Saving Seafood

International Fishery Experts Agree on Key Area-Based Management Concepts

June 22, 2020 — The following was released by the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council:

Area-based management has become a an international focal point for fisheries management with the United Nations advocating for some form of protected area in 30% of the ocean by 2030.

In response to this initiative and other issues, 34 fishery science and management experts from intergovernmental and nongovernmental agencies, regional fishery management organizations and academia convened by teleconference June 15-17 as a first step toward the development of a “Roadmap to Effective Area-Based Management of Blue Water Fisheries.” The workshop addressed emerging issues in national waters and in areas beyond national jurisdiction and called for clarity in objectives, monitoring and area-based selection. It also stressed comparing static vs dynamic area-based approaches.

The participants agreed that simply closing large sections of the ocean is not a silver bullet for managing blue water fisheries and their ecosystems and that marine protected areas (MPAs) are merely a single element within the tool box of area-based management.

“Area-based management tools are not exclusively MPAs or closures,” noted Ray Hilborn, professor at the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, University of Washington.

Convened by the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council and co-chaired by Hilborn and Vera Agostini (UN Food and Agriculture Organization), the workshop included participants from the Americas, Australia/Oceania and Europe. Workshop contributors addressed the application of area-based management tools to reach objectives pertaining to sustainable food production (local and global), employment (local and global), economic health and welfare, communities and culture, protected and non-target species, ecosystem integrity and resilience to climate change and other stressors.

Area-based management may be static in nature (i.e., have a fixed spatial delineation) or dynamic, whereby portions of the ecosystem closed to fishing can change in space and time. The workshop called for clarity in objectives, monitoring and area-based selection and comparing static vs dynamic area-based approaches.

Participants pointed out that with rapidly emerging technologies to collect data and monitor fisheries, area-based management can be adaptive and more precise in its implementation. But these objectives and management capabilities are also linked with specific need for empirical evidence and research.

“We can’t really predict the impacts of many actions because of information gaps,” Hilborn said.

Stakeholders and leading scientists cautioned for clear planning on the use of area-based management tools in blue water ecosystems rather than strictly opportunistic or “set it and forget it” implementation. Highly migratory fish movements are dynamic and their distributions are often moving, so scientific evaluation in planning is critical.

“Economic, cultural and social objectives need to be considered thoroughly prior to implementation of area-based management, and industry engagement is critical,” noted Craig Severance, professor of anthropology emeritus, University of Hawai’i at Hilo.

Alternative management measures should be explored and evaluated alongside any area-based management measures considered, including take MPAs, the participants agreed.

The workshop will produce the “Roadmap” document by the end of 2020 for publication as peer-reviewed literature.

Hope for the oceans in a time of COVID-19

April 14, 2020 — The following was released by the Environmental Defense Fund:

The global COVID-19 pandemic gives us all pause about what the future holds. Our focus and attention are on all those hurt by this terrible disease. But for many of us, this is also a time of deep reflection about society and the world we’ll inhabit when this scourge is over. So for me, it’s also a moment to reflect on the prospects for the ocean, one of the planet’s fundamental life-support systems — making it vital to human health and well-being.

A just-released article in Nature, by Professor Carlos Duarte of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia and colleagues, argues that the global ocean can once again return to abundance, rebounding from overfishing and pollution by 2050, if humanity puts its shoulder to the wheel and redoubles efforts across all types of threats. We emphatically agree.

Here, we dive into what such lofty ambitions might require, through one of the key lenses that Duarte and company identify: sustainable fishing.

First, peer-reviewed research shows very clearly that sustainable fisheries management works.  That should come as no surprise. Our own work with University of California, Santa Barbara and others (Costello et al., 2016) modelling the world’s fisheries showed that the “upside” of informed and effective management rapidly outweighs the downside of unsustainable fishing (which would otherwise deplete more than 85% of fish populations). Our modelling shows that such management approaches would allow full rebuilding of most stocks (and total global fish abundance) in less than a decade — restoring fish as a valuable asset both for nature and human needs. This exciting finding was recently underscored by a deep and systemic analysis (Hilborn et al., 2020) showing that, in fact, when good management is put in place, fish and fisheries respond impressively.

Read the full release here

Ray Hilborn is optimistic fishery management can work

April 9, 2020 — If you find it hard to imagine a college professor (of a subject other than epidemiology) drawing a crowd nowadays, I’m with you. Yet that is exactly what fisheries scientist Ray Hilborn did April 2.

