by Nicola Frost, Tony Long, Stephanie Juwana and Mansi Konar When the UN launched the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) five years ago, the world aligned around the need to end illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing by 2020 (SDG 14.4). Seen then as an achievable target, it is now a deadline we’re going to miss. IUU fishing accounts for [...]
Tony Long, Global Fishing Watch Chief Executive Officer, looks back at 2019 and sets a course for 2020 – a pivotal year for ocean governance and conservation. Reality check From five or ten years out, making sustainability commitments for the end of a decade is a seductive proposition for governments and sectors of all [...]
Gabriel Englander, PhD candidate, University of California, Berkeley. Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics. Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) are perhaps the largest property rights institution in the world, covering about 39% of the ocean’s surface and accounting for more than 95% of global marine fish catch. Because assigning property rights can improve both ecological [...]
The first-ever satellite mapping of fishing vessel behaviours has identified that very few vessels are using one of the key techniques to avoid accidentally killing albatrosses. Researchers hope a new analytics tool demonstrates that satellite data can help monitor efforts to reduce seabird mortality in fishing operations, and drive more transparency in general in the global fishing [...]
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 [...]
Camellia Williams is a Lead Writer at Vizzuality. See her original blog post here. We love hearing stories about people changing the world with the things we help make. This month we were contacted by Luli Masera. Luli is the co-founder of the Marine Conservation programme of Tompkins Conservation in Argentina and she had some extremely [...]
The Cocos Island National Park (CINP) is located in the Eastern Tropical Pacific, 532 km southwest of Costa Rica. Consisting of a 24 square km island and a 1,989 square km marine area, including a 12 nautical mile no-take zone surrounding the island, it was declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO in 1997 [...]
Commercial fishing is an important revenue source for Argentina, and the industry’s interests are strong, but the government is committed to protecting at least 10 percent of its territorial waters by 2020. Although reconciling the need for Marine Protected Areas with the economic interests of the fishing industry can be challenging, Global Fishing Watch [...]
Metcalfe (second from right) conducts field surveys with local fishers. Before discovering Global Fishing Watch, Dr. Kristian Metcalfe worked in Gabon on the west coast of central Africa on a Darwin Initiative funded project (20-009). The project established a network of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) using spatial analysis of satellite-derived data such [...]
The Ecuadoran government demonstrated a strong commitment to protecting its waters from illegal activity today when it handed down a $5.9 million fine to a Chinese refrigerated cargo vessel owner and a four year prison sentence to its captain for the illegal transport of sharks and shark fins in the protected [...]
Octavio Aburto of Scripps Institution of Oceanography (left) and his colleagues, Juan Mayorga of UC Santa Barbara and Enric Sala of Pristine Seas are using Global Fishing Watch to understand the economic impacts of establishing a new Marine Protected Area in Mexican waters. [UPDATE: On October 5, 2017, the Mexican government announced its intent to expand the Revillagigedo marine [...]
There were a whole lot of fishing vessels inside the Motu Maha no-take marine reserve last year, and every one of them had a reason to be there. As part of our series on deciphering suspicious behavior, we asked Dave Stevens, Senior Analyst for the New Zealand Ministry for Primary [...]
After our recent post Deciphering Suspicious Behavior: It’s not always what it seems, we thought it would be insightful to post a few examples of vessel behavior that looked suspect, but turned out to be easily explained on closer inspection. Often, a look at the other vessels in the area [...]
Unusual fleet behavior off West Africa spurs our analyst to investigate Just because something appears suspicious, doesn’t mean laws are being broken. Jumping too quickly to conclusions could embroil a legally operating fishing fleet in unwarranted investigations or accusations. Equally damaging would be to rush in on a crime without solid [...]
