We hear a lot of grim stories about overfishing and the decline of fisheries around the world. Bluefin tuna is vanishing. Chilean sea bass is dwindling. Pretty soon, it sometimes seems like, all that’ll be left is the jellyfish.
So it’s worth highlighting a country that has actually done a lot to curtail overfishing and rebuild its fisheries in the past decade the United States.
Back in the 1980s and ’90s, many fisheries in the US were in serious trouble. Fish populations were dropping sharply. Some of New England’s best-known groundfish stocks including flounder, cod, and haddock had collapsed, costing the region’s coastal communities hundreds of millions of dollars.
But the picture has improved considerably in the last decade, thanks in part to stricter fishing regulations. Last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released its annual fisheries update for 2013 and the news was encouraging. Yes, progress has been uneven. About one-fifth of assessed stocks are still overfished. But on the whole, US fisheries are steadily recovering.
Back in 1999, NOAA listed 98 stocks as “overfished.” Today, that’s down to 40. What’s more, 34 previously depleted fish stocks have now been “rebuilt” meaning that they’ve rebounded to a level that supports the maximum sustainable yield.
This rebound has been a boon to the fishing industry: US commercial fishermen caught 9.6 billion pounds of seafood in 2012, the second highest total in more than a decade (2011 was the highest year).
The rebound in US fisheries was also noted last year in a separate study by the Natural Resources Defense Council, which studied 44 key fish stocks that had been seriously depleted and found that about 64 percent showed significant signs of recovery.
There are also a bunch of unknowns here: NOAA only assesses about 230 of the 478 types of fish that are under regulation. Steve Murawski, a former scientist at the National Marine Fisheries Service, told me in an interview last year that assessments are complicated and expensive so NOAA has to “triage” by focusing on the most economically important species.
Still, most experts struck a note of guarded optimism on the state of US fisheries. “There are still a lot of areas where we’d like to see progress, especially in New England,” Ted Morton, director of the US oceans program at the Pew Charitable Trusts told me. “But overall we’re on the right track.”
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