“Fishing less, fishing better and at a human level”… In an article published on Monday, scientists set out the conditions for truly sustainable fishing, capable of facing the climate challenge and avoiding a collapse of marine ecosystems.
“Left unchecked, overfishing and destructive fishing will collide with the effects of climate change to produce dangerously dysfunctional oceans. Current fishing practices must be reformed to prevent this from happening,” Callum Roberts, professor of marine conservation at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom and lead author of the study published in the journal npj Ocean Sustainability.
With around thirty internationally renowned scientists, the British biologist worked for three years to define eleven “actions” intended to minimise the impact of fishing on marine life, to regenerate biodiversity, while strengthening the well-being of populations living from fishing.
“Managing fisheries more sustainably is a global imperative given the growing number of people living in hunger,” say the authors, who include some of the most renowned experts in their field, such as French-Canadian biologist Daniel Pauly, a professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
Seafood provides 15% of the animal protein consumed worldwide and 500 million people make their living from small-scale fishing, according to the latest figures from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
But this food source, essential to many poor countries, is threatened by climate change, the decline in biodiversity and overfishing. “Many fish stocks around the world remain overfished or in decline,” the authors point out.
In the North-East Atlantic, for example, only 28% of the stocks studied are neither overexploited nor at too low biomass levels, according to the European Union’s Scientific Committee on Fisheries (STECF).
And yet, these figures are probably too optimistic. Because, according to a study published in August in the journal Science, mathematical models underestimate the number of fish stocks that have collapsed due to overfishing.
Harmful subsidies
At the international level, a fishery is considered sustainable if it respects the maximum sustainable yield (MSY), an indicator setting the maximum quantity of fish that can be caught without threatening the renewal of the resource.
In addition to the fact that its calculation is questionable, this indicator is strongly criticized by scientists because it does not take into account interactions between species, nor the degradation of the ecosystem caused by fishing.
This is why the authors first call for “fishing less”, at levels “well below MSY”. “By fishing less, there will be more fish in the sea, which means that fishermen will be able to catch more, and better fish, with less effort and at lower cost,” Roberts emphasizes.
In the same vein, these scientists call for limiting the size of boats and abandoning fishing gear that is too destructive, while fighting against illegal fishing and human rights abuses.
They also call for the elimination of harmful subsidies that encourage overfishing, such as the tax exemption on diesel or aid for shipbuilding, estimated at 22.2 billion dollars (19.9 billion euros) in 2018 worldwide.
“Most of the most destructive fisheries will simply become unprofitable when this aid is withdrawn,” say the authors, who propose redirecting these funds to support “good fishing practices” or the establishment of marine protected areas.
“We need to fish less, fish better, at a human level, to ensure food security, while regenerating the health of the oceans,” summarizes Claire Nouvian, president of the Bloom association, which participated in the study.
According to Bloom, no fish sold in supermarkets meets these new sustainable fishing criteria. But labels could “take hold of them”, hopes Mme New.
“All of the reforms that we’ve proposed have been implemented somewhere, in some fisheries,” Roberts said. But “there’s no place that I know of where all of the reforms are already in place,” he acknowledged.