FarFish was centred on wide scale stakeholder involvement and participatory processes. The objective of this was to involve stakeholders in creating solutions for the policy context. This work was instrumental for achieving specific objectives of the project and for ensuring that projects results would be fit for purpose, accepted and used.
FarFish’s objectives of advancing biological knowledge, which included collecting and collating data related to biological characteristics of the main fish stocks in the CSs, represented a key component of the project. Data was collected from multiple sources and used as input to other work in the project. Much of the data collected is now available for reuse in the FarFish DataBase (FFDB), on Zeondo and in publicly available FarFish deliverables. As part of advancing biological knowledge, FarFish performed an evaluation of current stock assessment models used in each of the CSs, providing important perspective on the appropriateness, relevance and applicability of stock assessment models currently in use within the CSs. The project did as well initiate a pilot self-sampling program to demonstrate how such an approach can be applied to advance biological knowledge in the CSs. This self-sampling programme had the aim of discriminating between two black hake species in catches off the coast of W-Africa and was run by EU and Senegalese fishing vessels. The pilot showed that using self-sampling by fishermen is a viable option for collecting scientifically relevant data.
FarFish awarded significant efforts at mapping and analysing the CS value chains, and the current legal and contractual practices and constraints in these fisheries. This resulted in a comprehensive value chain and governance structure analysis, and associated policy recommendations.
Major component of the FarFish project was to develop so called management recommendations (MRs) for each of the CSs. MR is a formal agreement between resource users (fishing operators) and the relevant authorities on how to reach overall objectives for the respective fishery, by shifting responsibility for the management from authorities (top-down) to the operators (bottom-up). The project produced guidelines on how to develop MRs, and each CS then went through two iterations of developing MRs based on the guidelines. The MRs were then audited by independent auditor to evaluate soundness and success of the MRs.
FarFish developed general fisheries management- and other Decision Support Tools (DSTs) to support the FarFish CSs in developing MRs and to contribute to capacity building. Main results included the development of the FarFish DataBase (FFDB) and DSTs, as well as production of visualization materials to support development of MRs in the CSs.
Tools for using Data Limited Methods (DLM) for stock assessment were developed, interactive maps for analysing satellite and AIS signals have been developed, and an interactive platform to integrate codes visualization and data interaction tools for the selected CSs has been developed as well. The FarFish App was also created, which provides an easy and visual access to data, tools, reports and other results of the project; and allows them to be linked with specific issues or countries.
A major objective of the FarFish project was to build capacities, professional skills and competences of stakeholders within the project’s CSs and beyond within the field of fisheries management. Among capacity building outputs from the project included the development of a special university-level certificate program that was run in Tromso in early 2020, and remains now as e-learning coursed (8 students were graduated from the programme within the lifetime of FarFish), a six-month post-graduate program tailor-made for FarFish that has already graduated 5 students/fellows, e-learning materials tailored for FarFish in statistics, stock assessment and fisheries management where data is limited which are hosted within the Tutor-web platform, and more.
Dissemination of the project itself was also a vital part of FarFish, which included broad scope dissemination to various target audiences, which resulted in high interests all around the world. The project facilitated a large number of workshops and conferences, some of which are available at the project website.
