Saving Seafood

Krill industry seeks to preempt MPAs with own conservation initiatives in Antarctic

June 21, 2021 — The krill-fishing industry wants acknowledgement of its voluntary conservation and data-collection efforts before any agreement is reached on new marine protected areas in the Antarctic.

The U.S. recently renewed its support for the declaration of new marine protected areas (MPAs) as part of a broader push to delineate 30 percent of global marine space as protected. However, China and Russia have in recent years objected to the establishment of further MPAs by the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), which regulates fishing in the Antarctic region under a treaty signed in 1959.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

JOHN KERRY: China’s Chance to Save Antarctic Sealife

October 26, 2020 — Even as the United States and China confront deep disagreements, there is a global challenge that simply won’t wait for the resolution of our differences: climate change.

While some have decided that we are entering a new Cold War with China, we can still cooperate on critical mutual interests. After all, even at the height of 20th-century tensions, the Americans and the Soviets negotiated arms control agreements, which were in the interests of both countries.

Climate change, like nuclear proliferation, is a challenge of our own making — and one to which we hold the solution. We have an opportunity this month to make clear that great power rivalries aside, geopolitics must end at the water’s edge — at the icy bottom of our planet in the Southern Ocean, which surrounds the entire continent of Antarctica.

The first post-World War II arms limitation agreement — the Antarctic Treaty signed in 1959 at the height of the Cold War — banned military activities, created a nuclear-free space, set aside territorial claims and declared the continent a global commons dedicated to peace and science. Now we have the opportunity to extend that global commons from the land to the sea.

Read the full opinion piece at The New York Times

Commitments worth $63 billion pledged for ocean protection

October 29, 2019 — Governments, businesses, organizations and research institutions made commitments toward improving marine health and productivity worth more than $63 billion at the Our Ocean 2019 conference in Oslo on Oct. 23 and 24.

A total of 370 commitments were made at the conference, which was initiated by former U.S. secretary of state John Kerry in 2014 and has run annually ever since. Our Oceans brings together international leaders to share knowledge and experiences, and to commit to action for healthier oceans. This year, 500 people from more than 100 countries attended, as well as 100 youth delegates.

“These commitments are not just empty promises,” said Norway’s minister of foreign affairs, Ine Marie Eriksen Søreide, in her opening address. The conference emphasizes public accountability, and recent research by Oregon State University shows that past Our Oceans commitments have resulted, among other things, in more than one-third of the ocean area now under protected status.

Read the full story at Mongabay

US, others make commitments for sustainability at Our Ocean

November 8, 2018 — At the Our Ocean 2018 conference held last week in Indonesia, the United States pledged its support for 15 initiatives that would affect fishing communities across the globe.

In addition, former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met with Indonesian Fisheries Minister Susi Pudjiastuti during the two-day conference in Bali to reaffirm their nations’ commitment to encourage sustainable fisheries management worldwide.

Kerry, who also served as a conference presenter, commended Indonesia for its role in combating illegal fishing.

“I believe there is big crime committed in relation to [illegal, unreported and unregulated] fishing and this should be addressed by countries around the world,” he said. “To ensure sustainability, one of the ways is to maintain the volume of catch, making sure there is no overfishing.”

Another way the U.S. will work to combat illegal fishing is by working with The Waitt Foundation to hold a February 2019 summit in San Diego, California, U.S.A. with leaders from other countries to identify pilot projects that can be implemented online.

Peter Horn, who heads the Ending Illegal Fishing Project for The Pew Charitable Trusts, said he’s looking forward to the summit.

“We welcome the broadening of the debate of the governance issues behind current levels of Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU) fishing, and its second and third order consequences,” he told SeafoodSource in an email. “IUU fishing is often seen as purely an environmental crime with any absence of compliance with the rules countering it a management issue rather than what it really is: The tip of an iceberg of criminality which is directly linked to maritime safety and security.”

