Overfishing can occur in water bodies of any sizes, such as ponds, rivers, lakes or oceans, and can result in resource depletion, reduced biological growth rates and low biomass levels. Sustained overfishing can lead to critical depensation, where the fish population is no longer able to sustain itself. Some forms of overfishing, such as the overfishing of sharks, has led to the upset of entire marine ecosystems.
The ability of a fishery to recover from overfishing depends on whether the ecosystem's conditions are suitable for the recovery. Dramatic changes in species composition can result in an ecosystem shift,
where other equilibrium energy flows involve species compositions
different from those that had been present before the depletion of the
original fish stock. For example, once trout have been overfished, carp
might take over in a way that makes it impossible for the trout to
re-establish a breeding population.
Global scale
Overfishing has stripped many fisheries around the world of their stocks. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimated in a 2018 report that 33.1% of world fish stocks are subject to overfishing. Significant overfishing has been observed in pre-industrial times. In particular, the overfishing of the western Atlantic Ocean from the earliest days of European colonisation of the Americas has been well documented.
The fraction of fish stocks that are within biologically
sustainable levels has exhibited a decreasing trend, from 90.0 percent
in 1974 to 66.9 percent in 2015. In contrast, the percentage of stocks
fished at biologically unsustainable levels increased from 10 percent in
1974 to 33.1 percent in 2015, with the largest increases in the late
1970s and 1980s.
In 2015, maximally sustainably fished stocks (formerly termed
fully fished stocks) accounted for 59.9 percent and underfished stocks
for 7.0 percent of the total assessed stocks.
While the proportion of underfished stocks decreased continuously from
1974 to 2015, the maximally sustainably fished stocks decreased from
1974 to 1989, and then increased to 59.9 percent in 2015.
In 2015, among the 16 major statistical areas, the Mediterranean
and Black Sea had the highest percentage (62.2 percent) of unsustainable
stocks, closely followed by the Southeast Pacific 61.5 percent and
Southwest Atlantic 58.8 percent. In contrast, the Eastern Central
Pacific, Northeast Pacific (Area 67), Northwest Pacific (Area 61),
Western Central Pacific and Southwest Pacific had the lowest proportion
(13 to 17 percent) of fish stocks at biologically unsustainable levels.
Daniel Pauly, a fisheries scientist known for pioneering work on the human impacts on global fisheries, has commented:
It is almost as though we use our military to fight the animals in the ocean. We are gradually winning this war to exterminate them. And to see this destruction happen, for nothing really – for no reason – that is a bit frustrating. Strangely enough, these effects are all reversible, all the animals that have disappeared would reappear, all the animals that were small would grow, all the relationships that you can't see any more would re-establish themselves, and the system would re-emerge.
Examples
Examples of overfishing exist in areas such as the North Sea, the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and the East China Sea.
In these locations, overfishing has not only proved disastrous to fish
stocks but also to the fishing communities relying on the harvest. Like
other extractive industries such as forestry and hunting, fisheries are susceptible to economic interaction between ownership or stewardship and sustainability, otherwise known as the tragedy of the commons.
Overfished US stocks, 2015
- The Peruvian coastal anchovy fisheries crashed in the 1970s after overfishing and an El Niño season largely depleted anchovies from its waters. Anchovies were a major natural resource in Peru; indeed, 1971 alone yielded 10.2 million metric tons of anchovies. However, the following five years saw the Peruvian fleet's catch amount to only about 4 million tons. This was a major loss to Peru's economy.
- The collapse of the cod fishery off Newfoundland, and the 1992 decision by Canada to impose an indefinite moratorium on the Grand Banks, is a dramatic example of the consequences of overfishing.
- The sole fisheries in the Irish Sea, the west English Channel, and other locations have become overfished to the point of virtual collapse, according to the UK government's official Biodiversity Action Plan. The United Kingdom has created elements within this plan to attempt to restore this fishery, but the expanding global human population and the expanding demand for fish has reached a point where demand for food threatens the stability of these fisheries, if not the species' survival.
