Impacts of COVID19 on the Australian Seafood Industry: Extending the assessment to prepare for uncertain futures

Funded Activity Summary

In March 2021 the FRDC published an initial rapid assessment - Impacts of COVID19 on the Australian Seafood Industry: January-June 2020 - of the direct and indirect effects of disruption to seafood production, supply chains and markets caused by the global COVID19 pandemic. That assessment covered the initial period of the shocks wrought by COVID19 and demonstrated the availability of data to support rapid assessment in such conditions.

However gaps remain to be addressed, including:
1. comprehensive coverage of production effects in fishing and aquaculture across all Australian jurisdictions,
2. coverage of impacts on recreational fishing activity and Indigenous commercial seafood activities;
3. assessment of emerging medium-term impacts (such as changes in Australian consumer purchasing behaviours, structural effects in labour markets and export-oriented sectors, effects of alterations in tourism patterns); and the interactions with non-CV-19 impacts (such as trade tensions affecting exports); and
4. the effectiveness of crisis responses.
Furthermore, the capacity to access data to support rapid assessment in times of systemic shock needs to be consolidated. Finally, insights from rapid assessments need to be harvested to provide Australia with a framework for assessment of systemic (i.e. large-scale, multi-level) risk to the Australian seafood community.

This project addresses these needs through a follow-up Impact assessment report which is more comprehensive, given data availability. The follow up report will include case studies of crisis responses by key government and industry decision makers, and the lessons learned for preparedness for future shocks. It will develop a Guideline for rapid assessment of economic and social effects in fisheries and aquaculture, which will contribute to FRDC's capacity for rapid appraisal and assessments. The guideline will include quality assurance steps to be applied to rapid assessments. Finally, the project proposes to draw insights from this more comprehensive assessment to identify what risk factors to assess, and how, in order to prepare for systemic shocks in future.

Objectives:
1. Complete assessment of impact of COVID-19 on Australia's commercial, recreational and charter fisheries and aquaculture sectors for the period July 2020 to June 2021
2. Determine what were effective responses and interventions using selected case studies to inform preparedness for future shocks
3. Document all data streams and their source (organisation, private data, public domain data) - STOP / GO MILESTONE
4. Develop guidelines for data production, governance and use when rapid situational assessments are required.
5. Develop a framework for systematic risk assessment
6. Develop 'data architecture' for a portal to access live/near-real time data to support early detection and risk assessment of large-scale shocks (architecture to include: data sources, access and permissions; display; outputs)

Funded Activity Details

Start Date: 21-12-2021

End Date: 15-03-2024

Funding Scheme: Funding Scheme not available

Funding Amount: $179,564.00

Funder: Fisheries Research and Development Corporation

Research Topics

ANZSRC Field of Research (FoR)

There are no FoR codes available for this funding activity

ANZSRC Socio-Economic Objective (SEO)

There are no SEO codes available for this funding activity

Other Keywords

Consumer | Data | Economic | Human Dimensions Research | Import/Export | Production | Supply Chain

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