{"id":3937,"date":"2012-08-28T17:53:26","date_gmt":"2012-08-28T21:53:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/edfish\/?p=3937"},"modified":"2014-11-10T14:57:45","modified_gmt":"2014-11-10T18:57:45","slug":"new-ocean-health-index-puts-focus-on-fisheries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/edfish\/2012\/08\/28\/new-ocean-health-index-puts-focus-on-fisheries\/","title":{"rendered":"New Ocean Health Index Puts Focus on Fisheries"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>To manage anything well, you&#8217;ve got to measure it.\u00a0 And you&#8217;ve got to make sure you are measuring the right things.\u00a0 The new <a href=\"http:\/\/www.oceanhealthindex.org\/\">Ocean Health Index<\/a> puts us on a path toward both of these goals.<\/p>\n<p>The fact that the ocean scores only 60 out of 100 on the Ocean Health Index is good to know &#8211; it means that we humans are not doing a very good job in ensuring that the ocean provides the many benefits that it is capable of providing.\u00a0 It&#8217;s a little like finding out that your car is only producing 60% of its maximum power output, or that your garden is producing only 60% of the tomatoes that it could be producing.\u00a0 You know that something is not right.<\/p>\n<p>When you break the overall score down, it&#8217;s clear that we are doing a particularly bad job getting food out of the ocean (score = 24 out of 100).\u00a0 Although overall seafood production is up, most of it now comes from farms that feed fish that we don&#8217;t eat a lot of (so &#8211; called forage fish like sardines and anchovies) to fish that we like to eat (like salmon and shrimp).\u00a0 The problem is that the process of farming converts large amounts of forage fish into much smaller amounts of salmon and shrimp.\u00a0 And the less forage fish we leave in the ocean, the less food there is for dolphins, albatrosses, sharks and the other wildlife that grace the ocean and enrich our existence.<\/p>\n<p>The other way that we are getting it wrong on seafood production is that a lot of fisheries are not producing nearly as much as they could be, ironically because we&#8217;ve taken too much, too fast.\u00a0 Fisheries are renewable resources, but in order to produce good yields over many years, it&#8217;s critically important to leave enough fish in the water to produce the next generation. \u00a0Of the 30% of the world\u2019s fisheries that have been assessed, it\u2019s clear that we have been taking too much- resulting in high yields initially but low yields subsequently.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The good news is that more and more fisheries are getting it right.\u00a0 More than half of the world\u2019s scientifically assessed fisheries are producing their maximum sustainable harvest.\u00a0 Many of these fisheries use catch shares, in which scientifically determined catch limits are divvied up among fishermen or groups of fishermen or fishing communities.\u00a0 Well-designed catch shares generally result in greater compliance with catch limits, reduced waste, higher revenues and lower fishing costs &#8211; so good yields can be obtained sustainably, and fishermen can make more money while playing their important role as stewards of the sea.<\/p>\n<p>EDF and our partners have made great progress toward raising the U.S. fisheries score on the Ocean Health Index \u2013 over 50% of U.S. federal fisheries (by value) are currently managed under catch shares, overexploitation has plummeted and many stocks that were depleted are now rebuilding.\u00a0 But more work lies ahead.\u00a0 The vast majority of the world&#8217;s fisheries have not been assessed, so we don&#8217;t yet know the true state of the world&#8217;s fisheries.\u00a0 There are tools for rapidly and inexpensively assessing these fisheries, which is the first step toward fixing them.\u00a0 There is also a severe lack of governance in fisheries.\u00a0 There are tools to fix this problem too, including cooperatives, community fishing privileges, and area management &#8211; all based on the catch shares concept that fishermen need clear rights and responsibilities. This ensures that we can all benefit from their stewardship of the ocean.\u00a0 We need to apply these tools to as many fisheries as we can. A score of 24 out of 100 is pretty scary considering this is a resource that nourishes us both physically and spiritually.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p> To manage anything well, you&#8217;ve got to measure it.  And you&#8217;ve got to make sure you are measuring the right things.  The new Ocean Health Index puts us on a path toward both of these goals.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/edfish\/2012\/08\/27\/new-ocean-health-index-puts-focus-on-fisheries\/\/\" \/>Read the full post &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":505,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55584,42656],"tags":[80,522,72532],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-3937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-international-2","category-scienceresearch","tag-fisheries","tag-ocean-health","tag-seafood"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>New Ocean Health Index Puts Focus on Fisheries - EDFish<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/edfish\/2012\/08\/28\/new-ocean-health-index-puts-focus-on-fisheries\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"New Ocean Health Index Puts Focus on Fisheries - EDFish\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"To manage anything well, you&#039;ve got to measure it. 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