PECUNIA - Issuu

from EU Research Spring 2021

Combining Actuarial and Behavioural Perspectives to the Understanding of Longevity Risk

Assessing the costs and outcomes of healthcare

Healthcare costs are rising across the EU, and the burden is likely to intensify in future with the cost of caring for people with mental health diseases set to increase. Researchers in the PECUNIA project are developing new, more systematic, harmonised and comparable methods of assessing healthcare interventions, which could in future lead to more optimised, cost-effective care, as Professor Judit Simon explains.

Many European countries spend

a significant proportion of national income on healthcare, and the financial burden is set to increase further in future, with the cost of mental healthcare likely to lead to significant strain on healthcare organisations. The outlook is set to further worsen, with the COVID-19 pandemic expected to have longterm consequences on mental health amongst the general public. With governments and healthcare organisations looking to control costs while at the same time providing highquality care, it’s important to rigorously assess the costs and effects of different interventions, a topic at the heart of the PECUNIA project. “This project is addressing the issue of increasing healthcare costs,” says Judit Simon, Professor of Health Economics at the Medical University of Vienna, the coordinator of the project. Healthcare costs currently account for about 10 percent of national income across EU countries, the second highest government spending category after social protection, which Professor Simon says is the result of an enormous increase in demand for care, along with the availability and cost of new technologies. “We need this cost-effectiveness information, derived from economic evaluations, in order to provide more efficient care across healthcare systems and achieve the best value care possible,” she continues.

PECUNIA project

This is an issue Professor Simon and her colleagues from six European countries in the project are working to address by establishing a standardised approach to assessing the impact of healthcare interventions in the EU. Currently, there are not really any tools available to compare the results of economic evaluations conducted in different countries, while Professor Simon is also considering the wider importance of health in the project. “The EU published a strategy document several years ago which states that health is not just a value in itself, but is also very important for economic growth and prosperity,” she explains. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic illustrates the importance of public health to the wider economy, but the so-called inter-sectoral consequences of healthcare interventions are often not considered in economic evaluations. “In these evaluations the health and social care costs of interventions and consequences are commonly measured, but very often healthcare interventions have a wider impact, for example on our opportunities to work and study,” points out Professor Simon. The wider aim in the project is to develop methods and tools that enable such multisectoral, multi-national and multi-person economic evaluations, focusing in particular on mental healthcare. A mental healthcare intervention doesn’t affect just the individual concerned, but also their families and the people that care for them, while it also has an influence on the opportunities that may be open to them in future. “The treatment costs are the direct costs of healthcare, while these inter-sectoral costs fall outside the healthcare sector. For example, people may be unable to work, or to finish their studies, or there may be legal consequences,” explains Professor Simon. Researchers now aim to consider these types of costs in the project and build a deeper picture of the impact of different healthcare interventions, work which is by nature comparative. “Economic evaluations are comparative – for example you compare the cost of ‘no treatment’ to the cost of ‘treatment’, or you compare an existing medication which is already on the market and is commonly used to a newly developed medication, or you want to focus on comparing the consequences of prevention and early intervention options with different treatment options,” outlines Professor Simon.

Healthcare questionnaires and other new PECUNIA tools

Researchers in the project are developing a questionnaire, the so called Resource Use Measurement (RUM) questionnaire, which would enable the collection of a wider variety of data. This covers not just the health and social care consequences of an intervention, but also the impact on other sectors, including education, employment, (criminal) justice and those for the patients and families. “An instrument is under development which could be used in different countries with different languages, opening up the opportunity to collect information and data from a variety of settings in a harmonised way with one tool. For example, we are collecting information on the care burden facing families; how many hours do they have to support a family member due to ill-health?” explains Professor Simon. By developing a comprehensive new RUM questionnaire, researchers hope to overcome issues around the fragmentation of data and the varying levels of routine data collection and data linkage opportunities across different European countries. This will then provide the foundations for more detailed and comprehensive analyses, believes Professor Simon. “We can really evaluate the broader inter-sectoral impacts of an intervention by directly collecting this information from patients,” she continues. “Through the RUM questionnaire we collect information on, for example how many days someone was in hospital, how many times they visited their GP, or how many days they were unable to work. In order to estimate the costs, we need to know the average cost of each of these items, the so called unit costs, but this information is currently not widely available. Only a few countries have developed databases for such unit costs and it is often calculated in different ways,” says Professor Simon.