To a sit-in-your-office, stare-at-your-monitor webinar, no less!

It’s conceivable that the size of the audience reflected a degree of covid-19-inspired restlessness. But ennui alone cannot explain the more than 450 people who signed up for Hilborn’s presentation on the status of fish stocks and the role of management. And rather than dwindle, as webinar audiences tend to do, by the time the session ended Hilborn’s audience had swollen to “an easy 600,” according to NOAA’s Tracy Gill, who coordinated the event.

To be fair, Hilborn was no stranger to his audience. A professor of aquatic and fishery science at the University of Washington, he’s written several books, including, most recently, “Ocean Recovery: A Sustainable Future for Global Fisheries” (co-authored by his wife, Ulrike Hilborn) as well as scores of peer-reviewed papers, and is respected by industry, academics, and NGOs.

His message Thursday was reassuring – more or less. Listen to scientists long enough, and you realize that you can get yourself into trouble reading between the lines.

Many of you, for example, will recall how in 2006, mainstream journalists leveraged a study led by the Canadian ecologist Boris Worm on the loss of biodiversity in ocean ecosystems services into the disappearance of fish by 2048. “One very small part of the paper,” Hilborn recalled, extrapolated from catch trends and came up with a downward curve that “hit the y axis,” in the professor’s words, at 100 percent collapsed in 2048.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

New Study Finds Some Fisheries Management Is Actually Working

January 30, 2020 — Understanding how many fish are in the sea is crucial to creating effective policy and management strategies. One study out of the University of Washington in Seattle took a close look at how fishing pressures and stock abundance are correlated. How will management initiatives in countries with high fishing pressure affect the number of fish that are available to catch? Ray Hilborn and 23 contributing authors on the paper took a data-driven approach to this question with optimistic results that they hope will convince policymakers and the public that fish stocks are actually on the rise.

Hilborn has been labeled an “overfishing denier” for his divisive views on the status of overfishing and his pushback against marine protected areas (MPAs), but Hilborn argues that closing areas to fishing is not necessarily the answer; “fisheries are not well managed in many parts of the world (the ones primarily where we did not have data for our paper)…our paper shows that fisheries management does work when implemented”. The researchers assessed fish catch data from six continents (which comprised about 50% of total global catch) up until the year 2016 and found that where fish stocks were being managed properly, increased number of fish was the result. “Our hope for the use of the results is that the thousands of scientists, managers and technicians that have helped stop overfishing will be recognized for their contribution”, Hilborn says.

Fish stock assessments use data gathered from a number of sources including fisheries landings (the fish that are caught by fishers and reported), biological studies and scientific surveys. While there are uncertainties in the data due to environmental, financial and technological limitations, stock assessments provide the backbone of fisheries management and drive regulatory decisions.

Read the full story at Forbes

Fish populations around the world are improving

January 16, 2020 — The following was released by Sustainable Fisheries UW:

Let’s enjoy some unequivocal, inarguable good news: a paper published today in PNAS, Hilborn et al. 2020, shows that on average, scientifically-assessed fish populations around the world are healthy or improving. And, for fish populations that are not doing well, there is a clear roadmap to sustainability. With Australia on fire and scares of World War III, the start of 2020 and the new decade has been awful; hopefully Hilborn et al. 2020 can kickstart a decade of ocean optimism.

Hilborn et al. 2020 counters the perception that fish populations around the world are declining and the only solution is closing vast swaths of ocean to fishing. Instead, Hilborn et al. 2020 argues that increasing scientific, management, and enforcement capacity will lead to more abundant and sustainable oceans. The major takeaway of the paper is that fishery management works—when fisheries are managed, they are sustained. The key is following the science-to-management blueprint. Scientific data collection and fishery assessment comes first, then fishing regulation and enforcement of fishing policies. With the blueprint in place, most fisheries around the world are sustainable or improving.

The paper uses updates to the RAM Legacy Stock Assessment Database, a decades-long project to assemble data on fish populations that are scientifically assessed. As of 2019, the database contains data on 882 marine fish populations, representing about half of reported wild-caught seafood. In 2009, the database contained data on only 166, representing a much smaller proportion of global seafood. Researchers have spent the last 10 years adding to the database, and with today’s publication, update the global status of fish stocks. They found that, on average, fish populations are above target levels. Not every stock is doing well, but on average, things are much better than they were 2 decades ago. How nice: an environmental story where things are better now than they were in the past!

The paper describes the global status of fish stocks, but it also tells the story of fishery sustainability from the past 50 years.

