The victim in this crime is our ocean. The perp is overfishing. But what can we do? Quite a lot, say the authors of a new paper published today in Science. "Rebuilding Global Fisheries" is the name of their hopeful research and though there's still lots of bad news, and new crimes against fish-manity to report on, there's also signs of regrowth, regeneration and recovery. And, at the very least, in many parts of the world we're putting the brakes on our desire to extract every last fish.
Building on a previous paper that predicted a possible collapse of global fish stocks by 2048, the team of scientists from across multi-stakeholder groups, decided to dig a little deeper. What they found was that though the trend was generally still towards collapse, the situation varies widely from region to region. And in some regions, preventative measures are in place and in others, stocks are rebuilding.
In fact, the previous research indicated that this could/would happen. If you don't kill fish, they get bigger, reproduce and have more offspring and ultimately you have more fish. Seems pretty obvious really! And it's why we're in support of Marine Protected Areas(MPAs) here at the Aquarium.
The scientists found that MPAs and other methods to close areas to fishing are one of the factors in the success stories, but true recovery requires a combined effort. Effective management, reduction in effort, modification to fishing gear and incentives for fishers are all needed to turn this situation around.
The good news is that we can do it. Now the task is to do it.
You can do your part by creating market incentives. Use your Seafood Watch pocket guide and ask for sustainable choices.