Treatment costs are the direct costs of healthcare, while inter-sectoral costs fall outside

the healthcare sector. For example people may be unable to work, or to finish their studies.

This limits efforts to compare economic evaluations across different countries, even in cases where the same question was being addressed, simply because the unit costs that are used have been developed with completely different methods. This is another major area of interest in the project. “In parallel to our work on RUM, we are also considering the costs of all the services and resource use items that have been identified,” outlines Professor Simon. Researchers are now developing harmonised methods to calculate so called ‘Reference Unit Costs’ for the most important services. “We are developing tools which follow the basic PECUNIA Costing Concept, where we really go back to the basics of costing,” continues Professor Simon. “We have ten partners from six countries in the project. If the information that goes into calculating those costs is standardised, then in future economic evaluations you will be comparing apples with apples and not apples with oranges.”

The countries represented within PECUNIA also organise their healthcare provision differently, with varying levels of state and private sector involvement and different funding structures, which is an important consideration in terms of the project’s wider agenda. Researchers reviewed the literature, then conducted surveys about services and resources used in the different sectors in the six countries, including healthcare, social care, education, (criminal) justice and those costs directly impacting patients and families, from which

Professor Simon and her colleagues were able to gain some deeper insights. “We came up with so-called PECUNIA Service and Resource Item Lists for each country. We noticed that because the systems are so different, the items in these lists are also extremely different,” she says. The central idea behind harmonisation in the PECUNIA Costing Concept is to move away from the name of services - and linked system dependency of services - towards units of analysis which are comparable across countries. “A healthcare service may be understood differently in different countries. We have developed these units of analysis which can be coded according to internationally recognised classifications and reflect costs more accurately,” explains Professor Simon. “This information will be included in our PECUNIA Reference Unit Cost Compendium. So when someone is working with this information, they will also know whether it is for the public sector, the private sector, or if it is a mixed estimate,” outlines Professor Simon. This is a highly complex project, and coordinating it has proved very timeconsuming and demanding, yet Professor Simon says they have made significant progress in research. “One big achievement in the project has been to highlight why current cost estimates may not be comparable,” she says. “We’ve developed new concepts and methods for costing in economic evaluations that allow harmonised costing across sectors, countries, and people.” The project’s agenda also includes assessing the outcomes of healthcare interventions, which again may not be directly comparable, as different countries may use different tools or assess the value of quality of life in different ways. “To harmonise outcome assessment, we are developing an electronic compendium of information,” explains Professor Simon. A type of measure called PROMs (Patient Reported Outcome Measures) is central to this work. “This is the cornerstone of patient-centred care – that patients are able to self-report on their quality of life and their wellbeing,” continues Professor Simon. “We are looking at the questionnaires that are currently used in healthcare to assess quality of life and well-being, often in a generic way or within the mental health context, and collect structured information so that future studies can select and use the best and most suitable methods for PROMs assessment. In addition, we developed harmonised methods for the assessment of health-related quality of life at pan-European and supra-national levels to promote the feasibility of assessment at the EU level, across multiple countries or even in a single country where national valuation is currently not available.” While the above methods have now been developed to conduct Europe-wide health economic evaluations, Professor Simon and the PECUNIA Consortium have some plans for further research beyond the end of the project. “We are very much hoping to continue together and develop these European-wide, harmonised unit costing tools further. We want to make European economic evaluations much more comparable and to improve patient access to high-quality and efficient services in all EU countries,” she says. The project’s work will provide an important resource to researchers and organisations looking to optimise healthcare provision. “It is very important that these tools are known to decision-makers, then they can be incorporated as a gold standard in future guidelines and analyses,” stresses Professor Simon. “We are moving towards piloting and testing our tools with users and bringing them to a broader audience.”

ProgrammE in Costing, resource use measurement and outcome valuation for Use in multi-sectoral National and International health economic evaluAtions Project Objectives

PECUNIA aims to establish standardised costing and outcome assessment measures for optimised national healthcare provision in the European Union. The methods and tools to be developed within PECUNIA will be used to enhance efficient and evidence-based collaborative care models and intersectoral funding arrangements to improve chronic and mental health care in all EU health systems.

Project Funding

Funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 779292.

