The potential for global fisheries management

Status and Solutions for the World’s Unassessed Fisheries
Christopher Costello, Daniel Ovando, Ray Hilborn, Steven D. Gaines, Olivier Deschenes, Sarah E. Lester

Recent reports suggest that many well-assessed fisheries in developed countries are moving toward sustainability. We examined whether the same conclusion holds for fisheries lacking formal assessment, which comprise >80% of global catch. We developed a method using species’ life-history, catch, and fishery development data to estimate the status of thousands of unassessed fisheries worldwide. We found that small unassessed fisheries are in substantially worse condition than assessed fisheries, but that large unassessed fisheries may be performing nearly as well as their assessed counterparts. Both small and large stocks, however, continue to decline; 64% of unassessed stocks could provide increased sustainable harvest if rebuilt. Our results suggest that global fishery recovery would simultaneously create increases in abundance (56%) and fishery yields (8 to 40%).

Topics in Sustainability: Global Fisheries

The undergraduate class I'm co-teaching is getting into the part of the semester where each class is devoted to a major issue in sustainability. Topics we cover range from energy to hydrology to public health; with issues so large and time so limited each class can, at best, provide a very quick overview of the field and the major open problems in it. Given that I have to put together relevant and up-to-date background materials anyway, I figured I might as well put some links to all the materials on the blog for interested FE readers. Following RealClimate's Start Here page, I'm going to break the literature down a bit by target reader demographics so hopefully everyone will be able to find something interesting to chew on. Feel free to comment and give feedback as the topics go up; depending on how much use they get these posts might eventually turn into intermittently-updated pages.

On that note, let's begin with the first topic: Global Fisheries.

Readers with minimal technical background:

• National Geographic's 2010 Oceans issue, especially the article Seafood Crisis (also see, the 2007 NG article The Global Fisheries Crisis)
• A 2010 New York Times Magazine article on collapsing tuna fisheries which covers a lot of the main issues
• The Monterrey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch guides (also available as an iPhone app)
• Ocean 2012's video on overfishing

Readers with some science or technical knowledge:

• Pauly et al. Nature 2002, a mildly technical (and no-paywall) overview 
• Worm et al. Science 2009, nice recent overview article
• Pauly et al. Science 1998, fishing down the trophic chain (and a 2003 Nature article on the same)
• Watling and Norse, Conservation Biology 1998,  bottom trawling as the ocean's analog to clear-cutting
• Duarte et al. Science 2007, domestication of aquatic species (i.e., aquaculture) has progressed much faster than that of terrestrial species
• Swartz et al. PLoS One 2010, spatial expansion of fisheries since 1950

Readers interested in current research topics:

• Sumaila et al. J. of Bioeconomics 2010, overfishing may be driven by government subsidies
• Chassot et al. Ecology Letters 2010, empirical evidence that global marine primary production constrains catches
• Costello et al. Science 2008, catch shares as a global policy instrument 
• Branch et al. Nature 2010, the trouble with mean trophic level as a measure
• Pinsky et al. PNAS 2011, faster-reproducing ocean species collapse more quickly than slow ones under fishing pressure (opposite of the size / harvest pattern for most terrestrial species)
• Sethi et al. PNAS 2010, historical fishery development is driven by (...surprise?) profitability 
• Agnew et al. PLoS One 2009, a global estimate of illegal fishing activity