Substantial Gaps in the Current Fisheries Data Landscape

Blasco, Gordon; Ferraro, Danielle M.; Cottrell, Richard S.; Halpern, Benjamin S.; Froehlich, Halley E.

doi:10.3389/fmars.2020.612831

Cited by 21 publications

(19 citation statements)

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“…The UN’s FAO data still represent the most internally standardized dataset for fisheries and aquaculture production, but there remain inconsistencies in reporting standards among nations (Ye et al., 2017). The example from Austria highlights how clear delineation between aquaculture and fisheries operations is often compromised by the feedbacks among them (e.g., hatchery‐reared fish that are released into the wild, captured and reported as wild harvest), and such accounting issues fundamentally undermine effective aquatic governance (Blasco et al., 2020). Poor data resolution may also hide important trends pertinent to intersectoral interactions such as the decline in “Freshwater fishes nei” and the rapid increase in Nile tilapia landings in Egypt from 1990 (Figure 4b).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Similarly, the decline in China's miscellaneous marine fish landings could simply be a change in the resolution of reporting and more species are reported separately through time. Landings are a poor proxy for fish stock biomass, but there is a paucity of complete stock assessment data across marine and freshwater systems at a global scale (Blasco et al., 2020). This reinforces the importance of the complementary quantitative and qualitative approaches used here and other similar studies (Cottrell et al., 2019; Gephart et al., 2017) to validate whether the fisheries displacement indicated in our statistical analysis has resulted in a release from fishing pressure for wild populations.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Correspondingly, 0% environment similarity can be interpreted as a country only producing farmed seafood in inland systems and harvesting wild‐caught seafood from marine environments or vice versa, and 100% as identical production volumes across environments for farmed or capture sectors. It is important to note that we compared the taxa listed in production data rather than classifications more relevant to market integration studies such as “white fish.” This is due to the coarse nature of the FAO data, where the majority of many nations’ landings (40% at a global level in 2018) are resolved to species “not elsewhere included” (Blasco et al., 2020), making it impossible to reliably aggregate data into consumer‐relevant groupings across nations.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The search for blue transitions in aquaculture‐dominant countries

et al. 2021

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The capacity for aquaculture to provide an alternative source of fish and seafood to capture fisheries was once promoted as a tool to reduce demand for wild fish and thus tackle overfishing. To date, there is little evidence to suggest that aquaculture growth has successfully reduced fishing effort on wild populations. Recent theory on “blue transitions” suggests that displacement may only occur as aquaculture production surpasses that of capture operations. Yet, there has been no systematic attempt to understand whether aquaculture‐driven fisheries displacement has occurred in countries where aquaculture is now the dominant production form. We investigate the role of aquaculture on fisheries landings in these “aquaculture‐dominant” countries using national‐level production, trade, consumption and socioeconomic data from 1980 to 2017. Importantly, we find that aquaculture growth is associated with fisheries decline in aquaculture‐dominant countries, but the marginal effects of aquaculture have a far weaker influence on wild‐caught landings than other promoting factors, such as fish consumption and trade. Further, our qualitative analysis of the state of wild fisheries in aquaculture‐dominant nations suggests that overexploitation continues to be pervasive and that any minimal displacement effects from aquaculture are unlikely to have offset the environmental impacts imposed by the growing sector. The rise of aquaculture as an alternative production form can provide valuable insights for growing industries developing sustainable new foods. Unless coupled with effective food consumption policy, such products may simply add to rather than displace the environmental impacts of human food production.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The search for blue transitions in aquaculture‐dominant countries

et al. 2021

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“…The correspondence between predictions for tropical areas is especially concerning given their diversity, the strong reliance of many tropical communities on subsistence inshore fisheries, existing patterns of overexploitation and limited adaptive capacity [12,20]. While the absence of data on the importance of most of our modelled species to humans suggests that they are not commerically targeted, in many tropical and subtropical areas, the use of fine-mesh nets and destructive fishing techniques is associated with the exploitation of a large number of species that go unrecorded in official fisheries statistics [102][103][104]. In the Solomon Islands (Human Development index: 0.569), subsistence fisheries far surpass commercial fisheries in importance, with catches of 15,000 metric tonnes (mt) versus 3,250 mt per year respectively [105].…”

Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 99%

Modelling the impacts of climate change on thermal habitat suitability for shallow-water marine fish at a global scale

2021

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Understanding and predicting the response of marine communities to climate change at large spatial scales, and distilling this information for policymakers, are prerequisites for ecosystem-based management. Changes in thermal habitat suitability across species’ distributions are especially concerning because of their implications for abundance, affecting species’ conservation, trophic interactions and fisheries. However, most predictive studies of the effects of climate change have tended to be sub-global in scale and focused on shifts in species’ range edges or commercially exploited species. Here, we develop a widely applicable methodology based on climate response curves to predict global-scale changes in thermal habitat suitability. We apply the approach across the distributions of 2,293 shallow-water fish species under Representative Concentration Pathways 4.5 and 8.5 by 2050–2100. We find a clear pattern of predicted declines in thermal habitat suitability in the tropics versus general increases at higher latitudes. The Indo-Pacific, the Caribbean and western Africa emerge as the areas of most concern, where high species richness and the strongest declines in thermal habitat suitability coincide. This reflects a pattern of consistently narrow thermal ranges, with most species in these regions already exposed to temperatures above inferred thermal optima. In contrast, in temperate regions, such as northern Europe, where most species live below thermal optima and thermal ranges are wider, positive changes in thermal habitat suitability suggest that these areas are likely to emerge as the greatest beneficiaries of climate change, despite strong predicted temperature increases.

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“…Relatedly, data resolution precludes evaluation of more granular food items, arguably at the level consumer decisions occur. For instance, seafood products in FBSs are grouped into one of five commodities that represent thousands of fished and farmed species [82]. Such aggregation likely results in a 'portfolio effect' reducing the number of detected declines and limiting our ability to detect potential displacement between individual communities or species.…”

Section: Challenges and Opportunities For Alternative Foods To Drive More Sustainable Consumptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Historical food consumption declines and the role of alternative foods

Ferraro

Cottrell

Blasco

et al. 2021

Environ. Res. Lett.

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The adoption of sustainable new foods could potentially reduce the environmental burden of human food production if they can reduce demand for products with higher environmental impact. However, there is little empirical evidence for how frequent food consumption declines are when new foods are introduced, limiting our knowledge of the potential for such introductions to drive food system transformations. Using 53 years of global food supply data for 99 crop, livestock, and seafood commodities in 159 countries, we use regression analyses on 12,883 time series to detect sustained declines in apparent national food consumption, as well as corresponding consumption increases of other food commodities. First, we show that sustained declines in the consumption of any food item are rare, occuring in 9.6% of time series. Where declines are present, they most frequently occur in traditional plant-based staples, e.g., starchy roots, and are larger compared to animal-source foods, particularly in low- and middle-income countries where much of the future increase in food demand is expected to occur. Second, although declines were rare, we found national production rather than trade was identified as the most common proximate driver of declines in consumption, suggesting that shifts in diets have the potential to translate into reduced environmental impacts from food production. Third, we found consumption increases were nearly twice as common as declines, but only 8% of declines (from within 4% of total time series) occurred parallel to incline events within the same food group, suggesting limited interchangeability. An examination of case studies suggests that new foods can facilitate food system transitions, but strong relative disadvantages for existing foods across aspects of technology, markets, policy and culture need to exist in parallel to support for new foods across the same factors. Where existing foods are already produced in highly efficient systems, a lack of systematic disadvantage may provide a barrier to alternative foods driving change.

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Substantial Gaps in the Current Fisheries Data Landscape

Cited by 21 publications

References 60 publications

The search for blue transitions in aquaculture‐dominant countries

The search for blue transitions in aquaculture‐dominant countries

Modelling the impacts of climate change on thermal habitat suitability for shallow-water marine fish at a global scale

Historical food consumption declines and the role of alternative foods

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