Improved Management Could Revitalize Global Catches Rapidly ff

Source: Herald Tribune

The vast majority of the world’s fisheries are declining but could recover if properly managed, according to a paper published Thursday in the journal Science.

The statistical analysis marks the first time researchers have assessed the globe’s roughly 10,000 fishing areas, more than 80 percent of which are unregulated. The group of five American scientists who wrote the paper found that small unmanaged fisheries were in much worse shape than regulated ones. Large unmanaged fisheries, on the other hand, performed roughly as well as their regulated counterparts.

Christopher Costello, the lead author and an economist with the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California at Santa Barbara, said “one of the bright spots” for the small fisheries “is even though they’re in bad shape and in decline, they’re not yet collapsed.” “If we turn things around now, we can recover them in a matter of years, not decades, and that has big implications for conservation and food security,” Costello said in a phone interview.

About 20 percent of the world’s fisheries are monitored regularly and regulated; the vast majority around the world operate without any oversight. According to the new study, 64 percent of these unassessed fishing areas “could provide increased sustainable harvest” if they came under scientific management. That, it said, could boost global fish abundance by 56 percent, which could yield more fish for human consumption.

“When fish populations are healthy, they produce more young,” said co-author Steven Gaines, dean at the Bren School. “It may seem paradoxical, but we can get more fish on our plates by leaving more in the water.”

To determine how unassessed fisheries are faring, the team combined a statistical model based on the catch history of individual species, along with information on how fast a species grows and reproduces.

Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, called the analysis a “landmark study that allows us to assess the global state of fisheries in a much deeper way.”
Worm noted the trajectories of managed and unassessed fisheries began to diverge in 1995, when richer countries began to tackle overfishing within their maritime borders.

The study suggests that many of the world’s fisheries of tuna, such as central West Pacific skipjack and South Pacific albacore tuna, are in relatively good shape, while many snapper fisheries -- in places as disparate as Thailand and Latin America -- are doing badly. And most of the world’s shark populations, which are targeted in small-scale fisheries, are depleted.