Building resilience through adaptations to Harvest Control Rules
The annual harvest specifications process is one of the Council’s primary functions, and an “onramp” for using ecosystem and climate information in the management process. As part of its resilience planning, the Council is considering adaptations to harvest control rules (HCRs) for specifying Acceptable Biological Catch (ABC) limits. Based on simulation work by NMFS Alaska Fisheries Science Center scientists, modified HCRs have the potential to more effectively protect spawning biomass for some species and stocks under changing ecosystem conditions. These conditions could include environmental shocks, such as marine heat waves, and longer term changes that impact stock productivity.
This is a collaborative project involving NMFS AFSC scientists, Council staff, plan teams, the SSC, and the Council. This work supports one of the Council’s primary objectives for resilience planning, which is to strengthen the consideration of uncertainty and risk in the harvest specifications process. It is also a priority for implementing the Council’s Climate Resilience Workplan and ideas from the Climate Scenarios Workshop.
The HCR Project Overview provides more background and information on next steps and opportunities for public engagement.
Progress and next steps
Updated June 2026: The Council received an update and discussion paper on this work at its June 2026 Council meeting. The discussion paper describes how risk and uncertainty are currently addressed in the NPFMC harvest specifications process, and progress in moving towards alternative harvest control rules (HCRs).
The Council continues to support evaluation of whether modifying specific groundfish and crab HCRs to better incorporate changing ecosystem conditions is feasible and could improve conservation and/or management performance compared to status quo. Per SSC recommendations, the Council moved to focus immediate HCR considerations on the following stocks: BSAI/GOA pollock, Pacific cod and sablefish. The Council indicated that development of proposed performance metrics should proceed at present using the draft set of objectives in the staff paper, noting that the Council will develop alternatives and consider additional input on objectives once preliminary stock specific results are available to evaluate the trade-offs of different HCRs against these objectives. The Council further requested that the analytical team continue to consider the scalability of this work under varying budget scenarios, which includes reliance on survey data streams that are in flux due to budgets. For more information on the Council’s discussion, see the Council’s motion and June newsletter update.
During the September 2026 Groundfish Plan Team meeting, the Plan Teams will receive an update on preliminary results for the selected stocks from ongoing AFSC coordinated HCR evaluations. Relative to sablefish, the Council recommends further development of the hybrid harvest control rule presented in the preliminary results of the simulations.
This project is currently under development. If and when the Council decides to initiate action, this project could continue to move forward through the usual analytical process, including defining a purpose and need statement. The outcome could be an amendment to one or more FMPs, which would be required to make any changes to existing tier systems and HCRs. One important next step will be for the Council to identify potential objectives and outcomes that it would like to achieve through revised HCRs. This would enable AFSC scientists to propose different ways of structuring HCRs to meet the Council’s objectives, and evaluate how well they perform relative to performance metrics. One example of an objective would be to buffer against environmental shocks and protect long term sustainability. Another important step in this work would be to consider when, for which stocks, and under what circumstances alternative HCRs could go into effect.