The public perception of fisheries is that they are in crisis and have been for some time. Numerous scientific and popular articles have pointed to the failures of fisheries management that have caused this crisis. These are widely accepted to be overcapacity in fishing fleets, a failure to take the ecosystem effects of fishing into account, and a failure to enforce unpalatable but necessary reductions in fishing effort on fishing fleets and communities. However, the claims of some analysts that there is an inevitable decline in the status of fisheries is, we believe, incorrect. There have been successes in fisheries management, and we argue that the tools for appropriate management exist. Unfortunately, they have not been implemented widely. Our analysis suggests that management authorities need to develop legally enforceable and tested harvest strategies, coupled with appropriate rights-based incentives to the fishing community, for the future of fisheries to be better than their past.

Illegal and unreported fishing contributes to overexploitation of fish stocks and is a hindrance to the recovery of fish populations and ecosystems. This study is the first to undertake a world-wide analysis of illegal and unreported fishing. Reviewing the situation in 54 countries and on the high seas, we estimate that lower and upper estimates of the total value of current illegal and unreported fishing losses worldwide are between $10 bn and $23.5 bn annually, representing between 11 and 26 million tonnes. Our data are of sufficient resolution to detect regional differences in the level and trend of illegal fishing over the last 20 years, and we can report a significant correlation between governance and the level of illegal fishing. Developing countries are most at risk from illegal fishing, with total estimated catches in West Africa being 40% higher than reported catches. Such levels of exploitation severely hamper the sustainable management of marine ecosystems. Although there have been some successes in reducing the level of illegal fishing in some areas, these developments are relatively recent and follow growing international focus on the problem. This paper provides the baseline against which successful action to curb illegal fishing can be judged.

Despite growing concerns about overexploitation of sharks, lack of accurate, species-specific harvest data often hampers quantitative stock assessment. In such cases, trade studies can provide insights into exploitation unavailable from traditional monitoring. We applied Bayesian statistical methods to trade data in combination with genetic identification to estimate by species, the annual number of globally traded shark fins, the most commercially valuable product from a group of species often unrecorded in harvest statistics. Our results provide the first fishery-independent estimate of the scale of shark catches worldwide and indicate that shark biomass in the fin trade is three to four times higher than shark catch figures reported in the only global data base. Comparison of our estimates to approximated stock assessment reference points for one of the most commonly traded species, blue shark, suggests that current trade volumes in numbers of sharks are close to or possibly exceeding the maximum sustainable yield levels.

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