Saving Seafood

Study identifies major barriers to financing a sustainable ocean economy

June 9, 2021 — Financing a sustainable global ocean economy may require a Paris Agreement-type effort, according to a new report from an international team of researchers led by the University of British Columbia.

That’s because a significant increase in sustainable ocean finance will be required to ensure a sustainable ocean economy that benefits society and businesses in both developing and developed countries.

The report, published today—on World Ocean Day—identifies major barriers to financing such a sustainable ocean economy. This includes all ocean-based industries, like seafood production, shipping and renewable energy, and ecosystem goods and services, such as climate regulation and coastal protection.

“The size of the ocean economy was estimated at around $1.5 trillion in 2010, and prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, was projected to increase to $3 trillion in 2030,” said lead author Dr. Rashid Sumaila, a professor at UBC’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries and the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and Canada Research Chair in Interdisciplinary Ocean and Fisheries Economics.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

How small-scale fishers are struggling amid COVID-19 crisis

May 27, 2020 — As COVID-19 affects global food systems, tremendous impacts are being felt by coastal communities and small-scale fishers, many of whom are self-employed and rely on the catch to feed their own households or local communities.

In a review published in Coastal Management, researchers explore the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis on small-scale fisheries in Canada and worldwide, and provide recommendations on how to support them.

We spoke with lead author Nathan Bennett, research associate with the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at UBC, and Chair of the People and the Ocean Specialist Group for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), about the findings.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

Ten million tonnes of fish wasted every year despite declining fish stocks

June 26, 2017 — Industrial fishing fleets dump nearly 10 million tonnes of good fish back into the ocean every year, according to new research.

The study by researchers with Sea Around Us, an initiative at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries and the University of Western Australia, reveals that almost 10 per cent of the world’s total catch in the last decade was discarded due to poor fishing practices and inadequate management.  This is equivalent to throwing back enough fish to fill about 4,500 Olympic sized swimming pools every year.

“In the current era of increasing food insecurity and human nutritional health concerns, these findings are important,” said Dirk Zeller, lead author for the study who is now a professor at the University of Western Australia and senior research partner with the Sea Around Us. “The discarded fish could have been put to better use.”

Fishers discard a portion of their catch because fishing practices damage the fish and make them unmarketable, the fish are too small, the species is out of season, only part of the fish needs to be harvested—as with the Alaska pollock roe—or the fishers caught species that they were not targeting, something known as bycatch.

“Discards also happen because of a nasty practice known as high-grading where fishers continue fishing even after they’ve caught fish that they can sell,” said Zeller. “If they catch bigger fish, they throw away the smaller ones; they usually can’t keep both loads because they run out of freezer space or go over their quota.”

The study examined the amount of discarded fish over time. In the 1950s, about five million tonnes of fish were discarded every year, in the 1980s that figure grew to 18 million tonnes. It decreased to the current levels of nearly 10 million tonnes per year over the past decade.

The decline in discards in recent years could be attributed to improved fisheries management and new technology, but Zeller and his colleagues say it’s likely also an indicator of depleted fish stocks. A 2016 reconstruction of catch data from 1950 to 2010 by researchers with the Sea Around Us revealed that catches have been declining at a rate of 1.2 million tonnes of fish every year since the mid-1990s.

“Discards are now declining because we have already fished these species down so much that fishing operations are catching less and less each year, and therefore there’s less for them to throw away,” he said.

Read the full story at the University of British Columbia

Economic impacts of climate change on global fisheries could be worse than we thought

October 17, 2016 — Marine fisheries have been estimated to support the livelihoods of 10 to 12 percent of the world’s population and generate an average of $100 billion in revenue every year. But global fisheries are facing a number of challenges: changes in markets, demographics, and over-exploitation will significantly impact global fisheries in the near future, while climate change is expected to pose a major challenge over the longer term.

A study published last month in the journal Scientific Reports explores the potential economic impacts of climate change as it affects the amount and composition of fish in marine fisheries and leads to decreased catches. Previous research has shown that global warming will cause changes in ocean temperatures, sea ice extent, salinity, and oxygen levels, among other impacts, that are likely to lead to significant shifts in the distribution range and productivity of marine species, the study notes.