PECUNIA Final Workshop

2nd virtual satellite workshop on 1-2 June 2021 to present the developed PECUNIA tools. More information: https://www.pecunia-project.eu/

Project Partners

• Medical University of Vienna (AT) • Universitätsklinikum Hamburg-Eppendorf, European Research and Project Office GmbH (Eurice) (D) • Corvinus University of Budapest (H) • Servicio Canariuo de la Salud, Asociación Científica Psicost (ES) • Maastricht University, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam (NL) • London School of Economics, University of Bristol (UK)

Contact Details

Prof. Dr. Judit Simon Professor of Health Economics Head of Department & Deputy Head of Center Coordinator Doctoral Program Public Health Medical University of Vienna Center for Public Health Department of Health Economics Kinderspitalgasse 15, 1090 Vienna, Austria E: judit.simon@meduniwien.ac.at W: https://healtheconomics.meduniwien.ac.at W: https://www.pecunia-project.eu/ : https://twitter.com/Pecunia_EU

Professor Judit Simon

Judit Simon is Professor and Head of the Department of Health Economics (DHE) and Deputy Head of the Center for Public Health at the Medical University of Vienna (MUV) in Austria. She also coordinates the Doctoral Programme Public Health and leads the Health Economics Programme Line at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Applied Diagnostics. Previously she held positions at the LSE, UCL and University of Oxford where she remains Visiting Professor of Cognitive Health Economics at the Department of Psychiatry.

Why innovations die............................

With 100 billion precious euros invested in the Horizon Europe budget for research and innovation from 2021-2027, the awkward question is always lurking in the shadows, ‘how much of this investment comes to nothing?’ The so-called Valley of Death, the dreaded graveyard of projects where they cost too much to develop and effectively become filed, redundant and forgotten must reveal some clues about why innovation falters. Beyond this, even with prototypes, even with launched products or services – sometimes the obvious is missed when attempting to create for industry.

By Richard Forsyth

Whilst the business mantra of the era seems to be ‘it’s OK, or can even be good to fail’ that obviously only rings true if we learn from and use failure. Indeed, failure is intrinsically part of scientific discovery, testing new ideas and trialling new technologies. However, when projects are aiming to reimagine services and products to improve society, failure can be both awkward and embarrassing. What’s more, the truth is that amazing inventions that have failed to make an impact in society are littered throughout history, many caught in that perilous space between the laboratory and the market, the dramatically described Valley of Death. However, the Valley of Death is just one potential trap in an innovation cycle, which is a perilous and long journey, rife with potential to get things wrong.

There are many immediate clues to why some innovations do not transcend the boundaries to industrial, commercial or any form of success. Commercialisation, the business world, can often be a leap too far for academia to bridge. So what needs are projects not taking into account, for them to fail to pervade into the world beyond the university bubbles? One statistic claims that only an estimated 1 in 5,000 to 10,000 innovations make it through the Valley of Death to market implementation, and even those that do make it, often fizzle soon after in obscurity, or because they are not marketed, or they are superseded. Innovation can die at many stages, from a realisation it’s not feasible, to failing to create a prototype, to failing to understand its cost, value or even if it will be wanted by industry. We need to take a hard look at those touchpoints where invention dies, because frankly, this is the most likely outcome.

Falling into the money-pit

Innovation is risky financially, and there are rarely open taps of money that don’t at some point need to be turned off to prevent further losses. Commercialisation takes brave and sustained investment and the innovation process itself can often simply run out of cash as investors exhaust their patience and coffers with a project, however brilliant and promising. Development is often measured in years and even if a project makes it to the creation of a viable product or service it can still be tottering on the edge of the Valley of Death’s unforgiving canyon walls for a decade beyond that benchmark. An awareness of a company’s appetite and capability for the long game, coupled with a shrewd understanding of navigating public and government funding will be qualities that could literally pay dividends one day.

With just a prototype, the first 3 to 5 years would require investment and there would be no return on that. It’s been toted that around 90 percent of start-ups fail within the first three years, because they lack venture capital backing, and if a business model is lacking, they will fail to reap any kind of return.

Deep pockets are more commonly in short supply. It is critical to understand how finances are possible for at least five years and sustained pitching and hustling for investment is recommended whether to business angels, partners or public bodies and the government, as part of the on-going process. There can be ‘tucked away’ grants, but they won’t magically appear, they have to be rooted up and exploited. There is also a point where failure must be accepted if the progress and projections look starkly grim. Sometimes no amount of wishing can make a case for success.

Why innovations die............................

There are many immediate clues to why some innovations do not transcend the boundaries to industrial, commercial or any form of success. Commercialisation, the business world, can often be a leap too far for academia to bridge.

