Global Fisheries Are Declining but Can Still Recover

Global Fisheries Are Declining but Can Still Recover

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

The vast majority of the world’s fisheries are declining but could recover if properly managed, according to a paper published in the journal Science. The statistical analysis marks the first time researchers have assessed the globe’s roughly 10,000 fishing areas, more than 80% of which are unregulated.

The group of five American scientists who wrote the paper found that small unmanaged fisheries were in much worse shape than regulated ones. Large unmanaged fisheries, on the other hand, performed roughly as well as their regulated counterparts. Christopher Costello, the lead author and an economist with the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California at Santa Barbara, said “If we turn things around now, we can recover them in a matter of years, not decades, and that has big implications for conservation and food security.”