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 Monday, June 22, 2009 Policy Transparency Key to Saving World's Fisheries The sustainability of fisheries depends on the transparency with which coastal states incorporate scientific advice into policies, reports a study published in the journal PlosBiology Scripps Institution of Oceanography / University of California, San Diego A new study provides the first global evaluation of how management practices influence fisheries' sustainability. The study assessed the effectiveness of the world's fisheries management regimes using evaluations by nearly 1,200 fisheries experts and analyzing these in combination with data on the sustainability of fisheries catches. The results indicated that most fisheries management regimes are lagging far behind standards set by international organizations, and that the conversion of scientific advice into policy, through a participatory and transparent process, plays the most critical role in determining the sustainability of fisheries."The world's fisheries are one of the most important natural assets to humankind," says lead author Camilo Mora, a Colombian researcher at Dalhousie University and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. "Unfortunately, our use of the world's fisheries has been excessive and has led to the decline or collapse of many stocks."  A study led by Camilo Mora of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and Dalhousie University provides the first global evaluation of how management practices influence fisheries' sustainability. Image courtesy of Sascha Regmann, Project Blue Sea, Marine Photobook. "The consequences of overexploiting the world's fisheries are a concern not only for food security and socio¬economic development but for ocean ecosystems," says Boris Worm, a professor at Dalhousie University and co-author of the paper. "We now recognize that overfishing can also lead to the erosion of biodiversity and ecosystem productivity." "The different socioeconomic and ecological consequences associated with declining fish stocks are an international concern and several initiatives have been put forward to ensure that countries improve the way they use their marine resources," explains Mora. "Some of these initiatives include the United Nations Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries, the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Although these initiatives have been endorsed by most governments, a global assessment on the extent to which these ideals are actually implemented and effective remains lacking." In this study, Mora and his colleagues analyzed a set of attributes upon which country-level fisheries could be evaluated. The attributes that they pinpointed included the scientific quality of management recommendations, the transparency of converting scientific recommendations into policy, the enforcement of policies, and the extent of subsidies, fishing effort and fishing by foreign fleets. To quantify those attributes the researchers developed a questionnaire designed to elicit worst- to best-case scenarios. The survey was translated into five languages and distributed to more than 13,000 fisheries experts around the world. Nearly 1,200 evaluations were used in the study. The responses of the surveyed experts were compared to, and found to be in accordance with, empirical data, supporting the validity of the data obtained in the study. The results of this global survey showed that 7 percent of all coastal states carry out rigorous scientific assessments for the generation of management policies, 1.4 percent also have a participatory and transparent process to convert scientific recommendations into policy and less than 1 percent also implement mechanisms to ensure the compliance with regulations. No one country was additionally free of the effects of excess fishing capacity, subsidies or access to foreign fishing.  The map displays the effectiveness of the world's fisheries management regimes. Highlighted are the average scores each country received in a groundbreaking new survey. The results of the study show that wealthier countries, though they have predominantly better science and enforcement capabilities, face the negative repercussions of excessive subsidies and larger fishing capacity, which have resulted largely from increased modernization of national fleets. In contrast, low income countries largely lacked robust science and enforcement capabilities and although these nations have less fishing capacity nationally, they disproportionally sold fishing rights to nations that did. The study showed that in 33 percent of the coastal states classified as low income (commonly countries in Africa and Oceania) most fishing is carried out by foreign fleets from either the European Union, South Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan or the United States. The only attribute in which low- and high-income countries overlapped significantly was their limited ability to convert scientific recommendations into policy. The mechanism for this pattern, however, was different. Poor countries reportedly struggle with the effects of corruption while wealthier countries often encounter more political or economical pressures. For the second part of the study, Mora and his colleagues combined the database on management effectiveness with a recently developed index that quantifies the probability that the catch of a particular country is sustainable or not. This part of the study showed that out of several attributes analyzed, the transparency with which scientific recommendations are turned into policy plays the strongest role in the fate of fisheries sustainability. "Policy-making is at the center of the entire process of fisheries management," explains co-author Marta Coll, at the Institut de Ciènces del Mar in Spain. "If this is heavily influenced by political pressures or corruption, it is unlikely that good scientific advice will ever be translated into proper regulations. Similarly, authoritarianism in this process is likely to reduce compliance with the resulting policies."  Camilo Mora "A similar situation occurs with the quotas for bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean," explains Safina. "In this case, concerns about the collapse of this stock have led scientists to recommend quotas that have been almost doubled due to strong pressures in the process of policy-making." "For developing nations the situation is more regrettable, given that many of these countries, particularly in Africa and Oceania, face shortages in food supply," says coauthor Rashid Sumaila at the University of British Columbia. "We know, for instance, that in many of these nations, shark populations have been decimated as a result of shark fining. Unfortunately the regulation of this activity remains largely ineffective, most commonly as a result of corruption while generating or enforcing policies." Indeed, the study by Mora and colleagues indicates that policy-making is strongly influenced by corruption in poor countries in Africa, Asia and Central and South America. "This study provided us with a look at both sides of the coin," says Andrew Rosenberg at the University of New Hampshire, who was not involved in the study. "On one hand, it reminds us of the difficult challenges facing fisheries management globally in protecting critical natural resources from overexploitation. On the other hand it delivers a message of hope that when policy-making is transparent, participatory and based on science, things can improve." Funding for this study was provided by the Pew Charitable Trust through the Sea Around Us Project, The Royal Society and the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme. These funding agencies had no role in the study's design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. # # # Note to broadcast and cable producers: University of California, San Diego provides an on-campus satellite uplink facility for live or pre-recorded television interviews. Please phone or e-mail the media contact listed above to arrange an interview. Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at University of California, San Diego, is one of the oldest, largest and most important centers for global science research and education in the world. The National Research Council has ranked Scripps first in faculty quality among oceanography programs nationwide Now in its second century of discovery, the scientific scope of the institution has grown to include biological, physical, chemical, geological, geophysical and atmospheric studies of the earth as a system. Hundreds of research programs covering a wide range of scientific areas are under way today in 65 countries. The institution has a staff of about 1,300, and annual expenditures of approximately $155 million from federal, state and private sources. Scripps operates one of the largest U.S. academic fleets with four oceanographic research ships and one research platform for worldwide exploration. |
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