- Many deep sea fish are at risk, such as orange roughy and sablefish. The deep sea is almost completely dark, near freezing and has little food. Deep sea fish grow slowly because of limited food, have slow metabolisms, low reproductive rates, and many don't reach breeding maturity for 30 to 40 years. A fillet of orange roughy at the store is probably at least 50 years old. Most deep sea fish are in international waters, where there are no legal protections. Most of these fish are caught by deep trawlers near seamounts, where they congregate because of food. Flash freezing allows the trawlers to work for days at a time, and modern fishfinders target the fish with ease.
- Blue walleye became extinct in the Great Lakes in the 1980s. Until the middle of the 20th century, it was a commercially valuable fish, with about a half million tonnes being landed during the period from about 1880 to the late 1950s, when the populations collapsed, apparently through a combination of overfishing, anthropogenic eutrophication, and competition with the introduced rainbow smelt.
- The World Wide Fund for Nature and the Zoological Society of London jointly issued their "Living Blue Planet Report" on 16 September 2015 which states that there was a dramatic fall of 74% in worldwide stocks of the important scombridae fish such as mackerel, tuna and bonitos between 1970 and 2010, and the global overall "population sizes of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish fell by half on average in just 40 years."
In management
Several countries are now effectively managing their fisheries. Examples include Iceland and New Zealand. The United States has turned many of its fisheries around from being in a highly depleted state.
Consequences
Atlantic cod stocks were severely overfished in the 1970s and 1980s, leading to their abrupt collapse in 1992
According to a 2008 UN report, the world's fishing fleets are losing US$50 billion each year through depleted stocks and poor fisheries management. The report, produced jointly by the World Bank and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), asserts that half the world's fishing fleet could be scrapped with no change in catch. In addition, the biomass of global fish stocks have been allowed to run down to the point where it is no longer possible to catch the amount of fish that could be caught. Increased incidence of schistosomiasis in Africa has been linked to declines of fish species that eat the snails carrying the disease-causing parasites. Massive growth of jellyfish
populations threaten fish stocks, as they compete with fish for food,
eat fish eggs, and poison or swarm fish, and can survive in oxygen
depleted environments where fish cannot; they wreak massive havoc on
commercial fisheries. Overfishing eliminates a major jellyfish
competitor and predator exacerbating the jellyfish population explosion.
Both climate change and a restructuring of the ecosystem have been
found to be major roles in an increase in jellyfish population in the
Irish Sea in the 1990s.
Types
There are three recognized types of biological overfishing: growth overfishing, recruit overfishing and ecosystem overfishing.
Growth
Growth overfishing occurs when fish are harvested at an average size that is smaller than the size that would produce the maximum yield per recruit. A recruit is an individual that makes it to maturity, or into the limits specified by a fishery, which are usually size or age.
This makes the total yield less than it would be if the fish were
allowed to grow to an appropriate size. It can be countered by reducing
fishing mortality to lower levels and increasing the average size of
harvested fish to a size that will allow maximum yield per recruit.
Recruitment
Recruitment overfishing occurs when the mature adult population (spawning biomass)
is depleted to a level where it no longer has the reproductive capacity
to replenish itself—there are not enough adults to produce offspring.
Increasing the spawning stock biomass to a target level is the approach
taken by managers to restore an overfished population to sustainable
levels. This is generally accomplished by placing moratoriums, quotas and minimum size limits on a fish population.
Ecosystem
Ecosystem overfishing occurs when the balance of the ecosystem is altered by overfishing. With declines in the abundance of large predatory species, the abundance of small forage type increases causing a shift in the balance of the ecosystem towards smaller fish species.
Acceptable levels
The notion of overfishing hinges on what is meant by an acceptable level of fishing. More precise biological and bioeconomic terms define acceptable level as follows:
- Biological overfishing occurs when fishing mortality has reached a level where the stock biomass has negative marginal growth (reduced rate of biomass growth), as indicated by the red area in the figure. (Fish are being taken out of the water so quickly that the replenishment of stock by breeding slows down. If the replenishment continues to diminish for long enough, replenishment will go into reverse and the population will decrease.)
- Economic or bioeconomic overfishing additionally considers the cost of fishing when determining acceptable catches. Under this framework, a fishery is considered to be overfished when catches exceed maximum economic yield where resource rent is at its maximum. Fish are being removed from the fishery so quickly that the profitability of the fishery is sub-optimal. A more dynamic definition of economic overfishing also considers the present value of the fishery using a relevant discount rate to maximise the flow of resource rent over all future catches.
