November 5, 2026 — For decades, in some fisheries, the most valuable part of that animal was not its body… but its fins. A fisher would remove the fins, keep them and throw the rest of the shark back overboard in a practice known as “shark finning,” which is both wasteful and devastatingly painful for the animal on the receiving end of the blade. It did make economic sense in a grimly practical way, as fins took up far less space than whole sharks, leaving valuable room onboard for other species. But in a bid to end the cruel practice, global countries introduced regulations requiring sharks to be landed whole, with their fins naturally attached, attached to the carcass with ropes or wires, or landed according to prescribed fin-to-carcass ratios. On paper, this seems like a straightforward conservation solution. Stop finning, and you remove the incentive to kill sharks for their fins.
But what happens next? A new global analysis suggests the answer is not nearly as simple as we might hope.
Researchers examined shark trade across 188 countries between 2007 and 2020 using the Aquatic Resource Trade in Species, or ARTIS, database. Rather than looking only at whether countries had regulations, they asked if introducing shark-finning regulations actually changed how much shark product countries exported, imported or consumed. They then used a statistical approach called difference-in-differences, allowing them to compare countries before and after they introduced regulations with countries that had not yet introduced them. It is a useful way of getting closer to the question of causation rather than simply observing that two things happened at the same time. The headlining result is surprisingly undramatic: on average, finning regulations did not produce statistically significant changes in shark exports, imports or domestic consumption. Countries with regulations eventually exported about 351 metric tonnes less shark product per year than they might otherwise have been expected to export, while imports were about 142 tonnes higher. Domestic consumption was estimated to be lower by about 1,672 tonnes per year, but this effect was also not statistically significant.
For decades, in some fisheries, the most valuable part of that animal was not its body… but its fins. A fisher would remove the fins, keep them and throw the rest of the shark back overboard in a practice known as “shark finning,” which is both wasteful and devastatingly painful for the animal on the receiving end of the blade. It did make economic sense in a grimly practical way, as fins took up far less space than whole sharks, leaving valuable room onboard for other species. But in a bid to end the cruel practice, global countries introduced regulations requiring sharks to be landed whole, with their fins naturally attached, attached to the carcass with ropes or wires, or landed according to prescribed fin-to-carcass ratios. On paper, this seems like a straightforward conservation solution. Stop finning, and you remove the incentive to kill sharks for their fins.
But what happens next? A new global analysis suggests the answer is not nearly as simple as we might hope.
Researchers examined shark trade across 188 countries between 2007 and 2020 using the Aquatic Resource Trade in Species, or ARTIS, database. Rather than looking only at whether countries had regulations, they asked if introducing shark-finning regulations actually changed how much shark product countries exported, imported or consumed. They then used a statistical approach called difference-in-differences, allowing them to compare countries before and after they introduced regulations with countries that had not yet introduced them. It is a useful way of getting closer to the question of causation rather than simply observing that two things happened at the same time. The headlining result is surprisingly undramatic: on average, finning regulations did not produce statistically significant changes in shark exports, imports or domestic consumption. Countries with regulations eventually exported about 351 metric tonnes less shark product per year than they might otherwise have been expected to export, while imports were about 142 tonnes higher. Domestic consumption was estimated to be lower by about 1,672 tonnes per year, but this effect was also not statistically significant.