Saving Seafood

Indigenous peoples of the world’s coastlines are losing their fisheries — and their way of life

December 5th, 2016 — The world loves seafood. According to some estimates, people consumed about 102 million tons of it last year.

A new study released Friday by the Nippon Foundation-Nereus Program, based at the University of British Columbia, shows that indigenous people who live on the world’s coasts are definitely hooked. They consume 15 times more seafood per capita than people in other parts of the world, about 2.3 million tons, or about 2 percent of the global catch, the study said.

They don’t simply catch and eat fish and other seafood. It’s the heart of communities, the center of culture and religion, a gift from the heavens. Seafood is crucial to the cultures of coastal indigenous people in the Americas, Asia, Africa and the Arctic, among other places, and overfishing and the ocean-wide movement of fish due to climate change could wipe those resources out.

On the coast of Africa at the equator, huge commercial ships are starting to encroach on native fishing areas as ocean stocks diminish. In places such as Madagascar, the stocks of community fisheries have been nearly lost.

“These big industrial fisheries are chasing the fish. In West Africa, larger vessels are moving closer and closer to shore,” said Andrés Cisneros-Montemayor, research associate at the University of British Columbia and an author of the study published in PLOS One. “A lot of these indigenous communities, all they have are dugout canoes.”

Read the full story at The Washington Post 

Economic impacts of climate change on global fisheries could be worse than we thought

October 17, 2016 — Marine fisheries have been estimated to support the livelihoods of 10 to 12 percent of the world’s population and generate an average of $100 billion in revenue every year. But global fisheries are facing a number of challenges: changes in markets, demographics, and over-exploitation will significantly impact global fisheries in the near future, while climate change is expected to pose a major challenge over the longer term.

A study published last month in the journal Scientific Reports explores the potential economic impacts of climate change as it affects the amount and composition of fish in marine fisheries and leads to decreased catches. Previous research has shown that global warming will cause changes in ocean temperatures, sea ice extent, salinity, and oxygen levels, among other impacts, that are likely to lead to significant shifts in the distribution range and productivity of marine species, the study notes.

“Warmer temperatures may also lead to decreases in maximum body sizes of marine fishes,” write the authors of the study, a team of scientists from the University of British Columbia (UBC). These changes will be regionally specific, as predicted species distributional shifts and changes in ocean productivity due to climate change are expected to result in increases in maximum catch potential in high latitudinal regions but decreases in the tropics. The researchers add that “These changes have large implications for people who depend on fish for food and income, and thus the contribution of fisheries to the global economy.”

In all, the UBC researchers found that global fisheries could lose approximately $10 billion in annual revenue by 2050 if climate change continues unchecked — a 10 percent decrease, which is 35 percent more than has been previously estimated.

Countries that are most dependent on fisheries to feed their populations will experience the biggest impacts, according to the study. The largest average decrease in maximum catch potential will occur in small island countries like Tuvalu, which is expected to see a 79 percent drop in annual catches in its waters, and Kiribati, which is projected to see a 70 percent decrease.

“Developing countries most dependent on fisheries for food and revenue will be hardest hit,” Vicky Lam, a postdoctoral fellow at UBC’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries and the study’s lead author, said in a statement. “It is necessary to implement better marine resource management plans to increase stock resilience to climate change.”

On the other hand, some developed countries, such as Greenland and Iceland, could see revenue increases as fish move into cooler waters.

Read the full story at Mongabay

Warmer Global Ocean Pushes Fish to Extremes

August 15, 2016 — The opening lyrics in Bob Dylan’s classic tune “The Times They Are A-Changin’” told us to acknowledge that the waters around us were quickly rising. And while Dylan was surely referring to the sociopolitical climate of the day, those words still ring true in the physical sense as well. Climate change and global warming — or whatever phrase you use for our planet’s current ecological ailments — have generated much debate for the last several decades. These topics just seem to make some people, well, hot and bothered. Some choose to reject the notion that we’re seeing fairly, if not very, rapid changes in climate, but unfortunately, the data say otherwise. And this phenomenon we’re witnessing is directly linked to, if not driven by, what’s going on in the earth’s oceans.

In reality, the world’s oceans comprise a single large, connected entity called the global ocean. This expansive mass of water churns with currents, both visible and hidden, that not only exert control over marine ecosystems but also create profound effects on terrestrial ones.

