12/13/2022 0 Comments East west bank ernest cheung lineinAlthough the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation indicates that 57% of managed tuna stocks are considered to be at a healthy level of abundance, 13% are overfished ( 5), and even those that are not overfished show slight declines in biomass over time ( 6) and may benefit from increases in biomass. Highly migratory species such as tuna and sharks that move between the high seas and countries’ jurisdictional waters tend to be intensely fished and overexploited ( 4). Deep-sea bottom trawling can damage fragile habitats containing unique biodiversity including millenary deep-sea corals ( 3). The rationality of widespread high-seas fishing has been questioned because of its environmental impacts and uncertain economic profitability ( 2). These results support recent calls for subsidy and fishery management reforms on the high seas.įishing in the marine waters beyond national jurisdiction (the “high seas” covering 64% of the ocean’s surface) is dominated by a small number of fishing countries, which reap most of the benefits of fishing this internationally shared area ( 1). Deep-sea bottom trawling often produces net economic benefits only thanks to subsidies, and much fishing by the world’s largest fishing fleets would largely be unprofitable without subsidies and low labor costs. The patterns of fishing profitability vary widely between countries, types of fishing, and distance to port. Our results suggest that fishing at the current scale is enabled by large government subsidies, without which as much as 54% of the present high-seas fishing grounds would be unprofitable at current fishing rates. We characterize the global high-seas fishing fleet and report the economic benefits of fishing the high seas globally, nationally, and at the scale of individual fleets. These technological advances help us quantify high-seas fishing effort, costs, and benefits, and assess whether, where, and when high-seas fishing makes economic sense. Newly compiled satellite data and machine learning now allow us to track individual fishing vessels on the high seas in near real time. While the ecological impacts of fishing the waters beyond national jurisdiction (the “high seas”) have been widely studied, the economic rationale is more difficult to ascertain because of scarce data on the costs and revenues of the fleets that fish there.
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