Fighting Illegal Tuna Fishing from Space Very Effective ff

By Atuna.com

The WWF is proposing a new measure to combat the age-old problem of illegal fishing. The conservation group wants governments and regional fishery authorities to use satellite data to identify where unlawful fishing practices are taking place.

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) evaluated 18 months’ worth of satellite data – from an industry tool that’s been in use worldwide for more than a decade – and found it is possible to retrace the routes of fishing vessels, including those that are suspected of illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing.

The effective tool is the “Automatic Identification System” (AIS), introduced by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) back in 2000 for safety reasons. Via satellite it supplies data for identifying a ship: name, size, position, course and speed. 

According to their study, the WWF was able to verify in detail that Europe is supplied with fish from West Africa. The data showed that 111 industrial vessels were fishing off the coast of West Africa and in most cases, directly headed to the Spanish port of Las Palmas de Gran Canarias to land their catch.

“We wanted to find out what is really happening out there when vessels are fishing and trans-shipping on the high seas,” said Alfred Schumm, head of WWF’s Smart Fishing Initiative, in a press release. “After all, illegal and uncontrolled fishing is a hard nut to crack – it causes ecological and economic damage worldwide that affects all of us; fishing communities, fishing companies, governments, buyers and consumers.”

Globally, one in five fish comes from IUU sources, according to a 2007 European Commission report.

The WWF wants the technology to be a mandatory standard for all commercial fishing vessels. Currently, the IMO only requires ships over 300 gross register tons to install and maintain an AIS device (fishing vessels are excluded).

The group says it is an easy and inexpensive way to improve transparent fishing because “ships that previously escaped identification, such as by means of false data, are deprived of their anonymity.”