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China is a key player in global production, consumption, and trade of seafood. Given this dominance, Chinese choices regarding what seafood to eat, and how and where to source it, are increasingly important—for China, and for the rest of the world. This perspective explores this issue using a transdisciplinary approach and discusses plausible trajectories and implications for assumptions of future modeling efforts and global environmental sustainability and seafood supply. We outline China's 2030 projected domestic seafood production and consumption through an examination of available statistics, and qualitatively evaluate these in relation to key stated Chinese policy targets, consumer trends, and dominant political narratives. Our analysis shows that by 2030 China is likely to see seafood consumption outstrip domestic production. To meet the seafood gap China will likely attempt to increase domestic freshwater and offshore aquaculture, increase seafood imports, possibly expand the distant water fishing industry, and invest in seafood production abroad.

Thirteen Asian Large Marine Ecosystems (LMEs) ranging from the Arabian Sea LME in the West to the Western Bering Sea LME in the East are reported on in terms of their fisheries, catch trends and associated indicators such as the primary production required to maintain fishery catches, trends in the mean trophic levels of the catch, stock-status plots and others. Effective management of these LMEs is crucial for maintaining marine ecosystem system health and the goods and services the LMEs provide. Such management must be able to rely on credible catch data. The catch data used here were based on the national catch reconstructions performed by the Sea Around Us, as also documented in www.searoundus.org , but these could not fully compensate for the deficiencies of the fisheries statistical systems of several major countries in Asia, as reflected in exaggerated catch levels and uninformative catch compositions.

Fish are rich in bioavailable micronutrients, such as zinc and iron, deficiencies of which are a global food security concern.1,2 Global marine fisheries yields are threatened by climate change and overfishing,3,4 yet understanding of how these stressors affect the nutrients available from fisheries is lacking.5,6 Here, using global assessments of micronutrient content2 and fisheries catch data,7 we investigate how the vulnerability status of marine fish species8,9 may translate into vulnerability of micronutrient availability at scales of both individual species and entire fishery assemblages for 157 countries. We further quantify the micronutrient evenness of catches to identify countries where interventions can optimize micronutrient supply. Our global analysis, including >800 marine fish species, reveals that, at a species level, micronutrient availability and vulnerability to both climate change and overfishing varies greatly, with tropical species displaying a positive co-tolerance, indicating greater persistence to both stressors at a community level.10 Global fisheries catches had relatively low nutritional vulnerability to fishing. Catches with higher species richness tend to be nutrient dense and evenly distributed but are more vulnerable to climate change, with 40% of countries displaying high vulnerability. Countries with high prevalence of inadequate micronutrient intake tend to have the most nutrient-dense catches, but these same fisheries are highly vulnerable to climate change, with relatively lower capacity to adapt.11 Our analysis highlights the need to consolidate fisheries, climate, and food policies to secure the sustainable contribution of fish-derived micronutrients to food and nutrition security.

Knowing the patterns of marine resource exploitation and seafood trade may help countries to design their future strategic plans and development policies. To fully understand these patterns, it is necessary to identify where the benefits accumulate, how balanced the arrangements are, and how the pattern is evolving over time. Here the flow of global seafood was traced from locations of capture or production to their countries of consumption using novel approaches and databases. Results indicate an increasing dominance of Asian fleets by the volume of catch from the 1950s to the 2010s, including fishing in the high seas. The majority of landings were by high-income countries’ fishing fleets in their own waters in the 1950s but this pattern was greatly altered by the 2010s, with more equality in landings volume and value by fleets representing different income levels. Results also show that the higher the income of a country, the more valuable seafood it imports compared to its exports and vice versa. In theory, this implies that the lower income countries are exporting high value seafood in part to achieve the broader goal of ending poverty, while achieving the food security goal by retaining and importing lower value seafood. In the context of access arrangements between developed and developing countries, the results allow insights into the consequences of these shifting sources of income may have for goals such as poverty reduction and food security.

