March 14, 2019 — Among all the knotted problems in the global food supply, it’s hard to think of one that has received more focused attention than global fisheries and the challenges of overexploitation, ecological intricacy, regulatory responses, and failures.
And yet, after decades of international treaties and sustainability studies and harvest limits — some of the latter volunteered by industry — a majority of the world’s most important fishing stocks continue to decline.
Overfishing remains the key driver; other factors include pollution and habitat destruction. A typical status report will mention climate change, too, always as an afterthought, an emerging force whose impact cannot yet be calculated.
That changed at the end of February with publication in the journal Science of groundbreaking research that filtered out all other factors, then measured the influence of a warming ocean all on its own. Its unusual approach was to generate a “hindcast,” looking backward through nearly a century of data on seawater temperature and laying these against a standard measure of abundance for fish and shellfish — maximum sustainable yield — that has been in use since 1930.