Eric Galbraith is an ICREA research professor based at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Jerome Guiet is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. Read their new study. Most of the activity that Global Fishing Watch monitors is carried out by industrial fisheries, working for profit. These businesses are run and staffed […]
Rhythms of the wild in global fisheries data Read More »
This year’s first fishing season for Peruvian anchovy opens on May 4th and for the first time ever anyone can track the fishing fleet as the season progresses, thanks to the recent agreement to publish Peru’s vessel data via Global Fishing Watch’s public map. En español Monitoring of the Peruvian anchovy fleet using the national Vessel Tracking
World’s largest commercial fishery publicly tracked on Global Fishing Watch map Read More »
After just over a year at the helm, Global Fishing Watch CEO, Tony Long, reflects on how a freely accessible and near real-time digital map of the global ocean is exposing illegal fishing and changing the rules of the game, and calls on all governments to contribute data and join the movement for universal transparency.
Global Fishing Watch 2018 – the year in transparency Read More »
With increased transparency, we can see beyond the horizon and address the threats facing our oceans. Global Fishing Watch’s (GFW) mapping platform increases the transparency of commercial fishing activities worldwide, empowering Oceana and others to expose problems that were once out of sight, far from our coasts. Oceana analysts, part of Oceana’s Illegal Fishing and
How Oceana used Global Fishing Watch data to promote transparency at sea during 2018 Read More »
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 accelerating
Canada takes aim at illegal fishing as momentum grows for global ocean action Read More »
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 industrial fishing on the high seas today. Fortunately,
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 happening in this previously poorly understood realm. The latest in a series of reports focused on
Satellite tracking shows the economics of much high seas fishing does not add up Read More »
Global Fishing Watch discusses the use of technology at the first ever Ocean Risk Summit, Bermuda 8-10th May 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 risk sectors to identify potential exposures to the
Data sharing key to building the transparency needed to assess and respond to ocean risk Read More »
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 the
Costa Rica commits to making its fishing fleet visible to the world Read More »
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
Flag of Convenience or Cloak of Malfeasance? Read More »
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
Taming the Ocean’s Wild West Read More »
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.
IUU – Illegal, Unreported, Unregulated Fishing Read More »
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
New Partnership Expands Our View to Artisanal Fisheries Read More »
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
Rendezvous at Sea: What is Transshipping? Read More »
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
Beyond the Horizon Read More »
