Reversing the decline of oceans.

• Author: Weber, Peter
• Position: Coastal habitat destruction

WITHOUT far more serious attention by governments, industry, and communities to the biological limits of the oceans, marine and coastal environments will continue to deteriorate, eroding land-based as well as sea-based economies and threatening the ecological keel of the biosphere. The conundrum of ocean protection is that the marine environment is one of the Earth's great commons, but its most productive zones are under national jurisdictions. Given the direct influence of coastal countries on the oceans, along with the weaknesses of current international law, it will be largely up to the individual nations and local communities to take the specific actions necessary to turn the tide of marine degradation.

The three areas of highest priority for more protective management are fishing, coastal development, and inland sources of pollution. These are the largest causes of degradation, and represent the greatest opportunities for reversal.

The first step is to halt the depletion of fish stocks, in part by re-establishing basic tenets of local fisheries management and conservation that once were observed widely in traditional Pacific Island and coastal cultures, but have been disappearing under the weight of consumer demands, centralized governments, and aggressive competition from foreign fleets.

Many of the traditional tenets of fishery management still are applicable and, with the support of national governments, could provide workable means of restoring vitality to local fisheries. Much of the biological hemorrhage can be stemmed by placing limits or bans on blatantly harmful fishing practices. For example, a fisheries scientist from the Senegal Agricultural Research Institute has proposed that trawlers could increase their long-term catch by using nets with larger mesh size. This would prevent stocks from declining by allowing the smaller fish to escape and reproduce.

Limitations on fishing seasons, size of catch, access to fishing grounds, and the boundaries within which fishing is permitted all can serve to restrict the catch. New Zealand has pioneered the use of no-fishing zones among industrial countries. Within these zones, fish are allowed to mature and reproduce unmolested, leading to increased stocks. Furthermore, no-fishing zones leave the local habitat intact.

In Sierra Leone, for instance, traditional fishers found their catch declining as that of commercial fishers from Europe increased. Because commercial fishers export, while traditional fishers feed local people, it behooved the government to protect the latter's stocks. Sierra Leone established a five-mile fishing zone along the coast where only traditional fishers could fish, and sought to limit overfishing by commercial fishers outside that area. Because the country lacked the resources to patrol the commercial fishing waters, it established an experimental self-policing plan under which one foreign-based company issued the fishing licenses and enforced regulations. Under this experiment, the number of foreign boats dropped from around 170 to 50, and poaching fell off due to constant patrols.

To limit traditional fishing requires a similar form of self-policing with government support. The best examples parallel traditional community-based management. In the Philippines, the government grants local communities 25-year contracts to manage their sections of the coast. With this authority, several communities have restored hundreds of acres of mangroves, established no-fishing zones, and limited catches, with resulting increases in sustainable fish.

The broader issue decision-makers must confront is the proverbial "too many fishers chasing too few fish." The undeniable fact is that national fishing fleets have grown too big for existing stocks. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) conservatively estimates that, globally, annual expenditures on fishing amount to $124,000,000,000 in order to catch $70,000,000,000 worth of fish. Governments apparently make up most of the $54,000,000,000 difference with low interest loans, access fees for foreign fishing grounds, and direct subsidies for boats and operations. These subsidies keep more people fishing than the oceans can support.

Open access to fishing grounds contributes to the bloated size of fleets. Without...