Management of the cod resource under the risk of oil spill in the Barents Sea

• Main Author: Zhang, Qiu
• Other Authors: Eric Nævdal
• Format: Master Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2007
• Subjects: VDP::210; Arctic; Barents Sea; Lofoten; Norway; Arctic cod
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10852/17418; http://urn.nb.no/URN:NBN:no-15135

The Barents Sea contains one of Europe s last large, clean and relatively undisturbed marine ecosystems. There are around 150 different fish species in the sea. Among these are some of the world s biggest fish stocks. The North-East Arctic cod (NEA), the species we are going to study in this thesis, is the largest cod stock remaining, accounting for about 50% of the total cod catch (ICES 2005), and is one of the main reasons that Norway is the world s third largest exporter of fish, measured by export value. However, the stocks of NEA cod have decreased considerably over the latest decades and are currently at a poor state. At June 2006 ICES (International Council for the Exploration of the Sea) issued a far lower recommendation for quotas for NEA cod for 2007. ICES recommend that the total quota for NEA cod in 2007 should not exceed 309,000 tons a dramatic fall from the total quota for 2006 of 471,000 tons. Besides the setting of quotas, regulations aiming at protecting young cod such as minimum catching size and minimum mesh size are also adopted. In addition to the serious situation, the NEA cod are now threatened by a new and potentially damaging activity oil and gas development. Large amount of unexploited oil reserves are found in the Lofoten-Barents Sea area. Although there has been no petroleum-exploration in this area so far, the petroleum industry is eager to get access to these fossil resources. However, harsh climate and short and simple food webs make the marine ecosystem of the Barents Sea particularly sensitive to impacts such as pollution from chemicals and oil. A large oil spill would cause dramatic consequences to the marine life in the sea. In this thesis, we focus on the NEA cod, and examine the impact of an oil spill to the cod fishery. The problems we are going to study are: What is the optimal fishing strategy How should we change the fishing strategy once there is an oil spill How does the risk of having an oil spill affect the optimal fishing strategy compared with the deterministic one? ...