Fisheries Management and Economic Impacts

Fisheries management integrates ecological, social and economic objectives to ensure the long-term viability of marine stocks and the communities that depend on them. It relies on tools such as catch quotas, gear restrictions, spatial closures and rights-based approaches to balance exploitation with conservation. Economic impacts extend beyond harvest volumes to encompass the distribution of subsidies, resource rent, market access and the costs and benefits of rebuilding overfished stocks. Sustainable management can generate substantial net gains in income and resilience, yet harmful capacity-enhancing subsidies and incomplete data on actual catches often distort incentives and mask true stock status. Recent methodological advances, including catch reconstructions and spatially explicit socio-economic analyses, have shed new light on the global trajectory of fisheries and highlighted opportunities to align fisheries governance with poverty reduction, food security and ecological sustainability.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have used global catch reconstructions to reveal that reported data may underestimate total removals by a third, indicating a peak catch of over 130 million tonnes followed by a sharper decline than previously recognised. This work underscores the importance of comprehensive monitoring of small-scale, industrial and unreported fisheries to inform quota setting and enforcement. Parallel research has examined biogeochemical flows in aquaculture, quantifying global phosphorus inputs and harvests in 2016 and demonstrating that current aquaculture systems remove only around 20 percent of applied phosphorus. This imbalance highlights the need to improve phosphorus use efficiency to at least 48 percent by mid-century to achieve balanced anthropogenic nutrient budgets and reduce environmental impacts of fish production.

Fisheries Management and Economic Impacts publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in fisheries management and economic impacts across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Fisheries subsidy: Financial support from public entities that reduces fishing costs or enhances capacity, often influencing fleet profitability and stock status.

Catch reconstruction: A methodological approach to estimate total fish removals by combining official statistics with data on unreported, artisanal and discard catches.

Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ): A maritime area extending 200 nautical miles from a country’s coastline, over which the state has rights to exploit and manage natural resources.

Phosphorus use efficiency: The ratio of phosphorus harvested in aquaculture products to the total phosphorus input, indicating nutrient retention and environmental impact.

Resource rent: The economic profit derived from a natural resource after accounting for all costs of production, including normal returns to labour and capital.

References

1. Poverty line income and fisheries subsidies in developing country fishing communities. npj Ocean Sustainability (2024).
2. Catch reconstructions reveal that global marine fisheries catches are higher than reported and declining. Nature Communications (2016).
3. The shift of phosphorus transfers in global fisheries and aquaculture. Nature Communications (2020).
4. The economics of fishing the high seas. Science Advances (2018).
5. The Global Fisheries Subsidies Divide Between Small- and Large-Scale Fisheries. Frontiers in Marine Science (2020).
6. Benefits of Rebuilding Global Marine Fisheries Outweigh Costs. PLOS ONE (2012).