US fishing policy is boosting fish populations, not constraining most fisheries, finds research:
Commercial fishing employs 1.2 million Americans and generates more than $165 billion annually. Yet warming waters are threatening fish populations and disrupting fisheries around the world—a challenge set to worsen as climate change advances.
Despite the importance of sustaining fisheries, the reauthorization of the cornerstone policy protecting them in the United States—the Magnuson-Stevens Act—has been stalled in Congress for a decade. The holdup? Some blame the policy for being too stringent and leading to what they call "underfishing," while others argue the policy is not doing enough to rebuild depleted fish populations. Others go so far as to argue that fish populations would have rebounded without any policy.
A pair of studies finds these concerns to be largely unsubstantiated. In analyzing the policy's impact on fish populations, fishing, and industry revenue, they find that it is working essentially as it should. It is rebuilding fish populations, and in most cases it is not unduly holding back fishers from making their catch.
[...] In their study published in Science, Frank, Oremus and their other co-authors first examine the assertion of critics of U.S. fishing policy that it is too stringent and unnecessarily leaving too many fish in the water. They find that the main reason about half of the fish stocks considered "underfished" in this way is due to pure economics.
Fishers are not harvesting the fish because there is not enough demand for them. Other healthy fish stocks are being left in the water because they could not be profitably caught without also catching other fish species that are depleted. Just four fish species make up the majority of the revenue of those "underfished." And, of those, the majority of the revenue came from just one species: the walleye pollock, the catch of which is not constrained by our federal fisheries law.
[...] In a second study, Frank and Oremus look at a separate criticism of the policy: that it is not doing enough to rebuild fish populations or that fish populations would have rebounded on their own without the policy. They discover the opposite to be true. Fish subject to the policy saw their size increase to be 52.2% larger than those comparable fish in the European Union, where similar fishing policies were not yet in effect.
Comparing U.S. fish populations that were depleted before the rebuilding policy went into effect to U.S. fish populations that were depleted after the policy went into effect, Frank and Oremus find that in the absence of policy the declining fish populations continued to decline by about 45%. But when the policy took effect, it took five to 10 years for the fish population to double in size—recovering to be about 98% greater in size than when it was first threatened.
[...] "We hope these studies provide useful evidence for policymakers that science-based management of biological resources actually works," Oremus says.
Journal Reference:
Kimberly L. Oremus , Eyal G. Frank, Jesse Jian Adelman, et al., Underfished or unwanted?, Science, 380, 2023. DOI: 10.1126/science.adf5595
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by ChrisMaple on Wednesday May 17, @12:15AM (2 children)
According to wikipedia, the northern Atlantic cod population collapsed in 1992 due to overfishing and has not recovered at all.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by driverless on Wednesday May 17, @12:56AM (1 child)
With stuff like this you essentially get one chance to get it right. Miss that chance and you're screwed - it's estimated that the cod fisheries will take eighty or more years to recover, if they ever recover, either because of natural limits or more typically because as soon as there's a sign of recovery quotas are removed and they're fished right back into oblivion again.
With the cod fishing there were a few half-hearted attempts at the time to introduce some restrictions that were overwhelmed by a tide of "think of the fishermen, jobs could be lost, you can't do this". So nothing was done, the cod fisheries collapsed, and something like 40,000 jobs were lost more or less overnight.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aafcac on Wednesday May 17, @12:56PM
Yes here in the PNW, it was painful to tell all those fishers that they couldn't do it anymore, money was spent buying back boats and shutting entire businesses down. But, it has been effective in that the fisheries are recovering, and it's not likely that it will happen again. At least as far as the fish that the state has control over, the ones that migrate through many different jurisdictions is a much harder problem to solve. In some cases, like with some tuna species that migrate across multiple national borders, it might need to be that individuals and businesses just refuse to buy the fish at all until the demand drops to something that's more sustainable, or the pressure to fish while the fishing exists diminishes.
And that's assuming that nothing related to the environment suddenly pushes the fishery closer to depletion than what we're expecting.