Harvest strategies are a key component of contemporary fisheries management; however, they are typically developed and applied at the single-species level. In multi-species fisheries such as the Commonwealth Southern and Eastern Scalefish and Shark Fishery (SESSF), interactions among species and across sectors can limit the effectiveness of single-species approaches and constrain the achievement of broader management objectives. These challenges are compounded by changing environmental conditions, including climate-driven shifts in productivity and species distribution, which further increase uncertainty in management advice.
We outline a conceptual framework for a climate-adaptive and multi-species harvest strategy that incorporates system-level considerations into decision-making, consistent with ecosystem-based fisheries management principles. The framework draws on Risk–Cost–Catch theory to balance trade-offs between biological risk, economic performance, and management cost, and extends traditional harvest control rules to include cross-species constraints and risk-based buffers. Importantly, it seeks to account for the cumulative influence of management settings, fleet behaviour, and external drivers such as climate change that can amplify or mitigate risk but are not typically incorporated within conventional harvest strategy design.
Management Strategy Evaluation will be used to explore the performance of candidate approaches under uncertainty, including variability in recruitment, data quality, and environmental change. This includes testing novel approaches that explicitly account for closures and other operational constraints in shaping realised catch and effort outcomes.
The framework is designed to be transparent, robust, and implementable within existing management processes, providing a pathway to better align harvest strategies with the realities of complex, dynamic multi-species fisheries.