WHAT WE DO
We support our Members in
sustainable tuna management and policy
Our Fisheries Management Division supports our Members to refine and maintain effective policies that help them sustainably manage their tuna fisheries.
These policies can be national, sub-regional and regional.
This work also supports regional solidarity for, and national capacity of, our Members.
Our highest priority is to progress how our Members can manage and develop the tuna industry in, and around, their exclusive economic zones (EEZs)—the EEZs of the Western and Central Pacific Ocean.
How does this relate to our Strategic Outcomes?
Strategies to achieve Strategic Outcome #1 & #2 (from Strategic Plan 2020-25):
- Drive positive action at WCPFC, that is consistent with Members’ interest, including the adoption of WCPFC harvest strategies that maintain stocks above their limit reference points
- Ensure that the management arrangements in FFA EEZs deliver ecologically sustainable offshore fisheries, that also minimise the broader environmental impacts of fishing
- Improve the management of high seas fisheries to ensure in-zone management is not undermined
- Continue to support strong, defensible science and information to inform precautionary and adaptive management
- Understand and manage for the impacts of climate change on offshore fisheries
- Further refine Members’ offshore fisheries rights within EEZs, including through strengthening zone-based management
- Define Members’ fisheries rights on the High- Seas while ensuring zone-based management is not undermined.
- Improved management of Longline fisheries to enhance the social and economic benefits derived by Members.
- Continue to improve the management of the Purse-seine and other fisheries.
This fishery is now fully exploited
It operates at or close to its optimal yield, with no expected room to expand.
This means future development for our Pacific members cannot rely on increasing their catch, but instead on implementing zone-based arrangements to manage the fisheries.
These arrangements give our Members:
- responsibility to conserve and manage resources in their EEZs (through the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea)
- more equitable roles in managing highly migratory species.
Future challenges
We know that future challenges for sustainably managing the fisheries include:
- transitioning the management of targeted fish to agreed harvest strategies
- taking oceanographic cycles and climate change into account in the strategies
- making sure we account for and mitigate impacts on non-target species.
To give this high level of support to our members, we work closely with:
- the Pacific Community’s (SPC) Oceanic Fisheries Programme (the Pacific Community’s regional centre for tuna fisheries and ecosystem research, fishery monitoring, stock assessment and data management)
- our development and operations divisions
- the sub-regional management measures controlled by the Parties to the Nauru Agreement and the South Pacific Group (SPG)