Posted on February, 17 2015

The facts are frightening, to say the least. In 2014, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) declared that "90% of the world's fisheries are either fully exploited, over exploited, depleted, or recovering from depletion." According to the FAO, fish consumption has grown from approximately 38 million tonnes in 1960 to 137 million tonnes in 2003, an increase of 260 percent, and demand is expected to rise by another 50 million tonnes in the next 10 years.

Now, technology is offering a way to help combat overfishing caused by illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing—by asking commercial fishing companies to “come clean,” as it were. WWF and navama, the environmental technology innovators based in Germany, introduced TransparentSea (www.transparentsea.org), a tracking tool and data sharing platform that allows fisheries all over the world to voluntarily register with the system, and make their fishing activities “transparent.”

“Fisheries which cooperate with us can show their customers that they are committed to legal and responsible fishing,” said Alfred Schumm, WWF’s Smart Fishing Initiative (SFI) Leader, in a WWF press statement. SFI, the global fisheries programme of WWF, is meeting the challenge of global overfishing head-on and working to mitigate the potential “ecological disaster” of collapsed worldwide tuna fisheries by advocating good governance, supporting sustainable markets, and encouraging responsible investment.

“Transparency in fishing operations means that you have full disclosure and traceability of fish harvested in a fishery, so that you can properly manage the removals from that fishery,” explains Alfred “Bubba” Cook, Western and Central Pacific Tuna Programme Manager for WWF’s Smart Fishing Initiative.

“Full traceability means you can trace the catch, from a particular vessel or fisherman all the way to its final destination.” This is what is referred to as "boat-to-throat" or "bait-to-plate" traceability, adds Cook. “When there is no transparency, catches often go unaccounted for, leading to overfishing and, ultimately, fisheries depletion and collapse.”

Fishing responsibly

“Traceability systems such as the WWF-navama tracking tool help those fishers who employ such tools on their vessels to demonstrate to the markets, governments, fisheries managers, scientists, and consumers that they are fishing responsibly,” says Jackie Thomas, Leader of the WWF Coral Triangle Programme.

In an interview before the 11th Meeting of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission in Samoa last December 1-5, 2014, Cook had already identified the unwillingness of some countries to cooperate as one of the biggest obstacles to better management of tuna stocks in the Western and Central Pacific, referring to “the continuing refusal of several nations to provide basic information on the operation of their fishing fleets.”

The good news is, more companies are finally seeing the bigger picture, too. In 2013, Sea Quest Fiji Ltd., a tuna fishing company in the South Pacific that exports to the US, Japan, and growing markets in the European Union, New Zealand, and Australia, partnered with WWF to establish a transparent fishing system, starting with eight Automatic Identification System (AIS) transmitters installed on their boats.

“Fishing activities generate jobs and economic multipliers,” said Brett “Blu” Haywood, owner of Sea Quest Fiji Ltd., in an interview for WWF. “They need to be managed together, in a sustainable way…Exploitation of the resources needs to be equal and justified.”

In committing to such transparency in fishing, companies can prove that "they have nothing to hide," Cook says. A more discriminating market will also know exactly what they’re getting. “Buyers, and ultimately, consumers can have confidence in the fish they purchase, that it is not harvested illegally.” As navama’s Dr. Andreas Struck said in a press statement,  “A route tracking on every consumer mobile for each sold fish all around the globe is our vision for the future."

Transparency and traceability are particularly important in the Western Central Pacific (WCP), with its vast areas of ocean that needs to be monitored. “In the WCP, billions of dollars in potential revenues for Pacific Islands countries are lost each year due to IUU fishing,” Thomas says. “These technologies not only make fully monitoring fisheries over such a large area possible, but also practical and achievable,” Cook confirms.

Common violations

A tracking tool like AIS can help ensure that common violations such as encroachment in marine protected areas and illegal transshipment don’t happen anywhere. “WWF and its partners in the Coral Triangle, for example, are already developing traceability systems and an electronic catch documentation scheme for specific fisheries participating in Fisheries Improvement Projects (FIPs) in countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam,” Thomas reports.

For fishing companies themselves, however, there are more benefits that come with using the platform, other than simply promoting goodwill and establishing themselves as the good guys, Cook says. “They can use it to ensure efficiency in their own operations, to operate more safely among other vessels—avoiding collisions at sea, coordinating man overboard searches—and even use the information to improve their catch, by compiling data from year to year in a way that helps them identify areas and conditions that improve fishing.”

Ultimately, the platform is less about catching uncooperative commercial fishers in the act than it is about “reducing the opportunity for illegal fishers to profit from their behaviour,” Cook concludes. 

“If markets agree to preferentially source from fisheries that are fully transparent—and therefore protect their brand from the negative publicity that could come from non-transparent fisheries—it creates a strong incentive for all fisheries to ‘do the right thing.’” And it is this “right thing” that may just secure the future of the world’s most important fisheries.