Challenges and perspectives on tackling illegal or unsustainable wildlife trade

While illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing is a premier issue facing ocean sustainability, characterizing it is challenging due to its clandestine nature. Current approaches can be resource intensive and sometimes controversial. Using Chile as an example, we present a structured process leveraging existing capacity, fisheries officers, that provides a monitoring tool to produce transparent and stand-alone estimates on the level, structure, and characteristics of illegal fishing. We provide a national illegal fishing baseline for Chile, estimating illegal activity for 20 fisheries, representing ~ 70% of annual national landings. For four fisheries, we also estimate the relative importance of illegal activities across sectors, stakeholders, and infrastructure. While providing new information, our results also confirm previous evidence on the general patterns of illegality. Our approach provides an opportunity for government agencies to formalize their institutional knowledge, while accounting for potential biases and reducing fragmentation of knowledge that can prevent effective enforcement. Estimating illegal activity directly from fisheries enforcement officers is complementary to existing approaches, providing a cost-effective, rapid, and rigorous method to measure, monitor, and inform solutions to reduce IUU fishing.

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Estimating illegal fishing from enforcement officers.

The Vital Roles of Blue Foods in the Global Food System

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercialNoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is noncommercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. © 2021 The Authors. Fish and Fisheries published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 1School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA 2Marine Resource Assessment and Management (MARAM) Group, Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, South Africa 3Fisheries Resources Institute, Japan Fisheries Research and Education Agency, Nagasaki, Japan 4National Marine Information and Research Centre (NatMIRC), Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources (MFMR), Swakopmund, Namibia 5Fisheries New Zealand, Ministry for Primary Industries, Wellington, New Zealand 6Marine and Freshwater Research Centre, GalwayMayo Institute of Technology, Galway, Ireland 7Centro para el Estudio de Sistemas Marinos, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, Chubut, Argentina 8Departamento de Evaluación de Recursos, Instituto de Fomento Pesquero (IFOP), Valparaíso, Chile

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/faf.12560

Global status of groundfish stocks

A sleeping giant: the historically neglected Brazilian fishing sector

Which management actions work best to prevent or halt overfishing and to rebuild depleted populations? A comprehensive evaluation of multiple, co-occurring management actions on the sustainability status of marine populations has been lacking. Here we compiled detailed management histories for 288 assessed fisheries from around the world (accounting for 45% of those with formal stock assessments) and used hierarchical time-series analyses to estimate effects of different management interventions on trends in stock status. Rebuilding plans, applied less commonly than other management measures (implemented at some point historically for 43% of stocks), rapidly lowered fishing pressure towards target levels and emerged as the most important factor enabling overfished populations to recover. Additionally, the ratification of international fishing agreements, and harvest control rules specifying how catch limits should vary with population biomass, helped to reduce overfishing and rebuild biomass. Notably, we found that benefits of management actions are cumulative—as more are implemented, stock status improves and predicted long-term catches increase. Thus, a broad suite of management measures at local, national and international levels appears to be key to sustaining fish populations and food production. Wise management is critical to sustaining fisheries. This study finds that rebuilding plans, ratification of international agreements and harvest control rules yield strong benefits and that these are cumulative.

Identifying management actions that promote sustainable fisheries

Pramod et al. methods to estimate IUU are not credible

Small pelagic fishes are used for human consumption, fishmeal and fish oil. They constitute 25% of global fish catch and have been of considerable conservation concern because of their intermediate position in aquatic food webs, often being a dominant dietary component of marine predators. This paper provides an overview of trends in abundance and fishing pressure on small pelagic fish stocks from single-species scientific assessments that constitute 60% of global small pelagic catch. While most individual stocks have exhibited wide variability in abundance (typical of small pelagics compared with other fish taxa), across stocks there has been remarkable stability in average fishing pressure and biomass since 1970. On average, since 1970, the biomass of assessed small pelagic stocks is estimated to have been slightly above the biomass that would produce maximum sustainable yield, but estimation of this quantity for highly fluctuating stocks is quite uncertain. There were significant differences among assessed regions, with the Mediterranean and Black Sea of greatest concern for high and growing fishing pressure. The 40% of global small pelagic fish catch not covered by single-species quantitative stock assessments since 1970 comes largely from Asia, where catches have continued to increase. At regional levels, the average abundance of assessed small pelagic fish is largely unrelated to average fishing pressure, which we argue results both from the portfolio effect, where numerous stocks fluctuate with little correlation in abundance, and from the short life span of small pelagics coupled with recruitment largely independent of spawning abundance. 

Nicole Baker

Papers

Identifying management actions that promote sustainable fisheries

Pramod et al. methods to estimate IUU are not credible

Recent trends in abundance and fishing pressure of agency‐assessed small pelagic fish stocks