New publication: A scenario tool to foster sustainability transformation

How can we assess sustainability transformations in natural resource sectors in a structured, quantitative way?

In an interdisciplinary team, we develop a novel scenario tool linking ecological, economic, and institutional boundary conditions to explore which sectoral structures are actually viable under different policy choices. While the framework is designed for natural resource sectors in general, we apply it to the German Western Baltic fishery, a sector under pressure from collapsing fish stocks and often regarded as "time machine". We parametrize the tool with knowledge integration from multiple stakeholders.

We find that under low biological productivity, the current harvest quota allocation is not economically viable to most fishery businesses of different types (e.g. small-scale fisheries in main business). This shows very clearly how environmental crises can translate into human crisis. Our results suggest that quota redistribution can help to create viable futures especially for small-scale fisheries, while large-scale fisheries businesses using active gear remain under strong pressure in the Western Baltic Sea.

To make these scenarios accessible, we developed the Fisheries Transformation Tool (FiTT), programmed in Shiny R: ceos.shinyapps.io/ScenarioToolBalticSeaFishery/. It allows users to explore how changes in stock development, quota allocation, prices, costs, and target incomes affect the economic viability of different fishery types. 

We thank all representative of the fisheries sector as well as of politics and public administration for their positive cooperation and trust, and the members of the Leitbildkommission Zukunft der deutschen Ostseefischerei (engl. Commission on the Future of the German Baltic Sea Fisheries, final report (DE)) for their constructive criticism. 

The research was carried out as part of the Spaceparti project under the DAM research mission SustainMare.

You can find the publication here

Riekhof, M.-C., T.Hartig-Thiemann, C.Möllmann, L.Thaller, R.Voss, and H.Schwermer. 2026. “A Scenario Tool for Sustainability Transformation in Fisheries and Beyond.” Sustainable Development1–11. https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.71079.