Overfishing Crisis

Approximately thirty-five percent of global fish stocks are now overfished — harvested faster than they can reproduce. Most of the rest are fished at their maximum sustainable level, with only a small fraction still underfished, so there is little slack to meet rising demand. Marine vertebrate populations — fish, mammals, turtles, and seabirds — have fallen by roughly half since 1970, according to the WWF Living Planet Index.

Industrial fishing technology has outpaced the ocean's capacity to recover. Bottom trawling scrapes the seabed clean, destroying habitat that takes decades to regrow. Longlines stretching over a hundred kilometers catch non-target species indiscriminately.