Last week, G7 Environment, Energy and Oceans Ministers convened in Halifax, on Canada’s rugged Atlantic coast, to tackle some of the most pressing threats facing our planet. The ministers were tasked with advancing climate action, addressing illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing and other drivers of overfishing, cutting plastic pollution in our ocean, and [...]
Tony Long, CEO, Global Fishing Watch Imagine being told that a vital and valuable resource, found in an area covering almost half the surface of the Earth, was being extracted, with barely any control, by just a handful of wealthy nations. It would hardly sound fair, but that is the reality of [...]
Kristina M. Gjerde, Senior High Seas Advisor. IUCN Global Marine and Polar Programme As the countdown continues to September’s historic first round of United Nations treaty talks on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity in the high seas, science and technology are shedding increasingly compelling light on what is currently [...]
Global Fishing Watch discusses the use of technology at the first ever Ocean Risk Summit, Bermuda 8-10th May Tony Long, Global Fishing Watch I was very pleased to be invited to the first ever Ocean Risk Summit in Bermuda last week. Re-insurer XL Catlin gathered leaders from across the political, economic, environmental and [...]
Costa Rica and Global Fishing Watch (GFW), working with the Asociación Costa Rica por Siempre and the Fundación Pacífico, have entered into an agreement to advance transparency in the country’s fisheries. Costa Rica’s Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of Environment and Energy signed a letter of intent on May 2nd to make [...]
In the U.S., you can’t slap a license plate on your car from a state you don’t live in. Not so for ships on the ocean. Of course, ships don’t have license plates; they have flags, but it’s not uncommon for a fishing vessel to fly a flag from a country that has no actual [...]
The high seas are often called the ocean’s Wild West—open territory far from any shoreline or national jurisdiction where the global fishing fleet takes a free-for-all approach to harvesting the world’s shared resources. There’s some truth to that, but there are, in fact, laws intended to manage fishing on the high seas. They’re hard to [...]
The term IUU crops up frequently on our site and in discussions of the global fishing industry. It stands for illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, and it is one of the most serious threats to the sustainability of world fisheries. […]
Today, Global Fishing Watch is focused on tracking commercial-scale fishing fleets, because they are the ones required to carry Automatic Identification Systems that broadcast their information to satellites. But small, artisanal fishing vessels represent another side of the picture that can’t be ignored. Although they often employ low-tech, traditional fishing methods (especially in developing countries), small-boat subsistence fishers [...]
In the commercial fishing world, transshipment is the transfer of catch from one vessel to another. During a transshipment, a fishing vessel meets up with a large refrigerated cargo-type ship, known as a “reefer.” They tie up alongside one another and drift while the fishing vessel offloads tons of catch before heading back out to [...]
Most of the oceans are over the horizon and under the waves. As a result, the ocean is incredibly difficult to monitor. With regards to fishing, most of our data on where and when fishing occurs comes from data collected at port or through the logs of […]
To look out over the ocean at a horizon that stretches for thousands of miles, it’s almost easy to understand how we have allowed overfishing to become such a serious problem. It’s that very quality of limitlessness that led the world to believe there would always be enough. […]