The
Traffic Light colour convention, showing the concept of Harvest Control
Rule (HCR), specifying when a rebuilding plan is mandatory in terms of precautionary and limit reference points for spawning biomass and fishing mortality rate.
Harvest control rule
A model proposed in 2010 for predicting acceptable levels of fishing is the Harvest Control Rule (HCR),
which is a set of tools and protocols with which management has some
direct control of harvest rates and strategies in relation to predicting
stock status, and long-term maximum sustainable yields. Constant catch
and constant fishing mortality are two types of simple harvest control
rules.
Input and output orientations
Fishing capacity can also be defined using an input or output orientation.
- An input-oriented fishing capacity is defined as the maximum available capital stock in a fishery that is fully utilized at the maximum technical efficiency in a given time period, given resource and market conditions.
- An output-oriented fishing capacity is defined as the maximum catch a vessel (fleet) can produce if inputs are fully utilized given the biomass, the fixed inputs, the age structure of the fish stock, and the present stage of technology.
Technical efficiency of each vessel of the fleet is assumed necessary to attain this maximum catch. The degree of capacity utilization results from the comparison of the actual level of output (input) and the capacity output (input) of a vessel or a fleet.
Mitigation
In
order to meet the problems of overfishing, a precautionary approach and
Harvest Control Rule (HCR) management principles have been introduced
in the main fisheries around the world. The Traffic Light color
convention introduces sets of rules based on predefined critical values,
which could be adjusted as more information is gained.
The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea treaty deals with aspects of over fishing in articles 61, 62, and 65.
- Article 61 requires all coastal states to ensure that the maintenance of living resources in their exclusive economic zones is not endangered by over-exploitation. The same article addresses the maintenance or restoration of populations of species above levels at which their reproduction may become seriously threatened.
- Article 62 provides that coastal states: "shall promote the objective of optimum utilization of the living resources in the exclusive economic zone without prejudice to Article 61"
- Article 65 provides generally for the rights of, inter alia, coastal states to prohibit, limit, or regulate the exploitation of marine mammals.
According to some observers, overfishing can be viewed as an example of the tragedy of the commons; appropriate solutions would therefore promote property rights through, for instance, privatization and fish farming. Daniel K. Benjamin, in Fisheries are Classic Example of the "Tragedy of the Commons", cites research by Grafton, Squires and Fox to support the idea that privatization can solve the overfishing problem:
- According to recent research on the British Columbia halibut fishery, where the commons has been at least partly privatized, substantial ecological and economic benefits have resulted. There is less damage to fish stocks, the fishing is safer, and fewer resources are needed to achieve a given harvest.
Another possible solution, at least for some areas, is quotas,
so fishermen can only legally take a certain amount of fish. A more
radical possibility is declaring certain areas of the sea "no-go zones" and make fishing there strictly illegal, so the fish in that area have time to recover and repopulate.
In order to maximise resources some countries (e.g. Bangladesh
and Thailand) have improved the availability of family planning
services. The resulting smaller populations have a decreased
environmental footprint and less food needs to provided.
Controlling consumer behavior and demand is critical in
mitigating action. Worldwide, a number of initiatives emerged to provide
consumers with information regarding the conservation status of the
seafood available to them. The Guide to Good Fish Guides lists a number of these.
Government regulation
Many regulatory measures are available for controlling overfishing. These measures include fishing quotas, bag limits, licensing, closed seasons, size limits and the creation of marine reserves and other marine protected areas.
A model of the interaction between fish and fishers showed that
when an area is closed to fishers, but there are no catch regulations
such as individual transferable quotas, fish catches are temporarily increased but overall fish biomass is reduced, resulting in the opposite outcome from the one desired for fisheries.
Thus, a displacement of the fleet from one locality to another will
generally have little effect if the same quota is taken. As a result, management measures such as temporary closures or establishing a marine protected area
of fishing areas are ineffective when not combined with individual
fishing quotas. An inherent problem with quotas is that fish populations
vary from year to year. A study has found that fish populations rise
dramatically after stormy years due to more nutrients reaching the
surface and therefore greater primary production. To fish sustainably, quotas need to be changed each year to account for fish population.
