Assessing the impact of environmental variability on harvest in a heterogeneous fishery: a case study of the Canadian lobster fishery

ABSTRACT

Global fisheries face significant challenges in the coming years due to climate change. Understanding and anticipating the impacts of climate change is a necessity for implementing appropriate fisheries management. This study uses a panel dataset of individual fishing vessels to examine how variation in ocean temperature affects fish harvest. Using the American lobster (Homarus americanus) fishery in the Maritimes region of Canada as a case study, this paper employs a generalised linear mixed model (GLMM) taking into account heterogeneity amongst fishers, gear, vessels, and fishing areas. The GLMM is found to have better performance and estimations when compared against alternative specifications. As expected, a significant and positive relationship was found, further contributing to the existing evidence of warming impacts on the lobster fishery. The implications of this study are twofold: first, it provides further evidence that environmental change does have a significant positive impact on harvest. This information should be considered by fishing industry and fisheries authorities when implementing appropriate adaptive management strategies and measures in their decision making. Second, it illustrates that allowing for mixed-effects using GLMMs is a valuable empirical tool when dealing with hierarchical data structures.

KEYWORDS:

• Generalised linear mixed model
• mixed-effects
• bioeconomics
• climate change
• environmental variable
• heterogeneity

JEL CODE:

• C18
• C33
• Q21
• D22
• Q50
• C52
• Q54

Acknowledgements

We thank Barbara Best and Gisele Magnusson at Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) for their gracious assistance in data collection and manuscript review. We also thank Luc Bujold at DFO’s Marine Environmental Data Section for providing bottom temperature data, Zeliang Wang at DFO’s Bedford Institute of Oceanography for providing BNAM model output, and Christine Irwin at DFO’s Economic Analysis and Statistics group for providing shapefiles.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Annual landed values in the last five years were consistently above $1 billion with the exception of 2020, which was valued at $761 million.