OCEAN
OF TROUBLE
HUFFINGTON
06.23.13
ADAPTED FROM WWF’S 2012 LIVING PLANET REPORT.
World Fishing
Fleet Expansion
To measure fishing intensity,
researchers used the fish landed in
each country to calculate the “primary
production rate,” or PPR for each
region of the ocean. PPR describes the
total amount of food a fish needs to
grow within a certain region. The red
areas depict the most intensively and
potentially overfished areas. Between
1950 (top map) and 2006 (bottom
map), the area fished by global fishing
fleets has increased ten-fold.
KEY
At least 10%
PPR extraction
At least 20%
PPR extraction
At least 30%
PPR extraction
be a really interesting example for the
rest of the country, or the rest of the
world, for demonstrating how you manage a fishery through climate change.”
IN THE MEANTIME
Last month, as eleventh-hour debate was
brewing around the tough new catch
limits for New England, several hundred fishermen and an assortment of
local and national politicians from the
Northeast gathered in Boston to air their
grievances and entreat regulators at
NOAA to increase the looming quotas.
“We’re here to fight for a way of life
that we believe in,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) declared at the outset of
the rally, “and that’s what we’re going to
do, and we’re going to do it together.”
In the end, however, NOAA didn’t
budge.
Mike Fogarty, the marine biologist and
head of the agency’s ecosystem assessment program for the region, defends
the government’s fish stock analyses
— though he adds that more integrated
approaches to understanding and modeling the ocean biosphere, including the
ability to identify and fold in crucial
new inputs arising from climate change,
remain a work in progress.
He points to NOAA’s nascent Integrated
Ecosystem Assessment program, which is
based on a wider regulatory philosophy
called ecosystem-based management. The
doctrine aims, for example, to move away
from blunt, species-by-species counting
and quota-setting in favor of continually
taking the pulse of an ecosystem and all
its various interdependencies as a whole.
This includes not just a more thorough
understanding of how a given natural resource lives and breathes, but also how
society derives economic benefits from it,
and how humans function as fundamental