Bad timing ruins the moment

A common reason for stumbling innovation is simply because the market is not ready for it. Take electric cars. The technology is clearly here today and we insist at a government policy level, that they must succeed. However, despite making progress the hard fact is that they rely on the need for a comprehensive infrastructure of charging points – without which they can be limited in range compared to petrol driven vehicles. When the supporting infrastructure is mature, the electric vehicle market can appeal to everyone, not merely a segmented demographic of green-minded consumers or penny-counting fleet operators.

In addition, unless there is a pressing need for your innovation to solve a genuine problem, it may be simply a novelty and not a revelation. People and businesses can often get by with familiar clumsier methods and products than your innovation looks to replace, because they already fulfil a basic need and are established. The market must be ready for your solution, for the change it presents. The business successes and pivots seen during the pandemic show clearly that the environment for innovation can be key to its success or failure.

For a commercial success, market research should not be marginalised. Rather than just looking at the advantages and unique selling points of your innovation, assess the disadvantages compared to existing technology and services. Have an objective view. What market conditions are needed for success, realistically? A difficult trend to accept is also that in the rush to be first with a technology, often the industry is not ready for the flawed first attempts, but the chances are they will be later on with following, matured, better designed and easier to integrate, similar technologies.

Off with the lab coat, on with the suit

Finding a route to market involves the right partner or partners, the right plan and considerations for all the business aspects of commercial rollout, from legal and regulatory considerations to sales and marketing. Distribution partners should be in the mix and an understanding of

supply chain is also necessary. Innovations when scaled up can require manufacturing, importing, exporting and reselling so bridging from the lab to the market needs an acute understanding of business operations. For completed, functioning innovation to become a business, critical moments of launching the innovation, marketing it, selling it, supplying it, and scaling up must be calculated. For SMEs and Start-Ups, knowledge of how to access a market is as crucial as funding. A problem can sometimes be that a project begins in the Public Sector, moves to Public-Private Partnerships and finally has to transcend to the Private Sector, in what could be described as ‘a dance of differences’.

As innovators, you may be clueless at the business-side, so it may be advisable to be conscious incompetents and find partners with the skills needed for Start-Up success. Being an innovator does not necessarily make you business savvy and that is worth knowing, to seek the right advice, in order to make wise early decisions before time and money is wasted, when pursuing commercial success. For ideas that are deemed potential failures by, for instance, a potential business partner, transparency of criteria for decision making would also be useful for sharing. Understanding why an idea falls short, yet has potential, may mean it simply needs to be redeveloped or reimagined.

Understanding ‘why?’ is everything

There is power following a grander goal, aiming to change the world in some way. In this context, it’s worth understanding that so many innovations were born from necessity, almost accidently discovered or forced into existence whilst pursuing big aims. In 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the lunar surface with the help of the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC). It was such an advanced innovation it paved the way to the entire computer industry. This was perhaps the commercial success story of the lunar landing, the birth of a global industry. Intel Corp would probably have never been founded without the R&D from those space missions. Scott Hubbard, who worked for NASA for 20 years said: “Power consumption. Mass. Volume. Data rate. All the things that were important to making space flight feasible led to major changes in technology”. If you have a sense of true purpose in an industry, innovation can become a necessity uncovered. Focusing clearly on ‘why’ the innovation is needed can keep a project on the rails to commercialisation.

For humans, consider human factors

Great ideas are only great if people ‘get’ them and ‘use’ them. Take Virtual Reality. Here’s a good example of something that has been a product in many forms but seems ultimately to fail to meet its promise commercially. There have been so many attempts to make Virtual Reality an everyday household application but eventually all these VR concepts, some taken up by major companies and rolled out with fanfare and massive marketing, never really capture the mass market as hoped for, despite their brilliance.

The boldest attempt is PlayStation’s rollout of a VR headset, but even here, a year after its 2016 launch, CEO John Kodera revealed the VR market remained “below market forecasts”.

Similarly, Google stopped sales of their VR attempt, Daydream, declaring that ‘there hasn’t been the broad consumer or developer adoption we hoped for’.

One good reason for this is human factors. Wearing a device the size and weight of a full lunchbox from your eyes is not something most of us are prepared to do for long periods of the day.

“One of the main reasons why VR is not booming into the consumer segment is because of the uncomfortable, clunky headsets – even early VR adopters have complained of mental fatigue due to prolonged use of VR headsets.” An observation from tech commentator Prabhu Ram, Head - Industry Intelligence Group (IIG), CyberMedia Research (CMR).