Read the full story at Seafood Source

A Coalition of Global Participants Pledge to Protect Five Million Square Miles of Ocean

November 2, 2018 — Global participants in the fifth Our Ocean Conference have pledged the highest amount of funding yet for new initiatives and commitments on the protection of a combined expanse of ocean eight times the size of Alaska.

The event, hosted by the Indonesian government on the island of Bali, generated 287 pledges in bilateral and multilateral agreements between governments, the private sector, civil society organizations, and philanthropic foundations. The pledges were valued at more than $10 billion to protect some 5.4 million square miles of the world’s oceans, according to Luhut Pandjaitan, Indonesia’s coordinating minister for maritime affairs.

To date, the Our Ocean Conference has raked in commitments totaling $28 billion and covering 10.2 million square miles of ocean.

“These numbers are beyond our expectations,” Luhut said in his closing remarks on October 30th. “We are thankful for your collective contributions and making our ocean healthier and (more) sustainable.”

The impacts of illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing and climate change on the world’s oceans were the key focuses during the two-day conference. Data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization showed that the value of fish captured illegally was about 26 million tons, or up to $23 billion annually. The world’s maritime resources are valued at around $24 trillion.

“Illegal fishing globally still decimates fisheries at an unsustainable pace,” said former United States Secretary of State John Kerry in his speech on October 29th.

“Illegal fishing continues on an unmitigated, unsustainable pace and almost one-third of the world’s fisheries are still overexploited,” he said. He added that the remainder of fisheries “are either at peak or nearly at peak with more and more people in the middle class, more and more people with money, more and more people demanding fresh fish on their table in their restaurants in their country.”

Read the full story at the Pacific Standard

Nonprofits ramp up campaign to increase protections for Pacific bluefin tuna

August 25, 2017 — Ahead of an international conference scheduled next week to discuss rebuilding the Pacific bluefin tuna population, several organizations and influential leaders have urged countries to act quickly to stop what they claim is a steep decline in the species’ numbers.

For years, the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch initiative has urged people to avoid the fish because of its low numbers, but the campaign has picked up steam in advance of Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission’s Northern Committee 13th Regular Session in Busan, South Korea, scheduled to begin on Monday, 28 August. Those involved in the week-long talks centered on conservation measures for the Pacific bluefin tuna include the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Japan, with the latter country being the most dominant market for the species.

Among those speaking out included former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who said the current situation not only threatens the ecology but the economy as well.

“Unsustainable fishing isn’t just the enemy of conservation, it’s the enemy of fishermen everywhere,” said Kerry in a statement on the aquarium’s blog. “We know we can do better. That is why we should all be invested in the difficult task of turning things around and getting Pacific bluefin tuna on a path to recovery.”

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Tech solutions to tackle overfishing, labor abuse at sea

November 28th, 2016 — Fishing boats used high-tech systems to find vast schools of fish for decades, depleting stocks of some species and leading to the complete collapse of others. Now more than a dozen apps, devices and monitoring systems aimed at tracking unscrupulous vessels and the seafood they catch are being rolled out — high-tech solutions some say could also help prevent labor abuse at sea.

Illegal fishing, which includes catching undersized fish, exceeding quotas and casting nets in protected areas, leads to an estimated $23 billion in annual losses, according to the United Nations. Meanwhile, overfishing close to shore has pushed boats farther out, where there are few laws and even less enforcement to protect workers from abuse. Slavery has been documented in the fishing sectors of more than 50 countries, according to U.S. State Department reports.

Earlier this year, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said using technology at sea could eventually mean “there is not one square mile of ocean where we cannot prosecute and hold people accountable…”

However, Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director of Human Rights Watch, cautions that catching human traffickers goes beyond finding boats.

Read the full story at WRAL

California is cracking down to prevent illegal fishing off the coast

September 28, 2016 — California is embarking on a new effort to shield ocean waters from overfishing.

Law-enforcement officials have embraced a statewide ticketing system aimed at poachers and unwitting anglers who illegally catch bass, yellowtail, lobsters and other types of marine life within these zones, which are commonly called MPAs.