With the rapid growth of aquaculture, some negative factors of extensive monoculture accumulated, causing integrated multi-trophic aquaculture (IMTA) to draw increasing attention worldwide for its ecological and economic advantages. However, the development of IMTA in open water systems may not go as smoothly as anticipated—at least in Weihai, China, some producers who have adopted it would prefer to return to monoculture. This paper explores the problem from the angle of the economic performance by providing an in-depth analysis of costs and revenues generated by kelp monoculture and kelp-mollusk polyculture (IMTA). We find that the monoculture generates higher profits during the same production cycle. Besides inherent defects in system design, the rapidly growing labor cost and depressing selling price of the mollusk conspire to aggravate the economic failure of IMTA. Due to positive environmental externalities, the social benefits associated with IMTA are higher than the private benefits. This implies that there is a role for the government to generalize IMTA to achieve more total benefits. But single policy such as subsidies may backfire, a combination of policies designed to promote IMTA could be effective. Statement of relevance To study practical problems in aquaculture.

The impacts of banning wild spat collection are crucial for the future development of the Zhikong scallop fishery. Failure to the quantitative analysis of economic impacts obstructs the understanding of policy performance. Using key parameters extracted from the data and information through field research, we estimate the financial losses in spat collection, mariculture, and processing sectors. Our results show that the local ban should spark a chain reaction on the national Zhikong scallop fishery and potentially cause substantial economic consequences. The decreasing profitability and growing negative externalities of traditional mariculture are the main reasons for the local government to overhaul its marine development strategy. These findings have implications for some problems in the current marine management system or, from a more positive perspective, the crisis of the Zhikong scallop fishery providing China an opportunity to accelerate reforms for sustainable mariculture.

Climate change affects ocean conditions, fish stocks and hence fisheries. In West Africa, climate change impacts on fisheries were projected to be mainly negative through multi-facet ways. However, analysis of adaptation responses of fishers to climate change impacts is scarce. This paper reviews the impacts on climate change on fisheries in West Africa and discusses the potential adaptation strategies adopted by both the artisanal and industrial fishing sectors. Overall, climate change and over-exploitation have altered species composition of fisheries catches in West Africa. The effect of ocean warming on fisheries is indicated by the increase in dominance of warmer water species in the landings, shown from an increase in Mean Temperature of Catch, in the region. Climate change induced changes in potential catch and species composition, which inherently have similar symptoms as over-exploitation, are expected to have repercussions on the economic and social performance of fisheries. Both artisanal and industrial sectors may adapt to these changes mainly through expansion of fishing ground that increases operation costs. Our results highlight that historical changes in target species are more common in industrial than artisanal fisheries. This result challenges the prevailing assumption that artisanal fisheries, given their limited movement capacity, would adapt to climate change by shifting target species and/or gear type.

In 2005, the Sea Around Us described a website (www.seaaroundus.org) which presented, for all maritime countries and large marine ecosystems in the world, one of the most basic information items required by policy makers and fisheries managers: what catch was taken within their jurisdictional boundaries, and which countries took it. Surprisingly, for many countries this kind of jurisdictionally and/or ecologically assigned data had not been readily available before then. Since the release of these spatialized data, this material has had major influence on how fisheries are perceived by policy makers in various countries and by the global scientific community, as well as by a growing list of other stakeholders such as non-governmental environmental organizations and the general public. Here, the Sea Around Us updates the fisheries science, policy, conservation and management audience on the extensively modified spatial allocation method and a substantially improved new website. Also, this contribution points to and describes the much improved catch data underlying this website. These data now account for catches for all countries in the world by fisheries sectors (industrial, artisanal, subsistence, recreational), after augmenting the officially reported landings data through the inclusion of comprehensively reconstructed data of previously unreported catches and major discards, for every maritime country or territory in the world, and their Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). Also presented are the extensively improved spatial allocation procedures which assign global catch data to the 180,000 half degree spatial cells used by the Sea Around Us to subdivide the global ocean. The reconstructed data for 1950–2010 for all countries in the world and the High Seas, freely accessible and downloadable through the Sea Around Us web portal, will be updated regularly. It is hoped that these revised data and the substantially improved web utility will invigorate and assist the debate about the role of fisheries in a global framework as well as in national food security settings.