Read the full story at Sustainable Fisheries UW

Fish stock abundance increases when intensely managed, study shows

January 16, 2020 — Studies on global fisheries rarely make national news, but University of Washington professor of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences Ray Hilborn says that the public perception of fisheries is still recovering from one eye-catching study in 2006.

“A paper come out that said if current trends continue, all fish stocks will be collapsed by 2048, and that got front page New York Times, front page Washington Post, and it was totally wrong,” Hilborn said. “It was so contrary to my experience and lots of people, you can imagine almost everyone working on fisheries in Alaska. Ultimately I got together with the first author of the paper and we figured we could actually try to understand why we had such different perspectives.”

The result of the collaboration was a paper published in 2009 which showed that on average, stock abundance appeared to be stable.

“What they had assumed is that if that catch goes down, the catch is declining, and that simply wasn’t true. Most of the stocks they called collapsed, the catch had declined for other reason. Many times regulation, some times international 200 mile zones,” Hilborn said.

Hilborn worked to build a data set on the abundance of fish stocks, rather than just the reported catch.

More than a decade later, Hilborn’s research shows how intensely managing fisheries has resulted in increased abundance of fish stocks.

Read the full story at KTUU

Fish populations are thriving in areas with intense management, global study finds

January 14, 2020 — A new study has shown that fishery management, when done well, works, and is the solution for keeping fisheries sustainable.

By looking at data from about 30 countries around the world, a group of researchers have concluded that intense fisheries management has led to healthy or improving fish populations, while a dearth of management has led to overfishing. The researchers published their results in a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on 13 January.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

New paper showing fish stocks increasing where managed

January 14, 2020 — Nearly half of the fish caught worldwide are from stocks that are scientifically monitored and, on average, are increasing in abundance. Effective management appears to be the main reason these stocks are at sustainable levels or successfully rebuilding.

That is the main finding of an international project led by the University of Washington to compile and analyze data from fisheries around the world. The results were published Jan. 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“There is a narrative that fish stocks are declining around the world, that fisheries management is failing and we need new solutions — and it’s totally wrong,” said lead author Ray Hilborn, a professor in the UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. “Fish stocks are not all declining around the world. They are increasing in many places, and we already know how to solve problems through effective fisheries management.”

The project builds on a decade-long international collaboration to assemble estimates of the status of fish stocks — or distinct populations of fish — around the world. This information helps scientists and managers know where overfishing is occurring, or where some areas could support even more fishing. Now the team’s database includes information on nearly half of the world’s fish catch, up from about 20% represented in the last compilation in 2009.

“The key is, we want to know how well we are doing, where we need to improve, and what the problems are,” Hilborn said. “Given that most countries are trying to provide long-term sustainable yield of their fisheries, we want to know where we are overfishing, and where there is potential for more yield in places we’re not fully exploiting.”

Over the past decade, the research team built a network of collaborators in countries and regions throughout the world, inputting their data on valuable fish populations in places such as the Mediterranean, Peru, Chile, Russia, Japan and northwest Africa. Now about 880 fish stocks are included in the database, giving a much more comprehensive picture worldwide of the health and status of fish populations.

Still, most of the fish stocks in South Asia and Southeast Asia do not have scientific estimates of health and status available. Fisheries in India, Indonesia and China alone represent 30% to 40% of the world’s fish catch that is essentially unassessed.

“There are still big gaps in the data and these gaps are more difficult to fill,” said co-author Ana Parma, a principal scientist at Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council and a member of The Nature Conservancy global board. “This is because the available information on smaller fisheries is more scattered, has not been standardized and is harder to collate, or because fisheries in many regions are not regularly monitored.”

The researchers paired information about fish stocks with recently published data on fisheries management activities in about 30 countries. This analysis found that more intense management led to healthy or improving fish stocks, while little to no management led to overfishing and poor stock status.

These results show that fisheries management works when applied, and the solution for sustaining fisheries around the world is implementing effective fisheries management, the authors explained.

“With the data we were able to assemble, we could test whether fisheries management allows stocks to recover. We found that, emphatically, the answer is yes,” said co-author Christopher Costello, a professor of environmental and resource economics at University of California, Santa Barbara, and a board member with Environmental Defense Fund. “This really gives credibility to the fishery managers and governments around the world that are willing to take strong actions.”

