The dangers of underestimating overfishing
Global fisheries harvests have been systematically under-counted by not including non-industrial fisheries which represent 50% more fish taken from the seas.
Under-reporting of fishing globally has been hiding a declining trend
Global statistics for fishing catch are assembled by the UN from reports from individual countries. But these reports typically don't include subsistence fishing, small-scale commercial fishing for informal domestic markets, recreational fishing, bycatch and, of course, illegal fishing.
By using a range of non-traditional data sources, Dr. Daniel Pauly, Professor of Fisheries and Principal Investigator of the Sea Around Us project at the University of British Columbia, and a large collaboration of colleagues around the world, reconstructed this unreported fishing.
They found that this unreported catch represented a 50% increase in annual fishing harvest every year, and what's more, suggested fishery declines in the last two decades that official UN numbers weren't capturing.
Related Links
- Paper in Nature Communications
- UBC release
- CBC story
- SciAm/Nature article