Individual transferable quotas (ITQs) are fishery rationalization instruments defined under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act as limited access permits to harvest quantities of fish. Fisheries scientists decide the optimal amount of fish (total allowable catch)
to be harvested in a certain fishery. The decision considers carrying
capacity, regeneration rates and future values. Under ITQs, members of a
fishery
are granted rights to a percentage of the total allowable catch that
can be harvested each year. These quotas can be fished, bought, sold,
or leased allowing for the least cost vessels to be used. ITQs are used
in New Zealand, Australia, Iceland, Canada, and the United States.
In 2008, a large-scale study of fisheries that used ITQs compared
to ones that didn't provided strong evidence that ITQs can help to
prevent collapses and restore fisheries that appear to be in decline.
China bans fishing in the South China Sea for a period each year.
Removal of subsidies
Several
scientists have called for an end to subsidies paid to deep sea
fisheries. In international waters beyond the 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zones of coastal countries, many fisheries are unregulated, and fishing fleets
plunder the depths with state-of-the-art technology. In a few hours,
massive nets weighing up to 15 tons, dragged along the bottom by deep-water trawlers, can destroy deep-sea corals and sponge beds that have taken centuries or millennia to grow. The trawlers can target orange roughy, grenadiers, or sharks. These fish are usually long-lived and late maturing, and their populations take decades, even centuries to recover.
Fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly and economist Ussif Rashid Sumaila have examined subsidies paid to bottom trawl
fleets around the world. They found that US$152 million per year are
paid to deep-sea fisheries. Without these subsidies, global deep-sea
fisheries would operate at a loss of $50 million a year. A great deal of
the subsidies paid to deep-sea trawlers is to subsidize the large
amount of fuel required to travel beyond the 200-mile limit and drag
weighted nets.
"There is surely a better way for governments to spend money than by paying subsidies to a fleet that burns 1.1 billion litres of fuel annually to maintain paltry catches of old growth fish from highly vulnerable stocks, while destroying their habitat in the process" – Pauly.
"Eliminating global subsidies would render these fleets economically unviable and would relieve tremendous pressure on over-fishing and vulnerable deep-sea ecosystems" – Sumaila.
Minimizing fishing impact
Fishing
techniques may be altered to minimize bycatch and reduce impacts on
marine habitats. These techniques include using varied gear types
depending on target species and habitat type. For example, a net with
larger holes will allow undersized fish to avoid capture. A turtle excluder device
(TED) allows sea turtles and other megafauna to escape from shrimp
trawls. Avoiding fishing in spawning grounds may allow fish stocks to
rebuild by giving adults a chance to reproduce.
Aquaculture
Global harvest of aquatic organisms in million tonnes, 1950–2010, as reported by the FAO.
Aquaculture involves the farming of fish in captivity. This approach
effectively privatizes fish stocks and creates incentives for farmers to
conserve their stocks. It also reduces environmental impact. However,
farming carnivorous fish, such as salmon, does not always reduce pressure on wild fisheries, since carnivorous farmed fish are usually fed fishmeal and fish oil extracted from wild forage fish.
Aquaculture played a minor role in the harvesting of marine
organisms until the 1970s. Growth in aquaculture increased rapidly in
1990s when the rate of wild capture plateaued. Aquaculture now provides
approximately half of all harvested aquatic organisms. Aquaculture
production rates continue to grow while wild harvest remains steady.
Fish farming can enclose the entire breeding cycle
of the fish, with fish being bred in captivity. Some fish prove
difficult to breed in captivity and can be caught in the wild as
juveniles and brought into captivity to increase their weight. With
scientific progress more species are being made to breed in captivity.
This was the case with southern bluefin tuna, which were first bred in captivity in 2009.
Consumer awareness
Sustainable seafood is a movement that has gained momentum as more people become aware of overfishing and environmentally destructive fishing methods. Sustainable seafood is seafood from either fished or farmed sources that can maintain or increase production in the future without jeopardizing the ecosystems from which it was acquired. In general, slow-growing fish that reproduce late in life, such as orange roughy, are vulnerable to overfishing. Seafood species that grow quickly and breed young, such as anchovies and sardines, are much more resistant to overfishing. Several organizations, including the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), and Friend of the Sea, certify seafood fisheries as sustainable.
The Marine Stewardship Council has developed an environmental
standard for sustainable and well-managed fisheries. Environmentally
responsible fisheries management and practices are rewarded with the use
of its blue product ecolabel.
