Bioeconomic analysis accounting for environmental effects in data-poor fisheries: the northern Labrador Arctic char

Fisheries managers call for more nuanced understandings of complex interactions between exploitation and environmental variability, especially in data poor settings. We develop a bioeconomic model for the Arctic char (Salvelinus alpinus) out of Nain, northern Labrador, incorporating climate variability into growth. We derive parameters necessary for the bioeconomic analysis through optimization and identify optimal equilibrium conditions for the model with and without climate variability. Accounting for variability results in a slightly higher optimal harvest, fishing effort and stock. We find an optimal effort of 591 fishing weeks and harvest of 156 920 kg for 2014, suggesting that both were below optimal. We further find that increased temperature leads to higher optimal effort and net benefits at steady state. Despite numerous uncertainties, data and knowledge gaps limiting the accuracy of our estimates, this is the first effort to identify the equilibrium harvesting conditions for this currently uneconomic, yet socially and culturally important fishery. The methodology can be applicable to other data-deficient fish-eries with similar challenges and unknowns, to advance the understanding of socially optimal harvesting and interactions with environmental variability.