It’s easy to stop overfishing: just stop fishers from taking too many fish from the sea. But of course the problem starts well before any boats hit the water. Turning the tide against overfishing requires addressing root causes and drivers such as unreliable or scarce data, too many boats in a fishery, inadequate monitoring of illegal activity, power asymmetries, and overall consumer demand needing to be tackled for real change to take place.
The drivers of overfishing
Catch data can be a red herring. Fishers target areas where fish are most concentrated: along migratory pathways or in habitats where fish aggregate to socialise, feed or reproduce. This maximises the catch while minimising the time, fuel and effort fishers spend. But it becomes problematic when fishers, fishery managers and policymakers don’t know enough about the system and the target fish populations to set sustainable catch levels.