Fisheries management should be tailored to fit the characteristics of the different fisheries and the needs of specific countries and regions for it to be successful. Approaches that have been effective in many large-scale industrial fisheries in developed countries cannot be expected to work for small-scale fisheries, especially in regions with limited economic and technical resources and weak governance systems, Parma said.

The main goal should be to reduce the total fishing pressure when it is too high, and find ways to incentivize fishing fleets to value healthy fish stocks.

“There isn’t really a one-size-fits-all management approach,” Costello said. “We need to design the way we manage fisheries so that fishermen around the world have a long-term stake in the health of the ocean.”

Other co-authors are from University of Victoria, University of Cape Town, National Institute of Fisheries Research (Morocco), Rutgers University, Seikai National Fisheries Research Institute Japan, CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, Fisheries New Zealand, Wildlife Conservation Society, Marine and Freshwater Research Center (Argentina), European Commission, Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, Center for the Study of Marine Systems, Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, The Nature Conservancy, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Hilborn and collaborators recently presented this work at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ International Symposium on Fisheries Sustainability in Rome.

The research was funded by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis Science for Nature and People Partnership. Individual authors received funding from The Nature Conservancy, The Wildlife Conservation Society, the Walton Family Foundation, Environmental Defense Fund, the Richard C. and Lois M. Worthington Endowed Professorship in Fisheries Management and donations from 12 fishing companies.

Read the full paper here

Will cutting salmon out of our diets save the Puget Sound orcas?

August 29, 2019 — Salmon is a popular food in the Pacific Northwest for humans and orcas alike. But, the Southern Resident Orcas are struggling with their sole food source, Chinook Salmon, getting smaller and smaller.

With that in mind, is it still a good idea for us to consume fish? Will cutting salmon out of our diets help our orca population rebound?

Ray Hilborn is a professor at the University of Washington’s University of School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. His research focuses on ways to best manage fisheries to provide sustainable benefits to human society.

“In general, fisheries have quite a bit lower environmental impact than livestock, and even with respect to crops, many fisheries look very good compared to crops,” said Hilborn.

Read the full story at K5 News

RAY HILBORN: Keep eating fish; it’s the best way to feed the world

June 3, 2019 — This week, the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation (NMSF) is convening Capitol Hill Ocean Week in Washington, D.C. Additionally, President Trump has declared the month of June “National Ocean Month” in recognition of the importance of the ocean to the economy, national security, and environment of the United States.

For the duration of Ocean Week, Saving Seafood will share materials related to the sustainable and economically vital U.S. commercial fishing and seafood industries, including information tied directly to events being organized as part of the NMSF conference.

To kick off the week, Saving Seafood is sharing the following article on the importance of eating fish to global food security and the environment. It was written by renowned fisheries scientist Dr. Ray Hilborn and published by the Oxford University Press Blog last week:

The famous ocean explorer, Sylvia Earle, has long advocated that people stop eating fish. Recently, George Monbiot made a similar plea in The Guardian – there’s only one way to save the life in our oceans, stop eating fish – which, incidentally, would condemn several million people to starvation.

In both cases, it’s facile reasoning. The oceans may suffer from many things, but fishing isn’t the biggest. Earle and Monbiot’s sweeping pronouncements lack any thought for the consequences of rejecting fish and substituting fish protein for what? Steak? That delicious sizzler on your plate carries the most appallingly large environmental costs regarding fresh water, grain production, land use, erosion, loss of topsoil, transportation, you name it.

Luckily for our planet, not everyone eats steak. You’re vegan, you say, and your conscience is clean. An admirable choice – so long as there aren’t too many of you. For the sake of argument and numbers, let us assume that we can substitute plant protein in the form of tofu, made from soybeans, for fish protein. Soybeans need decent land; in fact it would take 2.58 times the land area of England to produce enough tofu to substitute for no longer available fish. That extra amount of decent arable land just isn’t available – unless we can persuade Brazil, Ecuador and Columbia to cut down more of the Amazon rainforest. We would also add 1.71 times the amount of greenhouse gases that it takes to catch the fish.

And, again for the sake of argument, were we to substitute beef for fish, we would need 192.43 Englands to raise all that cattle and greenhouse gases would rocket to 42.4 times what they are from fishing.

But aren’t there alternatives that we can eat with a clean conscience? It depends. First, we must accept the inescapable truth that everyone has to eat. You and I and another few billion humans right down to the single cell organisms. The second inescapable truth arises from the first but is often ignored, is that there is no free lunch. The big variable in this business of eating is deciding the appropriate price to the environment.

Read the full opinion piece at the Oxford University Press (OUP) Blog