California’s continued push to police its network of underwater state parks comes as government officials and scientific leaders from around the world gathered in Washington, D.C., last week for a conference on a wide range of marine issues, including climate change, pollution and restoring diversity of sea life.

Initially spearheaded by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in 2014, the Our Ocean conference has since drawn commitments to expand or form new preservation zones in sensitive ocean habitats from more than a dozen countries, including Morocco, Thailand and Canada, as well as the European Union and the United Kingdom. Most recently, the Obama administration expanded the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument off the coast of Hawaii — now the world’s largest marine protected area.

Read the full story at the Los Angeles Times

$5.3B Pledged for Marine Conservation at US Summit

September 19th, 2016 — A 90-nation conference devoted to the world’s oceans ended Friday with $5.3 billion in pledges for marine conservation, which U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said proves “we are making progress.”

Forty significant new or expanded marine protected areas were created at the Our Ocean summit, including President Barack Obama’s announcement of the first U.S. marine reserve in the Atlantic Ocean — an area totaling 13,000 square kilometers and known for its underwater mountains and canyons off the coast of New England.

Commercial fishing, oil exploration and other activities are limited in such areas to protect ecosystems.

Kerry said in closing remarks Friday that he had been in conversations with Russian officials about Moscow’s consent for a ban on fishing in the 960,000-square-kilometer Ross Sea, a pristine ecosystem in the Antarctic.

“We remain hopeful Russia will step up and join us in this endeavor,” Kerry said.

New technologies to fight pollution

The third Our Ocean event collected pledges of more than $1 billion to combat maritime pollution.

“It’s not just the dollars being brought to the table, but new technologies,” Kerry emphasized.

Five countries also detailed plastic bag bans: Mauritius said it has banned the import, manufacture, sale or supply of non-biodegradable plastic bags. Morocco announced that it has banned the production, import, export or acquisition of plastic shopping bags for sale or distribution. Ghana’s ban covers the manufacture of plastic bags thinner than .02 millimeter, and France informed delegates of its prohibition on all single-use plastic bags thinner than .05 millimeter. Senegal has banned the production and use of plastic bags.

In addition, France announced that it, Morocco and Monaco have launched an international coalition to ban single-use plastic bags.

Not only are the bags especially harmful to marine wildlife, they also litter the seas.

Read the full article from VOA News 

New way to publicly monitor global fishing changes the game

September 16, 2016 — World leaders in ocean conservation and management are gathering in Washington this week for Secretary John Kerry‘s Our Ocean conference — a convening of global policymakers aimed a tackling some of the greatest challenges facing our seas and the wildlife that depend on them. I’m especially excited about this year’s meeting because it will mark the moment when we can truly begin a new era in fisheries management thanks to a groundbreaking new digital tool that will allow governments and citizens around the world to improve management to bring back fishery abundance and strengthen food security.

Early Thursday morning, we made Global Fishing Watch available to the public. Now for the first time ever, anyone with an internet connection can monitor global fishing activity, in near real-time, for free. Oceana partnered with SkyTruth and Google to produce a public platform that uses satellite data, cloud computing and machine learning to identify fishing activity all over the world and provide it to users in an intuitive internet-based interface.

Until today, the only way to really know what fishing vessels were doing was to have eyes physically trained on the ships, or to track vessels one at a time, point-by-point, day by day. That process is now automated by Global Fishing Watch so that anyone can instantly look at the tracks of tens of thousands of vessels, everywhere they fish, at any time over the past five years, within just a few days back from the present. This completely changes the game.

Ships over a certain size are required to use the Automatic Identification System (AIS) to avoid at-sea collisions. This broadcast data is collected by terrestrial and satellite receivers, and Global Fishing Watch analyzes it to locate apparent fishing activity. Now, for the first time, everyone can see where ships are fishing, and when. The applications of this technology to fishery policy and management are numerous. Early testers of Global Fishing Watch have consistently been bringing us new application ideas that even we, the developers, hadn’t imagined.

Read the full story at The Hill