Assessment of the risk of commercial surface longline fisheries in the southern hemisphere to ACAP species

As noted at CCSBT ERSWG 10 and 11, New Zealand has been intending to extend the risk assessment framework applied to main fishing methods within the New Zealand Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) to a broader set of fisheries as seabirds migrate widely and interact with a wide range of fisheries across multiple EEZ and RFMO. This paper presents the progress on this to date, where the methodology has been applied to public tuna RFMO fishing data throughout the southern hemisphere for the 26 ACAP listed seabird species that breed in the southern hemisphere (Table 1). The intention for this risk assessment is to undertake a second iteration later in 2017 including additional data for tuna RFMOs and including other fishing methods operating within the southern hemisphere.