Possible economic impact on coastal fish stock resources in Bangladesh in the case of climate change

Abstract

The Bay of Bengal fishery in Bangladesh is the most important and the predominant fishery in the country. Effort data from 1985-1986 to 2007-2008 is standardised to a standard year 2007-2008 (fish trawler) vessel and standardised effort has together with catch data been used to calculate the parameter values for the Gordon-Schafer surplus production model. The parameterised models are used to estimate the biological parameters, maximum sustainable yield, maximum economic yield and open access equilibrium. The analysis indicates that present level of effort in the fishery is very close to the level of maximum sustainable yield (of about four thousand tonnes), but increase in cost and population related to recent changes in fishing pattern may show this situation is unsustainable. The model results are not pointing at any severe biological overfishing. But, on the other hand, economic overfishing started several years before. The model has also been studied under nine climate scenarios where assuming each represents possible climate change consequences. Similarly the output of three reference equilibriums have been studied for each climate scenarios.The paper analyses the potential of climate effects for changing the intrinsic growth rate, carrying capacity, profitability by the Bay of Bengal fisheries.