Reserves in Fisheries Management
Over the past several years, the National Fisheries Conservation Center has worked with the National MPA Center, NOAA Fisheries, the State of California, several conservation groups, and industry representatives on several projects that examined the interface between the creation of protected areas and fisheries management. By applying tools that were little used in fisheries at the time, such as the scientific consensus conference, decision analysis, and joint fact-finding, as well as cross-jurisdictional case study methods, NFCC provided its audiences and partners information and methods that improved their ability to navigate the complexities of MPA designation and its integration with fishery management.