June 12, 2015 — Sustainable methods of fishing are often touted for environmental benefits. But a new report finds they also yield more wealth than current techniques for communities that rely on them.
The study, from researchers at the University of California Santa Barbara, the University of Washington, the Environmental Defense Fund and the Economist Intelligence Unit, finds that sustainable management of global fisheries may increase their economic benefits by $51 billion each year in the next 10 years. Improving fisheries management, the report argues, is a “win for conservation, catch, and profits.”
The analysis looked at 4,373 fisheries around the world, and found that those with sustainable management plans — with policies and regulations that ensure a species isn’t overfished and that prohibit environmentally hazardous fishing techniques — were more profitable than those without them. In every country they looked at, the benefits of sustainable policies outweighed the costs by an average ratio of 10 to 1.
“To be quite honest, we expected there would be significant tradeoffs,” Christopher Costello, a professor of resource economics at UC Santa Barbara who was lead co-author of the report, told The Huffington Post. “Maybe you would sacrifice food provision for economic prosperity, or ecosystem integrity for food. And we found that there weren’t.”