Sustainable Fisheries
Sustainable fisheries are fishing operations managed in a manner that ensures the long-term health and productivity of fish stocks and the marine ecosystems in which they live. This involves harvesting at a rate where the fish population can replenish itself naturally, thereby avoiding overfishing. Sustainable fisheries also consider the impacts of fishing practices on other marine life and habitats, ensuring that the broader ecosystem remains balanced and healthy. The goal is to meet current seafood demands without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.
Practical measures for sustainable shark fisheries: Lessons learned from an Indonesian targeted shark fishery
Our results suggest that management measures focusing on fishing effort controls, gear restrictions and modifications, and spatiotemporal closures could have significant benefits for the conservation of shark species and may help to improve the overall sustainability of the Tanjung Luar shark fishery.
Wild Salmon, Pipelines, and the Trans Mountain Expansion
Easy access to cheap, abundant oil has created a high standard of living for many cultures and societies. At the same time, the extraction, refining, distribution, and use of this oil – as energy and in products – is increasingly undermining many of our planet’s life forms and the fragile balance of conditions that support climate stability and human prosperity. These effects are occurring on local, regional, and global scales. This report characterizes the risks posed to wild salmon by a Trans Mountain pipeline spill into the Lower Fraser River or a tanker spill into the Salish Sea. The Lower Fraser River flows from Hope past Mission, through Metro Vancouver, and into the estuary where it meets the Pacific Ocean.
Tracking the Global Footprint of Fisheries
In the 23 February 2018 issue of Science, along with research partners at University of California Santa Barbara, National Geographic Pristine Seas, SkyTruth, Dalhousie University, Stanford University, and Google, we published a global analysis of fishing effort using AIS data. We have made our data on the vessel identity and fishing effort freely available. This post provides links to materials associated with this paper, including how to download and used the data we released with the paper.
The economics of fishing the high seas
While the ecological impacts of fishing the waters beyond national jurisdiction (the “high seas”) have been widely studied, the economic rationale is more difficult to ascertain because of scarce data on the costs and revenues of the fleets that fish there. Newly compiled satellite data and machine learning now allow us to track individual fishing vessels on the high seas in near real time. These technological advances help us quantify high-seas fishing effort, costs, and benefits, and assess whether, where, and when high-seas fishing makes economic sense. We characterize the global high-seas fishing fleet and report the economic benefits of fishing the high seas globally, nationally, and at the scale of individual fleets. Our results suggest that fishing at the current scale is enabled by large government subsidies, without which as much as 54% of the present high-seas fishing grounds would be unprofitable at current fishing rates. The patterns of fishing profitability vary widely between countries, types of fishing, and distance to port. Deep-sea bottom trawling often produces net economic benefits only thanks to subsidies, and much fishing by the world’s largest fishing fleets would largely be unprofitable without subsidies and low labor costs. These results support recent calls for subsidy and fishery management reforms on the high seas.