Abstract
Abstract Many studies have shown that the global fish catch can only be sustained with effective regulation that restrains overfishing. However, the persistence of weak or ineffective regulation in many parts of the world, coupled with changing technologies and additional stressors like climate change, renders the future of global catches uncertain. Here, we use a spatially resolved, bio-economic size-spectrum model to shed light on the interactive impacts of three globally important drivers over multidecadal timescales: imperfect regulation, technology-driven catchability increase, and climate change. We implement regulation as the adjustment of fishing towards a target level with some degree of effectiveness and project a range of possible trajectories for global fisheries. We find that if technological progress continues apace, increasingly effective regulation is required to prevent overfishing, akin to a Red Queen race. Climate change reduces the possible upper bound for global catches, but its economic impacts can be offset by strong regulation. Ominously, technological progress under weak regulation masks a progressive erosion of fish biomass by boosting profits and generating a temporary stabilization of global catches. Our study illustrates the large degree to which the long-term outlook of global fisheries can be improved by continually strengthening fisheries regulation, despite the negative impacts of climate change.
Highlights
The world’s annual marine fish catches have stagnated since the 1990s, after more than a century of astonishing growth (FAO, 2018; Watson and Tidd, 2018)
The modelled trajectory of F/fishing mortality corresponding to MSY (FMSY) for this subset of fish populations in BOATS coincided with the observations when S approached 10 (Figure 1)
Neither of the estimates are consistent with the short peak and rapid global catch decline that the model simulates under global open access (OA), but the estimate by Pauly and Zeller (2016) is clearly inconsistent with the stable plateau of globally strong regulation
Summary
The world’s annual marine fish catches have stagnated since the 1990s, after more than a century of astonishing growth (FAO, 2018; Watson and Tidd, 2018). The future of global catches, which determines the sustained provision of nutrition and source of income for millions of people worldwide (Teh and Sumaila, 2013; Golden et al, 2016), depends on multiple interacting forces at play within human societies, including fisheries regulation and governance, technological and economic progress, and the capacity to mitigate climate change (Worm and Branch, 2012; Costello et al, 2016; Galbraith et al, 2017; Osterblom et al, 2017; Gaines et al, 2018; Free et al, 2019; Lotze et al, 2019).
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