Courtney Farthing

Peter Thomson

Life Below Water: Transparency and Innovation will Help Build Ocean Resilience

News & Views, Policy & Compliance / By

Meaningful ocean action is needed to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 14, says United Nations Ambassador Ambassador Peter Thomson, United Nations Secretary General’s Special Envoy for the Ocean, addresses the importance of transparency and technology to achieve SDG-14. The world is at a standstill. Over the last few months, COVID-19 has challenged health systems, crippled economies, […]

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Point Reyes vessel tracks

AIS ship tracking data shows false vessel tracks circling above Point Reyes, near San Francisco

Data and technology / By

Analysis from SkyTruth and Global Fishing Watch shows ship tracks jumping thousands of miles from their true locations.  Bjorn Bergman works with SkyTruth and with the Global Fishing Watch research team to track vessels broadcasting false automatic identification system (AIS) locations and to investigate new sources of satellite data for vessel tracking and for detecting

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Life below water

Life Below Water: Prioritizing safe and decent working conditions for fishers and fisheries observers

Fisheries, News & Views, Policy & Compliance / By

Two months ago, the death of fisheries observer Eritara Aati Kaierua was reported in Pacific waters, leading to an ongoing murder investigation. For many people, the idea of a murder taking place on board a confined fishing vessel out at sea seems inconceivable, but for those that know the fisheries sector well, it is yet

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Subsistence fisher returning in Kiritimati Island.

Life Below Water: Ensuring sustainable consumption and production of seafood

Fisheries, News & Views, Policy & Compliance / By

Large scale, commercial fishing activity has often historically taken place out of sight – fishing grounds far from shore make them difficult and costly to monitor, jurisdiction considerations impede governance and a patchwork of regulations have not kept pace with advances in fishing technologies. As our global seafood consumption has increased, so has the impact

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makerel

A Conversation with NOAA Researchers, Heather Welch and Dr. Elliott Hazen

Research and analysis / By

A key goal of Global Fishing Watch is to partner with leading researchers who can help us better understand, apply, and expand the usefulness of our data for fisheries transparency. To date, we have partnered with over 12 academic institutions, as well as several government fisheries research agencies, such as Japan’s Fisheries Research Agency. Heather

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Oil platforms or wind farms Radar Detections

Towards a Radar-Illuminated Ocean

Data and technology, News & Views, Research and analysis / By

At Global Fishing Watch, we use cutting-edge technology to visualize, track and share data about global fishing activity in near real-time and for free. Our primary dataset comes from data about a vessel’s identity, type, location, speed, direction and more that is broadcast using the Automatic Identification System (AIS) and collected via satellites and terrestrial

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Ghanaian woman works on a fish market in Ghana

Life Below Water: Sustainable fisheries and gender equality

Article / By

Ghanaian woman works on a fish market in Ghana. Anton_Ivanov / Shutterstock.com In West Africa, fishing, fish processing and fish selling are all part of life for many women. Roughly 6.7 million people directly depend on fisheries in the region, which have a landed value of 3.5 billion USD per year. Across West Africa, women form the majority

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Panama VMS

Life Below Water: Improving fisheries transparency to support the UN Sustainable Development Goals

News & Views, Policy & Compliance, Transparency / By

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) set ambitious targets to address the global challenges we face, including those related to poverty, hunger, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation and decent work. SDG 14; Life Below Water, will be in the spotlight throughout 2020 as States come together at multiple international meetings to create and

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Tuna Marine Protection

The Rewards of Large-Scale Marine Protection

Fisheries, Research and analysis / By

To conserve or not to conserve Protecting large portions of our oceans from extractive activities can provide enormous benefits to society: food provisioning, carbon storage and sequestration, tourism, storm attenuation and coastline stabilization are only a few of them. So, why do Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) cover only 4.8% of the ocean today? When it

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International cooperation - Flags

Greater focus on international cooperation, information sharing and policy implementation is needed in the fight against IUU fishing

Transparency / By

The European Commission recently warned Panama for a second time that they must tackle IUU fishing, but no one policy, system or State can fix the problem on their own. Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing threatens the sustainability of fish stocks, the income of fishers and the food security of communities around the world,

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Peruvian artisanal vessel capturing giant squid

Peru expands vessel tracking system to show activity of two large artisanal fishing fleets

Fisheries, Transparency / By

By April 2020, some 750 artisanal fishing vessels targeting jumbo flying squid and mahi-mahi are expected to join the Peruvian Vessel Monitoring System (VMS). As these vessels – 365 so far – are newly incorporated into Peru’s VMS, they will also appear for the first time on the public Global Fishing Watch (GFW) map. The

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Challenges an opportunities - Global Atlas of AIS - based fishing activity

The Global Atlas of AIS-based Fishing Activity

Data and technology, Fisheries, News & Views, Research and analysis / By

In 2018, Global Fishing Watch (GFW) published the first ever global maps of fishing activity using AIS data. These fishing maps drew on billions of GPS positions broadcast by over 60,000 fishing vessels, and they revealed fishing operations in all oceans in incredible detail. These new methods, though, had yet to be vetted by the

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