The Washington Post
By Juliet Eilperin
September 27, 2012

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 picture that emerges for the world’s fisheries is quite mixed: Many large fisheries that have scientists working on them, are in reasonable shape. Many of the smaller fisheries that have so far been ‘under the radar,’ are doing poorly,” he said in an e-mail. He added that although this presents a problem for developing countries, “fortunately, these problems are quite solvable, as recent, innovative community-based projects have shown in places like Kenya, Chile or Indonesia.”

University of Washington fisheries scientist Trevor Branch noted that large unassessed fisheries make up 99 percent of the world’s unregulated catch and that they are meeting their targets. The researchers “overstate the magnitude” of the information that is lacking about the unmanaged fishing areas, he said in an e-mail, because the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization already evaluates the status of 445 fisheries that account for 80 percent of the world’s fish catch.

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