The Long Term

Most anglers have heard plenty of talk over the last year or so about the record-breaking water temperatures in the Pacific, brought on by the last El Niño. Indeed, last year’s event ranked as the most significant ever recorded. No matter how severe the episode, however, El Niño events typically linger only a year or so. And although these ephemeral conditions seem to garner a lot of press, bigger problems have been unfolding for some time. Many environmental scientists agree that ocean temperatures are rising on a long-term, global level.

Read the full story at Sport Fishing Magazine

Carl Walters on the “precautionary approach”

July 6, 2016 — Carl Walters is a Professor Emeritus at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia. His area of expertise includes fisheries assessment and sustainable management and has used that expertise to advise public agencies and industrial groups on fisheries assessment and management. He is a member of the Royal Society of Canada and received the Volvo Environmental Prize in 2005. He has been a member of a number of NSERC grant committees since 1970, and received the AIFRB Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in 2011. Walters is considered the ‘father’ of adaptive management.

Misuse of the precautionary approach in fisheries management

We spoke with Carl Walters of the University of British Columbia about the misuse of the precautionary approach by risk-averse scientists and conservation advocates. His concern arises from the application of the precautionary approach to Western Canadian salmon fisheries, which he believes has negatively impacted Canadian salmon fishermen and resulted in “virtually, an economic collapse.”

He began by first differentiating between the precautionary principle and the precautionary approach, the former he claimed to be “a perfectly sensible statement that I think almost everyone would subscribe to about the need to avoid irreversible harm when possible…in the management of any system. There’s a different creature that has arisen in fisheries policy…called the precautionary approach to management” – this is the one that upsets him (00:35).

According to Walters, there are two problems with the precautionary approach (PA). First, it was concocted intuitively by highly risk-averse biologists and managers. “Those people are not the ones who bear the costs of having such a policy. It’s really easy for a highly risk-averse manager to recommend a very conservative policy because it’s not his income and economic future that’s at stake” (03:18). In fact, fishermen are seldom consulted about what harvest control rule they would prefer. Fishermen are often perceived to be relentless natural resource extractors that demand to keep fishing until it can be proven that the stock is collapsing. “That’s not the way fishermen behave” Walters says. “It turns out that most fishermen are risk-averse. They’re not pillagers, they’re not gamblers willing to take any risk at all in order to just keep fishing. They are concerned about the future and they are generally willing to follow some kind of risk-averse harvesting policy” (04:40). “Fishing is a risky business, and fishermen in general are far less risk averse than the people who end up in government and academic jobs.  But that does not mean fishermen are willing to take high risks with the productive future of the stocks that support them.”

So if both fishermen and managers are risk-averse, what’s the problem? The issue is that the interests of only one of these stakeholders is truly accounted for when designing precautionary harvest policies. In Canadian fisheries, there has been “a deliberate exclusion of fishermen in the development of these critical harvest control rules. They have no say in it. The decision rule should be based, at least to some degree, on patterns of risk-aversion that fishermen have since it’s the fishermen who bear the burden of the regulation” (09:48).

Read the full story and hear the conversation at CFood

Nutrition: Fall in fish catch threatens human health

June 16, 2016 — How will the 10 billion people expected to be living on Earth by 2050 obtain sufficient and nutritious food? This is one of the greatest challenges humanity faces. Global food systems must supply enough calories and protein for a growing human population and provide important micronutrients such as iron, zinc, omega-3 fatty acids and vitamins.

Deficiencies of micronutrients — so called because the body needs them only in tiny amounts — can increase the risks of perinatal and maternal mortality, growth retardation, child mortality, cognitive deficits and reduced immune function1. The associated burdens of disease are large. Forty-five per cent of mortality in children under five is attributable to undernutrition; nutritional deficiencies are responsible for 50% of years lived with disability in children aged four and under1.

Fish are crucial sources of micronutrients, often in highly bioavailable forms. And fish populations are declining. Most previous analyses have considered only how people will be affected by the loss of protein derived from fish. We calculate that this is the tip of the iceberg. Combining data on dietary nutrition, and fish catch, we predict that more than 10% of the global population could face micronutrient and fatty-acid deficiencies driven by fish declines over the coming decades, especially in the developing nations at the Equator (see ‘Troubled Waters’). This new view underlines the need for nutrition-sensitive fisheries policies.

Read the full story at Nature.com