A project to inform fisheries adaptation to climate change is needed in the South East region because:
1) it is an international ‘hotspot’ for marine climate change, which is currently displaying signs of perturbation and where further shifts, shrinkages and expansions of ecosystems and species distributions are expected;
2) it produces >50% of Australia’s seafood and is home to 60% of the Australian population;
3) a formal risk assessment identified fisheries species at highest risk from climate changes are also those with highest economic importance to the region;
4) its fisheries are managed by five separate jurisdictions whose adaption responses will need to be well coordinated if negative impacts are to be reduced effectively and opportunities that arise are to be seized.

With the advent of the Status of Australian Fish Stocks (SAFS) process, there is now a requirement to provide a stock ‘status’ determination in addition to the annual TACC determination. The ‘status’ reflects changes in the overall biomass, the fishing mortality, or in their proxies. This has led to disagreements among researchers, managers and industry, largely due to uncertainty around how best to derive a meaningful overall stock status indicator to meet the requirements of the SAFS reporting process. These higher-level reporting processes are an important demonstration of sustainable management of Australian fisheries, but only if stock status determinations are accurate and defensible.

Australian abalone fisheries primarily use harvest control rules based around CPUE (Kg/Hr) to set TACC. However, with abalone, stable catch-rates may not indicate stable biomass and/or stable density. Catch-rates are frequently criticised because the effort needed to take a quantity of catch may be influenced by density but also by density independent factors such as conditions at the time of fishing, experience, and the ability of fishers to adjust their fishing strategy to maintain catch rates (diver behaviour driven hyper-stability). While there are many issues with the assumption that CPUE is a reliable proxy for abundance, it is assumed to be so despite the absence of robust data to validate use of CPUE in this way. In some jurisdictions CPUE is supplemented by sparse fishery-dependent size and density data. There is an urgent need to review common assumptions, methods and interpretations of CPUE as a primary indicator, and to determine whether inclusion of spatial fishery data could provide a ‘global’ indicator of stock status for abalone fisheries.