A common reason for stumbling innovation is simply because the market is not ready for it.

For commercial rollout especially; easy, fast and convenient is expected as standard. Since Apple’s revelation of using fingers to point our way through mobile phone options via touchscreens, we truly perceive the expectation to have intuitive tech. The basics for car design have not changed and that is because the design of steering wheel and pedals is universally accepted by everyone, is intuitive, and it works. It is now standard for designers to place heavy emphasis on human factors, on how intuitive, how easy the user interfacing is in innovation.

The rule is ‘simplify’, not to be mistaken with making it simple, but instead simplifying its use, design, operability. Everything from ergonomics, aesthetic appeal, to usability should be taken seriously if innovation is to appeal to us humans. Elon Musk, now the richest innovator in the world, understands the significance of how something looks, feels and is operated – from Tesla cars to space suits, it’s the details, the appeal and how something looks and feels that makes an innovation elevate from useable to desirable. It’s the same for services, as it is for products – think ‘human’.

Culture clashes, stakeholder engagement and miscommunication

If you are targeting a market sector, you need to take into account the cultures in those sectors to succeed. A massive IT project rollout in the UK for the NHS arguably failed because of a clash of cultures and authorities, namely the people who run hospitals vs IT technicians. The publicly funded rollout of a unified health records system for British citizens was supposed to serve 40,000 GPs across 300 hospitals in one of the biggest IT projects in history. The system was supposed to be a dramatic transformational approach to replace the varied existing systems, rather than an evolutionary approach involving the healthcare operations at ground level. There did not seem to be an appreciation of how healthcare had been functioning. The stakeholders, the healthcare workers themselves were not really involved in the process of change. Who had authority, accountability and responsibility – the IT crowd or the GPs? Two very different cultures, that arguably did not harmonise to make this a success.

A takeaway from this catastrophic failure, is involve the end user before big decisions. Understand how they work and ask if there are reasons why your innovation will fail because it does not fit into the culture, flow and daily grind, because without adoption and acceptance, however good it is in terms of functionality, it’s ultimately pointless.

It is the hope of all project co-ordinators, scientists and inventors that there will be a positive legacy, that the project marks the beginning of something rather than an end. Likewise, there is pressure on budget allocators to create return on investment. For innovation, which is science’s practical gift to the world and its citizens, it is clear that there is a vast and varied range of practical considerations needed for success, coupled with a broad understanding of markets, users and needs. The good news is that those research and development projects that do succeed can really change sectors for the better, and overall, make up for the failures. One report by Science/Business found that with a broad economic analysis of long-term return on one euro of public investment in research, projects had a 20% return. So, despite the proliferation of failures in RoI, the successes make it all worth it in the grand scheme. And of course, it’s not all about money. The science generated by projects can be priceless for our society and many a project that looks off to the accountants, is gold dust to engineers, visionaries, thinkers, developers and scientists who may need such steppingstones of knowledge for their own worthy endeavours.

Fishing fleets from across the world converge on certain areas of the oceans, but it is not always clear what they catch and in what quantities. The FarFish project aims to develop new tools and methods to improve fisheries management, with the wider goal of supporting the long-term sustainability and profitability of the industry, as Jónas R. Viðarsson explains.

Many European fishing fleets travel

far from their own shores to catch a variety of species, in some cases sailing as far as the Pacific Ocean or the Indian Ocean. For example, the international waters of the South-West Atlantic are extremely important fishing grounds for the Spanish fleet, while the region also attracts vessels from other parts of the world. “Fleets from basically all over the world fish there,” says Jónas Viðarsson, Director of the value creation division at Matis in Iceland. However, it is not clear how much fish is caught there, while some of the fleets operate according to different rules.

“EU fleets have to comply with EU legislation regardless of where they are fishing. This creates a lack of level playing field with other fleets in the area that don’t have to comply to such strict regulations established with the aim of fishing in a sustainable manner” continues Viðarsson.

FarFish project

However, a number of the other fleets operating in the SW-Atlantic high Seas area follow a different set of rules, and as things stand now, no organisation is taking overall responsibility for fisheries management there, a situation that is paralleled in many other parts of the oceans. As the coordinator of the FarFish project, an initiative which brings together 21 different partners from both within the EU and outside it, Viðarsson aims to develop new tools and methods for fisheries management, while also supporting knowledge-sharing between scientists. “We are encouraging dialogue between different countries. For example, we are organising a conference focusing on high seas fisheries in the South Atlantic,” he outlines. “It is important to get the scientists involved in stock assessment and fisheries to talk together.”