The aim of this paper is to provide an updated estimate of global fisheries subsidies. It builds on earlier estimates and methodologies to re-estimate and discuss the various types of subsidies provided by governments around the world. The results suggests that total subsidies were about USD 35 billion in 2009 dollars, which is close to the earlier estimate of 2003 subsidies once they are adjusted for inflation. Capacity-enhancing subsidies constituted the highest category at over USD 20 billion. For all regions, the amount of capacity-enhancing subsidies is higher than other categories, except for North America, which has higher beneficial subsidies. The analysis reveals that fuel subsidies constitute the greatest part of the total subsidy (22% of the total), followed by subsidies for management (20% of the total) and ports and harbors (10% of the total). Subsidies provided by developed countries are far greater (65% of the total) than those by developing countries (35% of the total) even though the latter lands well above 50% of total global catch. Asia is by far the greatest subsidizing region (43% of total), followed by Europe (25% of total) and North America (16% of total). Japan provides the highest amount of subsidies (19.7% of total), followed by the United States and China at 19.6% of total.

The global ocean is projected to be warmer, less oxygenated and more acidic in the 21st century relative to the present day, resulting in changes in the biogeography and productivity of marine organisms and ecosystems. Previous studies using a Dynamic Bioclimate Envelope Model (DBEM) projected increases in potential catch in high latitude regions and decreases in tropical regions over the next few decades. A major structural uncertainty of the projected redistribution of species and fisheries catches can be attributed to the habitat suitability algorithms used. Here, we compare the DBEM projections of potential catches of 500 species of exploited marine fishes and invertebrates from 1971 to 2060 using three versions of DBEM that differ by the algorithm used to predict relative habitat suitability: DBEM-Basic, DBEM-Maxent and DBEM-Aquamaps. All the DBEM models have similar skill in predicting the occurrence of exploited species and distribution of observed fisheries production. Globally, the models project a decrease in catch potential of 3% to 13% by 2050 under a high emissions scenario (Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5). For the majority of the modelled species, projections by DBEM-Maxent are less sensitive to changes in ocean properties than those by DBEM-Aquamaps. The mean magnitude of projected changes relative to differences between projections differ between regions, being highest (>1 times the standard deviation) in the tropical regions and Arctic Ocean and lowest in three of the main Eastern Boundary Upwelling regions, the eastern Indian Ocean and the Southern Ocean. These results suggest that the qualitative patterns of changes in catch potential reported in previous studies are not affected by the structural uncertainty of DBEM, particularly in areas where catch potential was projected to be most sensitive to climate change. However, when making projections of fish stocks and their potential catches using DBEM in the future, multiple versions of DBEM should be used to quantify the uncertainty associated with structural uncertainty of the models. Overall, this study contributes to improving projection of future changes in living marine resources by exploring one aspect of the cascade of uncertainty associated with such projections.

The effects of climate change on the ocean environment – especially ocean warming, acidification, and sea level rise – will impact fish stocks and fishers in important ways. Likely impacts include changes in fish stocks’ productivity and distribution, human migration to and away from coastal areas, stresses on coastal fisheries infrastructure, and challenges to prevailing maritime boundaries. In this paper, we explore these and other related phenomena, in order to assess whether and how the impacts of climate change on fisheries will contribute to the risk of fisheries conflict. We argue that climate change will entail an increase in the conditions that may precipitate fisheries conflict, and thereby create new challenges for existing fisheries management institutions. Several potential changes in fisheries management policy are recommended to avert the growing risk of fisheries-related conflicts.