Consumers concerned about overfishing and its consequences are
increasingly able to choose seafood products that have been
independently assessed against the MSC's environmental standard. This
enables consumers to play a part in reversing the decline of fish
stocks. As of February 2012, over 100 fisheries around the world have
been independently assessed and certified as meeting the MSC standard.
Their where-to-buy
page lists the currently available certified seafood. As of February
2012 over 13,000 MSC-labelled products are available in 74 countries
around the world. Fish & Kids is an MSC project to teach schoolchildren about marine environmental issues, including overfishing.
The Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch
Program, although not an official certifying body like the MSC, also
provides guidance on the sustainability of certain fish species. Some seafood restaurants have begun to offer more sustainable seafood options. The Seafood Choices Alliance is an organization whose members include chefs that serve sustainable seafood at their establishments. In the US, the Sustainable Fisheries Act defines sustainable practices through national standards. Although there is no official certifying body like the MSC, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has created FishWatch to help guide concerned consumers to sustainable seafood choices. See also a guide to good fish guides.
In September 2016, a partnership of Google and Oceana and Skytruth introduced Global Fishing Watch, a website designed to assist citizens of the globe in monitoring fishing activities.
Barriers to effective management
The fishing industry has a strong financial incentive to oppose some measures aimed at improving the sustainability of fish stocks. Recreational fisherman also have an interest in maintaining access to fish stocks. This leads to extensive lobbying that can block or water down government policies intended to prevent overfishing.
Outside of countries' exclusive economic zones, fishing is
difficult to control. Large oceangoing fishing boats are free to exploit
fish stocks at will.
In waters that are the subject of territorial disputes, countries may actively encourage overfishing. A notable example is the cod wars where Britain used its navy to protect its trawlers fishing in Iceland's exclusive economic zone.
Fish are highly transitory. Many species will freely move through
different jurisdictions. The conservation efforts of one country can
then be exploited by another.
While governments can create regulations to control people's behaviours this can be undermined by illegal fishing activity.
Estimates of the size of the illegal catch range from 11 to 26 million
tonnes, which represents 14-33% of the world's reported catch.
Illegal fishing can take many forms. In some developing countries,
large numbers of poor people are dependent on fishing. It can prove
difficult to regulate this kind of overfishing, especially for weak
governments. Even in regulated environments, illegal fishing may occur.
While industrial fishing is often effectively controlled, smaller scale
and recreational fishermen can often break regulations such as bag limits
and seasonal closures. Fisherman can also easily fish illegally by
doing things such as underreporting the amount of fish they caught or
reporting that they caught one type of fish while actually catching
another. There is also a large problem with surveillance of illegal fishing activity. In 2001, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO), passed the International Plan of Action to Prevent, Deter and
Eliminate Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing (IPOA-IUU). This
is an agreement with the intention to stop port states from allowing
boats to dock that participated in illegal, unreported or unregulated
fishing. It also gives details for port states on effective measures of
inspecting and reporting illegal fishing. Some illegal fishing takes place on an industrial scale with financed commercial operations.
The fishing capacity problem is not only related to the conservation of fish stocks
but also to the sustainability of fishing activity. Causes of the
fishing problem can be found in the property rights regime of fishing
resources. Overexploitation and rent dissipation of fishermen arise in
open-access fisheries as was shown in Gordon.
In open-access resources like fish stocks, in the absence of a system like individual transferable quotas,
the impossibility of excluding others provokes the fishermen who want
to increase catch to do so effectively by taking someone else' share,
intensifying competition. This tragedy of the commons
provokes a capitalization process that leads them to increase their
costs until they are equal to their revenue, dissipating their rent
completely.
Resistance from fishermen
There is always disagreement between fishermen and government scientists... Imagine an overfished area of the sea in the shape of a hockey field with nets at either end. The few fish left therein would gather around the goals because fish like structured habitats. Scientists would survey the entire field, make lots of unsuccessful hauls, and conclude that it contains few fish. The fishermen would make a beeline to the goals, catch the fish around them, and say the scientists do not know what they are talking about. The subjective impression the fishermen get is always that there's lots of fish - because they only go to places that still have them... fisheries scientists survey and compare entire areas, not only the productive fishing spots. – Fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly
