A new report out stating that the world’s fisheries are in headlong decline.

The world’s stocks of seafood will have collapsed by 2050 at present rates of destruction by fishing, scientists said yesterday.

A
four-year study of 7,800 marine species around the world’s ecosystems
has concluded that the long-term trend is clear and predictable.

This is one of the claimed environmental problems which I am inclined to take seriously. Here in European waters it’s all the fault of the European Union and the entirely insane Common Fisheries Policy (more dead cod forced to be thrown back into the water last year than actually landed: twice as much in fact). We even subsidize the export of such policies to African and other Third World nations.

Still, love to read the paper to see what, if anything, they recommend doing about it. Anyone a subscriber to Science? Or, possibly, to one of the UK’s public libraries which has such a subscription?

Update: Download science_787.pdf
, thank you!

OK, interesting. They remark upon the great success of non-fishing reserves, with less effort required to catch more fish (a fourfold improvement actually) just outside such areas.

They’re also quite right to point out that this isn’t really about ‘resources’ so much as ecosystem services. There’s a lot more to it than just fish: coastal erosion and so on are included.

Now that we’re on the subject of ecosystem services we can refer to the UN’s Millennium Report on such. Yes, reserves and no fishing areas are a good idea but the most important thing is that we have to move away from the hunter gather style harvesting and to one based on property rights and markets. That’s the solution, the only one in the long term, to such Tragedies of the Commons.

One thing is that with the 200 mile Exclusive Economic Areas under the UN’s Law of the Sea we already have (with two exceptions, in the Sea of Okhotsk and in the deep sea fisheries) the legal structure in place for such an allocation of rights to be possible. All of the fisheries, (with those two exceptions) are in waters covered by the EEA of one or another country.

Except of course for European Atlantic (no, it doesn’t cover Mediterranean waters, the French made sure of that) waters which are under the idiocy which is the Common Fisheries Policy. Another thing we have to thank the European Union for, the imminent extinction of the North Sea fisheries.