The job of fisheries scientists is to provide evidence that can be used for fisheries management both in tactical terms (i.e., from one year to the next) and strategically, in term of their broad orientations. Catch reconstructions, which consider all fisheries in a given area, can help with the latter, but they are often contested, as broad assumptions must often be made to reconcile and harmonize divergent data sets. Here, contra Chaboud et al. (Comment on “Fisheries catch misreporting and its implications: The case of Senegal”) on Belhabib et al., 2013 , Belhabib et al., 2014b , we justify the assumptions and methods we used, in close collaboration with Senegalese government agencies, to reconstruct the historic and current artisanal catch of Senegal and the illegal catch taken by foreign industrial vessels in Senegalese waters. This done, we argue that such work, rather than haggling about the number of pirogues deployed decades ago, is a current task of fisheries scientists working on Senegalese fisheries, and by extension, elsewhere in West Africa, where the conflict between artisanal and foreign industrial fisheries is most acute.

The marine resources in Senegal are still relatively abundant, and Senegalese fisheries generate a high economic value for local communities. These fisheries are characterized by a large number of distant-water fleets alternating between legal and illegal operations, depending on circumstances, and a rapid increase of artisanal fishing effort. The extent of the impact of artisanal fisheries on fisheries resources and the Senegalese economy is as poorly known as is the level of illegal unreported and unregulated (IUU) industrial fishing. The former relies on official surveys and voluntary reports by fishers, while the existence of the latter was largely denied in the past. Large and frequent ‘migrations’ (i.e., incursions into the waters of neighbouring countries) by Senegalese artisanal fishers, under-estimation of fishing effort and increasing conflicts over fisheries suggest that officially reported catch data do not reflect reality. A thorough literature review, experts and industry consultations were used to reconstruct Senegalese fisheries catch data. Official national data were compared to the data supplied to FAO and adjusted from 1950 to 2010. Reported and missing sub-sectors, including artisanal catches within and outside Senegalese waters, non-commercial sub-sectors, and industrial catches by the legal and illegal fleets, were conservatively re-assessed. The impacts of the intensive illegal fishing activities on artisanal fisheries and the economy were investigated. The results showed substantial under-reporting, ranging from 4 times higher than the official data in the past to about 1.6 times recently. Artisanal fisheries, according to official data, were responsible for 50% of total extractions, as opposed to 80% 20 years ago. However, while catches by migrant fishers increased dramatically, artisanal catches from Senegalese waters decreased despite an increasing effort, suggesting over-capacity. IUU catches, which were worth around $ 300 million US annually, whether transhipped or otherwise spirited out of Senegalese waters, or discarded, represent a huge loss to Senegal. Also, the foreign fleet, illegally exploiting Senegalese fisheries resources, impact strongly on the migrations of Senegalese artisanal fishers, who in turn increase their migrations as an adaptation strategy to meet their need for fish in the face of rapid resource depletion.

Shallow coral reefs provide food, income, well-being and coastal protection to countries around the Indian Ocean and Asia. These reefs are under threat due to many anthropogenic stressors including pollution, sedimentation, overfishing, sea surface warming and habitat destruction. Ocean acidification interacts with these factors to exacerbate stress on coral reefs. Effective solutions in tackling the impact of ocean acidification require a thorough understanding of the current adaptive capacity of each nation to deal with the consequences. Here, we aim to help the decision-making process for policy makers in dealing with these future challenges at the regional and national levels. We recommend that a series of evaluations be made to understand the current status of each nation in this region in dealing with ocean acidification impacts by assessing the climate policy, education, policy coherence, related research activities, adaptive capacity of reef-dependent economic sectors and local management. Indonesia and Thailand, are selected as case studies. We also highlight general recommendations on mitigation and adaptation to ocean acidification impacts on coral reefs and propose well-designed research program would be necessary for developing a more targeted policy agenda in this region.