Swedish COBECOS Pilot Study. Costs and Benefits of Control Strategies in selected Swedish fisheries. Final Report

Designing control and enforcement strategies in the fisheries sector to ensure compliance with existing rules is intricate and often hampered by costs. The EU Sixth Framework Programme Project “Costs and benefits of Control Strategies” (COBECOS; https://cobecos.jrc.ec.europa.eu) tackled this impediment to successful fisheries control and enforcement schemes by developing computer based modelling approaches which help to optimise the cost/benefit ratio of envisioned control/enforcement strategies. This modelling framework is based on theory and empirical estimations aimed at answering questions such as: - What are the costs and benefits of increased enforcement effort in particular fisheries? - If compliance alters (exogenously) in certain fisheries what are the costs and benefits? - What are the impacts of increased penalties for violations of fisheries rules? - How do different control schemes compare when the cost of enforcement is taken into account? In order to test COBECOS using real scenarios, the Joint Research Centre in collaboration with the Swedish Agency for Marine and Water Management (SwAM), applied the COBECOS model to a selection of Swedish fisheries. One of the main deliverables of this project (lacking in the FP6 COBECOS) has been the production of a fully functioning user friendly software. This open source software allows the user to investigate the costs and the benefits of enforcement tools of various fisheries and management situations. It includes default functions but it is flexible enough to allow the user to introduce their own estimations, modify the parameters etc. if so wanted. Results and deliverables are documented in this report.
JRC.G.4-Maritime affairs