Global trends in world fisheries: impacts on marine ecosystems and food security

By Daniel Pauly, R. Watson, J. Alder. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2005

834 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This contribution, which reviews some broad trends in human history and in the history of fishing, argues that sustainability, however defined, rarely if ever occurred as a result of an explicit policy, but as result of our inability to access a major part of exploited stocks. With the development of industrial fishing, and the resulting invasion of the refuges previously provided by distance and depth, our interactions with fisheries resources have come to resemble the wars of extermination that newly arrived hunters conducted 40 000–50 000 years ago in Australia, and 11 000–13 000 years ago against large terrestrial mammals arrived in North America. These broad trends are documented here through a map of change in fish sizes, which displays characteristic declines, first in the nearshore waters of industrialized countries of the Northern Hemisphere, then spread offshore and to the Southern Hemisphere. This geographical extension met its natural limit in the late 1980s, when the catches from newly accessed stocks ceased to compensate for the collapse in areas accessed earlier, hence leading to a gradual decline of global landing. These trends affect developing countries more than the developed world, which have been able to meet the shortfall by increasing imports from developing countries. These trends, however, together with the rapid growth of farming of carnivorous fishes, which consumes other fishes suited for human consumption, have led to serious food security issues. This promotes urgency to the implementation of the remedies traditionally proposed to alleviate overfishing (reduction of overcapacity, enforcement of conservative total allowable catches, etc.), and to the implementation of non–conventional approaches, notably the re–establishment of the refuges (also known as marine reserves), which made possible the apparent sustainability of pre–industrial fisheries.

Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d1b700640741a5ed0e44b4c55c7e9f4def178d15

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Citations in the corpus

Linking temperate demersal fish species to habitat: scales, patterns and future directions (2013, background): “Following growing concerns regarding the long-term sustainability of marine fish exploitation (Pauly et al. 2005), fisheries collapse from food web restructuring (Frank et al. 2005) and reduced abilities of chronically impacted benthic communities to sustain previous stock levels (Shephard et al.…”
The global extent and character of marine mammal consumption by humans: 1970-2009 (2011, background): “Third, given the pervasive declines in global fish catches, increases in human populations (Allison et al., 2009; Pauly et al., 1998, 2005), and the profound impacts of these trends in the coastal regions of developing countries (Hall et al., 2010), we would expect to see changes in consumption and…”
Diet studies of seabirds: a review and recommendations (2007, background): “With increasing concern over the conservation of marine ecosystems that sustain intensive fishing effort (Pauly et al., 2005), the need to monitor the diets of seabirds and to incorporate seabird populations within regional models of marine ecosystems is becoming even clearer.”
On the use of abiotic surrogates to describe marine benthic biodiversity (2010, background): “Benthic ecosystems have been negatively impacted by over-fishing (Jackson, 2008), bottom trawling and dredging (Pauly et al., 2005), pollution of coastal waters (Halpern et al.”
Fish intake, contaminants, and human health: evaluating the risks and the benefits. (2006, background): “Given the importance of n-3 PUFAs for health, balance must be achieved between environmental and economic concerns to allow sustainable, financially viable aquaculture and commercial fishing.(195,196,199) Plant Sources.”
World Squid Fisheries (2015, background): “This led to calls for radical reappraisal of fishery management (Pauly et al., 2005) and for more holistic approaches to marine resource management and adoption of EBM (Larkin, 1996; Link, 2002, 2010).”
Modelling and mapping resource overlap between seabirds and fisheries on a global scale: a preliminary assessment (2007, positive): “The open oceans are poorly studied, though intensively exploited (e.g. Myers & Worm 2003, Pauly et al. 2003, 2005 ).”
Key principles of marine ecosystem-based management (2015, background): “It has failed to protect marine systems from human pressures [5] or fishery stock collapses [9,10] and in turn these failures have deeply impacted the humans that depend on these resources [2,11].”
Poverty, sustainability and human wellbeing: A social wellbeing approach to the global fisheries crisis (2011, background): “These in many circumstances have proved a success in terms of the replenishment of fish stocks (McClanahan and Kaunda-Arara, 1996; Roberts, 1997; Agardy, 2000; Pauly et al., 2005).”