Smart fishery management will help fisherman earn a living

Our oceans are in crisis. As a result of overfishing, pollution and the warming waters associated with climate change, about 85% of the world's fish stocks are now fully exploited, overexploited or have collapsed. Especially alarming, one billion people depend on them for their primary source of protein.

This distressing reality should be tempered with a degree of optimism, however. We're learning how to better manage fisheries, a bedrock component of what makes oceans and marine systems healthy and sustainable. Commercial harvests that provide jobs and nutrition across the globe depend upon it.

Common ingredients in these productive fisheries include science-based decision making, secure access for fishing communities and technologies that enable timely catch reporting. An integral part of this strategy is the allocation of a secure area, or a privilege, to harvest a share of a fishery's total catch to individual, or groups of, fishermen. Dedicating an allotment can take many forms, ranging from individual or community quota to access rights to a particular part of the coastline or a bay. Giving fishermen a direct stake in the long term health and abundance of fish populations is a recipe for success. That they are willing to be held more accountable for catch limits is a new, but unsurprising reality.

Under the EU's common fishery policy reforms, EU member states have the express ability to pursue rights-based management within their fisheries. Environmental Defense Fund has compiled the world's most comprehensive information on rights-based management at fisherytoolkit.edf.org to share results and lessons learned from countries in Europe, Asia, North America and South America, including approximately 200 catch shares in more than 40 countries.

Conventional fishery management approaches often fail due to a lack of incentives. Fishermen have no stake in forsaking short-term gains, snagging as many fish as possible before a season is halted or a species is overfished.

One of the most encouraging results so far is the significant decrease in discards. Wasted fish unintentionally caught then tossed overboard often dead or dying, was an issue brought to the public's attention vividly by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstal's Fish Fight campaign. Meeting the new EU mandate to end discarding is a daunting challenge. Under conventional management, if a fisherman accidentally exceeds his catch limit, he has little choice other than to dump it overboard. With secure access a fisherman can purchase or lease quota from a colleague who has yet to exhaust his own allotment. It's a built in safeguard against overfishing.

Secure access results in seasons that aren't artificially constrained. Fishermen have more time to fish more safely, more selectively and have the flexibility to test new gear technologies that are less likely to catch unwanted fish. In Denmark and the US, fishermen are voluntarily pooling their allocation for overfished species and are no longer fishing in areas where these fish pool. Since making management changes, discards have decreased almost 75% among groundfish fishermen on the US's west coast. That's no anomaly. A 2012 study in Marine Policy of 15 rights-management programmes found an average 66% drop in discards among those studied after switching from conventional management.

That same study concluded that compliance with fishing limits greatly improves too. Catch limits were exceeded 44% of the time under conventional management, and just 6% after transitioning to rights-based management.

Monitoring is often used to help ensure that rules are upheld. Catch quota trials conducted in Scotland and England utilised quota allotments in tandem with on board video cameras, resulting in unprecedented drops in discarding. Other fisheries relied upon on-board observers. In Mexico and Belize, fishermen are taking the lead to guard fishing grounds against illegal fishing.

Changing the way an industry is regulated is hard work, but that's no reason not to adopt mechanisms to allow stocks to rebuild and fishermen to earn a stable living. Tradeoffs are a given. But, fishermen, governments and NGOs working together can make a real difference. Laying the foundation for sound fisheries management is the unsexy task at hand. It couldn't be more important to get it right.

Britt Groosman is the director of the Environmental Defense Fund oceans programme, Europe

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