“Warmer temperatures may also lead to decreases in maximum body sizes of marine fishes,” write the authors of the study, a team of scientists from the University of British Columbia (UBC). These changes will be regionally specific, as predicted species distributional shifts and changes in ocean productivity due to climate change are expected to result in increases in maximum catch potential in high latitudinal regions but decreases in the tropics. The researchers add that “These changes have large implications for people who depend on fish for food and income, and thus the contribution of fisheries to the global economy.”

In all, the UBC researchers found that global fisheries could lose approximately $10 billion in annual revenue by 2050 if climate change continues unchecked — a 10 percent decrease, which is 35 percent more than has been previously estimated.

Countries that are most dependent on fisheries to feed their populations will experience the biggest impacts, according to the study. The largest average decrease in maximum catch potential will occur in small island countries like Tuvalu, which is expected to see a 79 percent drop in annual catches in its waters, and Kiribati, which is projected to see a 70 percent decrease.

“Developing countries most dependent on fisheries for food and revenue will be hardest hit,” Vicky Lam, a postdoctoral fellow at UBC’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries and the study’s lead author, said in a statement. “It is necessary to implement better marine resource management plans to increase stock resilience to climate change.”

On the other hand, some developed countries, such as Greenland and Iceland, could see revenue increases as fish move into cooler waters.

Read the full story at Mongabay

Carl Walters on the “precautionary approach”

July 6, 2016 — Carl Walters is a Professor Emeritus at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia. His area of expertise includes fisheries assessment and sustainable management and has used that expertise to advise public agencies and industrial groups on fisheries assessment and management. He is a member of the Royal Society of Canada and received the Volvo Environmental Prize in 2005. He has been a member of a number of NSERC grant committees since 1970, and received the AIFRB Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in 2011. Walters is considered the ‘father’ of adaptive management.

Misuse of the precautionary approach in fisheries management

We spoke with Carl Walters of the University of British Columbia about the misuse of the precautionary approach by risk-averse scientists and conservation advocates. His concern arises from the application of the precautionary approach to Western Canadian salmon fisheries, which he believes has negatively impacted Canadian salmon fishermen and resulted in “virtually, an economic collapse.”

He began by first differentiating between the precautionary principle and the precautionary approach, the former he claimed to be “a perfectly sensible statement that I think almost everyone would subscribe to about the need to avoid irreversible harm when possible…in the management of any system. There’s a different creature that has arisen in fisheries policy…called the precautionary approach to management” – this is the one that upsets him (00:35).

According to Walters, there are two problems with the precautionary approach (PA). First, it was concocted intuitively by highly risk-averse biologists and managers. “Those people are not the ones who bear the costs of having such a policy. It’s really easy for a highly risk-averse manager to recommend a very conservative policy because it’s not his income and economic future that’s at stake” (03:18). In fact, fishermen are seldom consulted about what harvest control rule they would prefer. Fishermen are often perceived to be relentless natural resource extractors that demand to keep fishing until it can be proven that the stock is collapsing. “That’s not the way fishermen behave” Walters says. “It turns out that most fishermen are risk-averse. They’re not pillagers, they’re not gamblers willing to take any risk at all in order to just keep fishing. They are concerned about the future and they are generally willing to follow some kind of risk-averse harvesting policy” (04:40). “Fishing is a risky business, and fishermen in general are far less risk averse than the people who end up in government and academic jobs.  But that does not mean fishermen are willing to take high risks with the productive future of the stocks that support them.”

So if both fishermen and managers are risk-averse, what’s the problem? The issue is that the interests of only one of these stakeholders is truly accounted for when designing precautionary harvest policies. In Canadian fisheries, there has been “a deliberate exclusion of fishermen in the development of these critical harvest control rules. They have no say in it. The decision rule should be based, at least to some degree, on patterns of risk-aversion that fishermen have since it’s the fishermen who bear the burden of the regulation” (09:48).

Read the full story and hear the conversation at CFood