June 7, 2018 — The vast majority of fishing vessels follow the rules governing fishing – but many are not, and these bad actors can cause a lot of damage.
Vessels may take too many fish – overfishing – which is causing our fisheries to collapse. Then there is the problem of illegal fishing, which can occur in protected areas, in other country’s waters or on the high seas. Many countries simply don’t have the capacity to enforce fishery management rules. As a result, illegal fishing has become a multi-billion-dollar industry, worth up to $23bn each year. Because of overfishing – both legal and illegal – one third of fisheries assessed in a study by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation were overfished and over half were fully fished. This threatens jobs and food security for millions of people, all around the world.
The trouble is, so much of this illegal activity is hidden – it happens out to sea, making it difficult to scrutinise what individual vessels are getting up to. To address the problems facing our oceans, we need to know what’s happening beyond the horizon.
Fortunately, we are now beginning to see what happens after commercial fishing vessels leave port. The data that underpins the map above is helping to make fishing activity at sea more transparent. In September 2016, my colleagues and I at Oceana – an advocacy organisation focused on ocean conservation – launched a mapping platform called Global Fishing Watch, along with Google and SkyTruth, a non-profit that uses satellite data to encourage environmental protection.