The need for cumulative impact assessment (CIA) of fishing activities is increasingly being recognised. Target species stock assessments typically consider the species of interest as well as other sources of fishing mortality (e.g. discards), but usually do not consider their effects on other fisheries sectors or the effects of other sectors on the focal fishery.

The focus of this project will be developing methods to estimate the cumulative impact from multiple fisheries and sectors (commercial, recreational, indigenous). The assessment framework will be scaleable to include impacts from non-fishing activities in future (e.g. coastal development, habitat loss). This process will be informed by a two-part review of cumulative impacts methods applied elsewhere in the world and a global ERA review to identify cumulative impacts seen in other fisheries.

The methods developed will be used to perform an Australia-wide cumulative impacts assessment, with fishery-specific results, for:

• commonwealth fisheries across ecological components,
• indigenous and recreational sectors that interact with commonwealth fisheries for these components; and
• state and recreational fisheries where they overlap with Commonwealth fisheries.