Growing seafood demand has created pressure on fish stocks around the world.

EU fleets must comply with EU legislation regardless

of where they are fishing within or outside European waters. These strict regulations are established with the aim of ensuring that the EU fleet conducts its fisheries in a sustainable manner at all times.

The majority of fishing fleets of course want to maximise their catch and overall profitability, but this must also be compatible with the long-term goal of maintaining stocks of many different species in the oceans. A lot of attention in research is therefore devoted to assessing fish stocks and identifying the Maximum Sustainable Yield. “This is something that we are always looking at,” stresses Viðarsson. Fisheries are an important part of the economy in many parts of the world, and there is a general awareness of the need to protect stocks, yet Viðarsson says it can be difficult to assess the abundance of different species. “We often do not have reliable information about what is being caught in certain regions and who is fishing there,” he says. “So stock assessment and fisheries management are quite complicated.” This is an issue high on the project’s agenda, with researchers working to develop new tools and assessment methods, based on data gathered in the oceans. The project is based around stakeholder involvement and outreach, with scientists gathering data on six case study areas, including both the South-West- and South-East Atlantic high

seas areas, as well as four areas subject to sustainable fisheries partnership agreements with the EU (Cape Verde, Senegal, Mauritania and Seychelles). “We have been collecting and analysing data on fish biology, ecology, and the surrounding ecosystems,” says Viðarsson. “We have been investigating the fisheries management tools that are available

in these six different fisheries areas across the world, and at what data is available for doing these assessments. We have also been doing value-chain analysis, and developing decision-support tools.”

The situation in each of these six case study areas is very different, with the project seeking to build a deeper picture of the specific challenges they face, as well as the social and economic factors that may affect fisheries management. One of the main species of interest in the project is tuna, which has been over-fished in some parts of the oceans to a point where some types are at risk of extinction, underlining the importance of effective management. “It is important to sustainably harvest these resources,” stresses Viðarsson.

A large part of the project’s work is about knowledge sharing and competence building, both within the EU fleet and in partner countries. This takes place through programmes in schools and universities, as well as other outreach activities. “We are working with our partners in Senegal, Mauritania, Cape Verde and Seychelles, as well as in Brazil, and other countries with sustainable fisheries partnership agreements with the EU,” outlines Viðarsson. The overall fisheries picture is highly dynamic however, and fish populations may move to different areas as the temperature of the oceans change, another topic of interest to Viðarsson and his colleagues in the project. “We have been looking for example at how the environment is affecting small pelagics off the West coast of Africa. It seems likely that some species will move because of climate change,” he says.

Consumer demand

This is clearly an important issue for fishing fleets, as they need to identify grounds where they can catch enough fish to meet consumer

©LDAC

demand, while preserving the sustainability of the resource. Fish are a major part of the local diet in many parts of the world, providing a source of omega-3 and many important vitamins, yet growing demand is likely to be met primarily from aquaculture rather than wild fisheries, believes Viðarsson. “The total global wild catch of fisheries has stagnated at somewhere between 90-100 million tonnes a year, and it is unlikely that we will see any major changes in that. However, by improving the sustainability of global fisheries we can potentially slowly increase wild catches over the long term,” he says.

The ideal scenario in terms of fisheries management would be to establish a global framework to share knowledge on stocks and ensure that all fishing fleets operate under the same rules. While this is not entirely realistic at this point, the project is working to encourage collaboration between different countries, which could lay the foundations for further dialogue and knowledge-sharing.

“We have already secured participation in a dialogue between scientists from across the world that are fishing in the high seas fisheries in the South Atlantic. If we are able to get the scientists that are involved in stock assessment and management to talk together, then that is an important first step,” says Viðarsson. “We hope that when the project finishes, other researchers will take up the reins.”

Responsive Results-Based Management and capacity building for EU Sustainable Fisheries Partnership Agreement- and international waters Project Objectives

FarFish has the overall objective to provide knowledge, tools and methods to support responsible, sustainable and profitable EU fisheries outside European waters. To achieve this, FarFish has provided a better knowledge base of selected SFPA and high-seas fisheries where the EU fleet operates and identified opportunities for improvement.