Publication Abstract

I review the environmental, social and economic performance of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) at the scale of the Regional Advisory Council (RAC) areas based on analyses conducted by the ongoing project ‘Indicators for fisheries management in Europe’. In all the RAC areas considered, the high level objectives of the CFP and the aspirations to integrate ecosystem concerns have proved difficult to meet. In some areas data needs are inadequate to assess environmental, social and economic performance, but the gap between data needs and capacity for data collection will be much reduced if fleet capacity was matched to the productivity of the resources and if the present decreases in exploitation rate that are seen in some RAC areas can be maintained. A major impediment to progress towards an EAF is that the environmental, social and economic objectives of the CFP are known to be incompatible over the short-term; and yet there is no consistent or pre-agreed guidance about how trade-offs among objectives should be made to overcome this incompatibility.