The North Pacific Fishery Management Council manages fisheries in some of the most productive and rapidly changing ecosystems in the world. Planning for resilience–including resilience to environmental changes and shocks such as marine heat waves, as well as changing social, economic, and market conditions–is important for supporting sustainable and productive fisheries and the communities that depend on them.
Resilience planning is a current focus of the Council’s work with additional support provided by Inflation Reduction Act funding. The Council is also committed to ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM) and using the best scientific information available to inform its management recommendations. The Council is advancing EBFM and planning for resilience by focusing on the following priorities.
- Develop management policies that are resilient to changing environmental and fishery conditions
- Continue work to incorporate local and traditional knowledge, following the guidance in the Council’s Local Knowledge, Traditional Knowledge, and Subsistence Policy and Protocol
- Strengthen the consideration of uncertainty and risk in harvest specifications.
Resilience planning spans all of the Council’s work. A recent summary of the Council’s recent resilience planning work is available here (Section 5.10).
Join our opt-in resilience planning email list for periodic updates on the Council’s resilience planning work.
Staff contact is Katie Latanich: 907-271-2809
Resilient Management Policies
The Council develops policy guidance, including Fishery Management Plan goals and objectives as well as cross-FMP policies, to communicate its priorities and guide the integration of ecosystem information and resilience planning considerations into Council management recommendations. A library of the Council’s policy guidance is available on the Management Policies page.
The Council recently completed a review of the Groundfish Management Policy contained within the BSAI and GOA Groundfish FMPs, and is considering revisions to the Policy including language related to ecosystems and integration of LKTK. The Council tasked the Ecosystem Committee with helping develop revised policy language.
Harvest Control Rule Adaptations
The Council is considering adaptations to the harvest control rules (HCRs) for some groundfish and crab stocks, to ensure the harvest specifications process continues to perform well and support long-term sustainability and productivity amid environmental changes and shocks such as marine heat waves. HCRs are predetermined guidelines regarding how much fishing can take place, based on indicators of the targeted stock’s biological status.
Project resources and updates are available on the HCR Project Page. A summary of the Council’s current harvest specifications process is provided in this June 2026 discussion document.
This work also aligns with one of the main priorities in the Council’s Climate Resilience Work Plan, implemented in December 2024. The work plan is focused on 1) expanding the Council’s processes, collaborations, and partnerships to facilitate inclusion of multiple knowledge systems in climate planning, and 2) considering management tools and options that can include existing and emergent climate information. Council staff and AFSC scientists are documenting progress toward workplan implementation using a tracking tool. The most recent version is available here.
Resources and completed projects
- Climate Change Task Force Final Report (2024)
- Climate Scenarios Workshop and Report (2024)
- Climate Readiness Synthesis (2022)