Saving Seafood

Seaspiracy’s lasting impact on sustainable seafood businesses

April 21, 2021 — With each passing day, Seaspiracy becomes increasingly irrelevant, buried in the never-ending content cue of the world’s largest streaming platform. The last month has been full of fact checks, flame wars, and funding accusations. Though it brought out the worst of everyone on social media, it brought the marine science and stakeholder community together. There is a clear consensus that the film was awful. Even Ray Hilborn and Daniel Pauly agree!

I sneer at the filmmaker’s silly “fact page,” a regurgitation of each false claim in the film listed in chronological order.  But I acknowledge—the joke’s on us. The filmmakers had no intention of presenting facts or having an honest discussion about ocean health; they sought to create a piece of horror entertainment by slandering the seafood industry. And they succeeded. For those of us in the sustainable seafood world, the cut is deep and unlikely to heal soon.

Sustainable seafood businesses didn’t deserve this. Those referring to the best available science, making public sourcing policies, exercising due diligence in their supply chains, and seeking certifications are disproportionately impacted. The film concluded that there is no such thing as sustainable seafood, making liars and cheats of those seeking it. A seafood company that makes no sustainability claims is now less likely to receive negative feedback than one that does.

Herein lies the most disgusting part of this film: it disincentivizes sustainability. Sustainable seafood products are often more expensive than unsustainable alternatives, and studies suggest consumers are not willing to pay a premium for environmentally sustainable seafood. Attempting to source seafood sustainably costs time, money, and perseverance. Like brushing your teeth, you can’t just do it once and be considered clean. A diligent seafood sustainability program requires regular re-assessments and constant attention, or else plaque will accumulate. Commitment to sustainability prohibits a fisherman from fishing in a marine protected area even though it might be full of valuable fish; it stops a chef from putting a popular item back on the menu; it requires a mid-size grocery store chain to invest valuable resources into a seafood certification program each year.

Read the full story at Sustainable Fisheries UW

Ray Hilborn on the role of industry funding

April 12, 2021 — It is true that my research program receives funding from the fishing industry. Industry funding makes up about 22% of my total funding, while I receive similar amounts from environmental foundations, Universities, and private individuals unassociated with the fishing industry. In addition, I receive funding from environmental NGOs, including over the years the National Resources Defense Council, The Nature Conservancy, Environmental Defense Fund, and the Pew Institute for Ocean Science.

Here is my response to those who say this means you should not believe what I say about fisheries:

Science is collaborative, not individual

When I say that all fish will not be gone by 2048 or that fish stocks are increasing in abundance in much of the world, these are not personal opinions, but results of scientific papers authored by a large group of people, each of whom stands by the results of the paper.

When the claim that “all fish would be gone by 2048” came out, the lead author on that paper, Boris Worm, and I agreed to meet together to understand why we had different perspectives. We organized a group of about 20 scientists and looked at trends in fish stock abundance where it was measured and found no sign that these stocks were generally declining. In 2009, we published a paper in Science Magazine showing this, and the lead author was Boris Worm. It is absurd to say that because I, one of 21 authors, had received funding from the fishing industry this work was biased.

I was the first author on the 2020 follow-up paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Effective fisheries management instrumental in improving fish stock status, that showed that fish stocks were actually increasing in much of the world, but this paper had 23 authors, including professors from several different universities, an employee of The Nature Conservancy, a member of the Board of Directors of The Nature Conservancy, a member of the Board of Directors of Environmental Defense, and an employee of the Wildlife Conservation Society all of whom stand by our conclusions. It is not my work, but group work, and where I get some of my funding is largely irrelevant.

Almost every paper with my name on it in fisheries has a range of authors and many of them have at least one author representing conservation organizations.

Look at the data and what was actually done

My research is not cloaked in secrecy. In every research paper I have been a part of, we tell the reader what data we used and how we used it to get the results we did. This is the methodology section. We describe our data and methods so you, or anyone else, can redo and/or verify the analysis.

This is an important part of science. I have criticized the methodology section of others before, and others have criticized mine—this is what makes information evolve closer to truth. Unfortunately, that part of science gets lost in press releases and hyperbolic headlines, which was a large reason I started this website—to explain the methodology sections of important fisheries papers to give the public (and journalists) proper context. For example, we have been highly critical of Oceana’s seafood fraud methodology on this website, but we appreciate the work they do and gave them a platform to respond to our criticism.

Read the full story at Sustainable Fisheries UW

Dr. Hilborn: No-take MPAs “do nothing to mitigate” problems facing U.S. oceans

November 18, 2020 (Saving Seafood) — WASHINGTON — Yesterday, at a House Natural Resources Committee hearing on the Ocean-Based Climate Solutions Act, respected fisheries scientist Dr. Ray Hilborn criticized the marine protected area (MPA) provision of the bill, which he called “the wrong tool for adapting to climate change.”

The provision, known as the “30 by 30” plan, would require the establishment of MPAs in at least 30 percent of American waters by 2030. In his testimony, Dr. Hilborn, professor of sustainable fisheries at the University of Washington, cited numerous threats facing U.S. oceans, including climate change, ocean acidification, exotic species, land-based runoff, plastics and illegal fishing.

“There are solutions to each of these problems,” Dr. Hilborn said. “But it is not no-take MPAs – they do nothing to mitigate these problems.”

Dr. Hilborn praised current fisheries management under the regional council process, which he called science-based and credible with industry and other stakeholders. He also pointed out that MPAs would simply push fishing pressure outside of the protected area into other parts of the ocean, with no net gain.

“MPA advocates ignore the fact that ‘30 by 30’ would cause 70 percent of U.S. oceans to see increased fishing pressure from the vessels that moved out of the 30 percent closed, and thus potentially be less resilient to climate change. Do we really want to make 70 percent of our oceans less resilient to climate change?” Dr. Hilborn said.

The hearing kicked off with Ranking Member Rob Bishop (R-UT) introducing a letter organized in part by Saving Seafood and signed by over 800 seafood industry members opposing the “30 by 30” plan. Rep. Bishop added that “30 by 30” is “woefully misguided, does not improve fisheries, it undermines the Magnuson-Stevens Act, and even worse, it’s detrimental to Americans, especially American fishermen.”

Read Dr. Hilborn’s written testimony here

Watch the full hearing here

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