Much effort has been placed over the last couple of decades on the development of harvest strategies, stock assessments, risk assessments and the strategic use of ecosystem models to facilitate meeting the needs of the Commonwealth’s Harvest Strategy Policy. A focus on modelling to improve fisheries management has required effort towards method development. However, little effort has been made towards revisiting and updating the biological parameters that fundamentally underpin such modelling (e.g. growth rates, age and size at maturity, natural mortality rates, dietary information, mixing rates and stock structure) and the tools or methods used to derive them. As a result, most models now rely on parameters and community dietary data derived from information collected during the 1970s-1990s, (e.g. available maturity ogives for blue-eye trevalla are over 20 years old), or information that is borrowed from other regions or species. Whether such old or borrowed values are now representative for commercial Australian fish species is unknown but many factors point to major changes occurring in our marine environment. Australian waters in the south east and south west are climate hotspots and, overall, Australian waters have warmed faster than the global average. Key components of the productivity of marine fish (growth, maturity, and recruitment) are expected to be undergoing directional changes under a changing climate and it is entirely possible that there have been changes in fundamental productivity parameters for some Australian stocks. The reliance of current assessments on what is likely to be out-of-date information leads to increased uncertainty, which propagates into management decisions. Without an understanding of any changes in biological parameters and how any change might impact assessment frameworks, determining whether current management measures are ensuring sustainability becomes highly uncertain.

There is widespread evidence, in Australia and internationally, of increased need for an improved, practical approach to integrated management (IM) of fisheries and other coastal marine activities that is able to fully embrace the social, economic and institutional aspects (the so-called ‘human dimensions), of management. Assessment and management systems traditionally neglect the human dimensions. Further, they treat sectors separately, often with different authorities managing diverse activities in different ways, resulting in inconsistencies in management across activities. The result is that there is almost no consideration of the cumulative social, economic or ecological impacts of multiple activities, and no way of informing trade-offs among activities in management decision-making.
Experience to date is that IM has been only partially successful. Management of multiple activities has been additive…squeezing one activity in among others (e.g aquaculture in light of others). While there are some examples of movement toward IM, these have resulted in partial or temporary success. There are examples where management has started toward IM, but progress has been stalled or has fallen back. In general, many preconditions exist, but it has been hypothesized that management is missing key aspects of intentional design that would allow IM to proceed.
The proposed workshop will bring together those with both the science knowledge and the operational knowledge of 8-10 Australian IM case studies and a few with international expertise, to evaluate and compare experience towards identifying key elements of success and failure of Integrated Management.