Two University of Washington scientists have just published a study in the journal Conservation Biology in collaboration with colleagues from Rutgers University and Dalhousie University arguing that the gloomiest predictions about the world’s fisheries are significantly exaggerated.
The new study takes issue with a recent estimate that 70 percent of all stocks have been harvested to the point where their numbers have peaked and are now declining, and that 30 percent of all stocks have collapsed to less than one-tenth of their former numbers. Instead, it finds that at most 33 percent of all stocks are over-exploited and up to 13 percent of all stocks have collapsed.
It’s not that fisheries are in great shape, said Trevor Branch, the lead author of the new study; it’s just that they are not as badly off as has been widely believed. In 2006, a study in the journal Science predicted a general collapse in global fisheries by 2048 if nothing were done to stem the decline.
Read the complete story from The New York Times.