A new study that incorporates the impact of subsistence, small-scale and illegal fishing into estimates of commercial fishing draws a dire conclusion, says the Guardian. The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, says the worldwide catch for decades was much larger than previously calculated, and it is falling three times faster than UN figures suggest — an average decline of 1.2 million tonnes a year as opposed to the UN estimate of 400,000 tonnes. The peak catch was 130 million tonnes in 1996. The Guardian quotes lead researcher Daniel Pauly, of the University of British Columbia, as saying, “Our results indicate that the decline is very strong and is not due to countries fishing less. It is due to countries having fished too much and having exhausted one fishery after another.”
Pauly says the new estimates are based on the work of 400 researchers around the world who gathered data over the past 10 years, and on the results of 200 studies. More than 2.5 billion people, a third of the global population, rely on seafood for protein, says the Guardian.