To assess whether the ESD and MEE objectives are met there is a need to determine the status of prawns stocks in the NPF and to develop guidelines to define whether the present status of the stocks may require management actions. It is important to precisely define what population parameters should be monitored and what biological reference points should these parameters be compared in order to determine whether management action is required. The Northern Prawn Fishery Assessment Group (NPFAG) has identified that spawning stock biomass and standardised fishing effort are the two most important indicators for target stocks in the NPF. The NPFAG has also established that targets and limits for these indicators need to be set and reassessed as new information is collected. The NPFAG has also recommended that future advice provided to them by researchers should include an explicit measurement of the probabilities that each of these targets may be exceeded. Calculation of such probabilities requires formal risk analysis to be carried out as part of the stock assessment.

Additionally, there are a number of future management options that have been recently considered by NORMAC. These include reductions of pool of the licensing units used in the NPF, (A-units, representing vessel length and engine power), gear restrictions as well as further seasonal and spatial closures. Although the operational implications of adopting some of these options have been the subject of NORMAC discussions, the scientific evaluation of options is not carried out in a structured framework but rather as individual assessments as different options are proposed by NORMAC. There is a need to establish a structured framework for management strategy evaluation so that the NPFAG and NORMAC can compare different options in a consistent way. This framework for management strategy evaluation should allow for the integration of risk analysis into the evaluation of management options. The consequences of each management strategy should be quantified and evaluated against the indicator of performance established by the NPFAG. The evaluation should include the estimation of the probability that, in the future, certain undesirable or desirable states of the stock are reached.