Fisheries Impact Pathway: Making Global and Regionalised Impacts on Marine Ecosystem Quality Accessible in Life Cycle Impact Assessment

Abstract

Overexploitation in wild-capture fisheries is a principal driver of marine biodiversity loss. Currently, efforts are underway to improve the representation of marine damage indicators in Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) methods. The recently operationalised fisheries impact pathway has introduced fishing impacts on the marine system into the LCIA framework, and the current work seeks to further develop this complex pathway. In total, 5000+ Characterisation Factors for exploited marine organisms have been re-computed with updated fisheries production data (2018), exploring temporal effects on dynamic, biotic resource impacts. An estimation of discarded unwanted by-catch is incorporated into the characterisation. Regional to global scaling factors are tested for the representation of species-specific vulnerability. The temporal and spatial variations in impacts reflect the dynamic nature of real-world fisheries trends, global average impacts increased by 41% (2015–2018). Discarding as an additive, regional estimate increases impacts, most notably for lower impacted stocks. The retention of species-specific detail relating to species distributions is of particular relevance to fisheries when computing global-scale impacts. Updating CFs improves the relevance of the fisheries impact assessment, and continued periodic re-computation is recommended to maintain relevance with real-world trends. Data availability remains a challenge to large-scale marine impact assessment and the continued development of this emergent impact pathway is expected.