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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Workshop on the assessment of management measures (WKMSE) of the General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean was held at the headquarters of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Rome, Italy, from 20 to 23 February 2017. The key objectives of the meeting were to: i) review the existing methodologies to perform Management Strategy Evaluation (MSE) simulations and the different harvest control rules used in the GFCM and other regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs); and ii) assess the biological implications of alternative management scenarios for the small pelagic fishery in the Adriatic Sea and the demersal fishery in the Strait of Sicily. The workshop was organized just before the second meeting of the Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) Subregional Committee for the Adriatic Sea (SRC-AS) and of the Subregional Committee for the Central Mediterranean (SRC-CM), to which the conclusions of the discussions were reported. The WKMSE agreed on the formulation of simulation models for both case studies and identified a set of management scenarios to be tested, based on existing recommendations or on basic principles (e.g. FMSY and Bpa). A set of simulations was run during the workshop and the whole set of simulations for all management scenarios were completed after the meeting and results were appended to the report. Simulations showed that under current fishing mortality, all stocks analysed remained outside safe biological limits, while under some of the management scenarios tested, stocks were within safe biological limits and, in some cases, yields recovered to levels similar to those before the management measures.