Responsible Fishery Management is a Powerful Tool to Conserve Our Ocean
Matt Tinning, Chief Executive Officer, At-sea Processors Association (APA)
June 9, 2025
The new Ocean documentary provides a remarkable portrait of life beneath the waves. This World Ocean Day, it’s appropriate to follow the film’s gaze on climate change and destructive fishing – two major threats to the marine environment globally. Unfortunately, our most powerful and achievable tool to ensure fisheries are healthy for future generations—responsible fishery management—is entirely absent from the film’s narrative. Acknowledging and scaling up the implementation of responsible fishery management globally is an urgent priority we should unite to advance.
Fishing has provided people with food and jobs for millennia. Yet in the modern age, technological advancement has given humanity the tools to fish to excess. In the decades after World War II, numerous global fish stocks collapsed, and high-value marine habitat was degraded. In response, fishery scientists and managers joined with policymakers to develop solutions. The United Nations Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries, finalized in 1995 by global experts, provides a clear roadmap for all who wish to ensure that fishing takes place sustainably.
The United States – and especially the Alaska Region – has led the world in demonstrating how responsible fishery management can be implemented. For almost five decades since passage of the U.S. Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA) in 1976, Eastern Bering Sea groundfish stocks—including Alaska pollock, sablefish, Pacific cod and Alaska flatfish – have been carefully managed, and harvested using highly precautionary science-based catch limits. Fish stocks have consistently remained healthy; tens of thousands of American families, many in remote communities, have been sustained by jobs in fish harvesting, processing and support businesses; and billions of nutritious and affordable seafood meals have been provided to people around the world every single year.
Maintaining healthy target stocks is one half of the responsible fishery management challenge. The parallel task is to minimize harm to the broader marine ecosystem. The accidental harvest of non-target species (bycatch) and the disturbance of benthic habitat both take center stage in Ocean, and it’s absolutely true that both must be carefully regulated to prevent unacceptable impacts on the ocean environment.
In this area too, U.S. North Pacific fishery management leads the world. An evocative scene in the documentary shows 75% of a trawl tow being discarded. North Pacific trawl nets look profoundly different from this, thanks to the most effective bycatch avoidance techniques in the world. For example, APA’s Eastern Bering Sea Alaska pollock fleet discards less than 0.5% of the fish we catch, and we continue to improve our bycatch performance through the use of excluder technology on nets, the sharing of real-time bycatch data across the fleet, and the establishment of rolling “bycatch hotspot” area closures.
The Eastern Bering Sea’s ocean-bottom habitat, meanwhile, is conserved through extensive area-based closures, and is carefully monitored by scientists and managers for fishery impacts. Approximately 200 science-based conservation areas have been established throughout the U.S. North Pacific, usually through cooperation between scientists, managers and industry. Sixty-one percent of the region’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) has been closed year-round to bottom trawling. Further, the Essential Fish Habitat provisions of the MSA require extensive review of fishing’s habitat impacts every five years. Scientists and managers in the U.S. North Pacific have consistently confirmed through these exhaustive reviews that habitat impacts from fishing in the region are both temporary and minimal.
Remembering the broader context is also important. As we strive to sustainably feed the world’s eight billion people, there is simply no comparison between the environmental impact of responsibly managed fisheries and the terrestrial farming of animal protein. Natural habitat has been clear felled across the United States and around the world to create vast areas for intensive terrestrial food production. In Iowa, to take just one example, more than 85% of the natural habitat has been replaced by farmland. In the U.S. North Pacific, by contrast, the marine habitat remains overwhelmingly intact, with just 3.9% of the region’s benthic habitat estimated to be in a disturbed state as a result of fishing, which has occurred in the region over many decades and continues to provide food to the world and vital economic and community benefits to the region.
When it comes to climate change – the most acute long-term threat to marine ecosystem health – wild-capture seafood is by far the most climate-friendly choice of any animal protein. Put simply, in wild-capture fisheries the ocean ecosystem does the hard work of growing food without the carbon-intensive inputs that farms and aquaculture facilities require. Further, the size and scale of large fisheries like Eastern Bering Sea Alaska pollock lead to unmatched catch efficiency, further reducing the climate and habitat impacts that occur per meal produced. As a result, Alaska pollock has a carbon footprint of 3.77 kg CO2-eq per kg protein, compared with 12.5 for chicken, 20.83 for plant-based meat, and 115.75 for beef. Ocean referenced recent research suggesting that some fishing activity may lead to the release of carbon from the ocean floor into the atmosphere. While many scientific questions remain about this new theory, in the Eastern Bering Sea, where storms constantly churn the benthic habitat, it is clear that fishing is not responsible for meaningful benthic carbon releases.
As we take stock of Sir David Attenborough’s latest work, let’s focus on reforming poorly managed fisheries and ending destructive fishing practices globally. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) estimates that 23% of global fish landings come from a fishery operating at biologically unsustainable levels. This is unacceptable. Illegal and unregulated fishing in some countries and on the high seas are harming the marine environment. Serious work to sustain the marine life profiled in Ocean involves acting with urgency to address climate change, and redoubling our efforts to improve the management of more fisheries globally. The experience of Alaska and many other regions proves that responsible fishery management works. The task before us is not to secure MPAs in locations and at a scale that would lead to massive displacement of fishers around the world from their historical fishing grounds, as the advocates who funded and produced Ocean have long argued. Rather, the scaling up of responsible fishery management globally is the clear opportunity we have in front of us for durable change. Together, through serious action on climate and more effective fishery management globally, we can secure the benefits of productive fisheries and a healthy marine environment for generations to come.