Thanks to generous support from the Walker Foundation, EDF is able to provide peer-to-peer education and business support to New England fishermen who are in the process of transitioning to sustainable fisheries management.
This new approach is called "sectors," a form of catch share management that puts a direct cap on how much fish can be caught every year in the entire fishery, and parcels percentages of that annual harvest to fishing cooperatives to decide how best to collectively fish their portion. Under sectors, groups of fishermen commit to higher levels of accountability in exchange for more flexibility in when and how they collectively catch their allotment of fish. As fisheries return to their former abundance, fishermen and fishing communities directly benefit.
Read the complete story from the Walker Foundation.