Responding to the recent Science Policy Forum article co-authored by Nereus PI Malin Pinsky (Rutgers University), Nereus colleague Jack Kittinger (PI, Arizona State University), with Transform Aqorau and Johann Bell, write that the future proofing of Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMO) for potential impacts of climate change is well under way in the South Pacific (‘Good governance for migratory species’, Science September 21, 2018). While Pinsky et al. cautioned that major gaps in current governance frameworks may spill over into international conflicts over geographic redistribution of fisheries resources, Aqorau et al. believe measures such as the Parties to the Nauru Agreement’s (PNA) Vessel Day Scheme (VDS) provide “a shining example” of how regions can cooperatively manage highly migratory species, like skipjack tuna, that are predicted to shift their distribution as climate and ocean conditions change in the future.
Related Works
Not all fish swim the same way. Some fish will live their whole lives swimming around a tiny home range, while others migrate 5000 km across the Atlantic ocean in just a few months. Even among those that move over large areas, there is a lot of variability.
By Guillermo Ortuño Crespo, Nereus Program Fellow at Duke University
Due to their wide-ranging swimming behaviors, migratory fish, marine mammal, seabird and sea turtle species experience a variety, and an increasing amount, of anthropogenic pressures over the course of their lives. These threats, including climate change, overfishing, and marine pollution, combined with conservation strategies that largely fail to consider spatial connectivity over the life cycle, are resulting in declining populations worldwide.
Fish don’t respect borders. With 1982’s United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, coastal nations were given the right to manage fisheries within their Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) – the area that extends, generally, up to 200 nautical miles. But of course, fish don’t adhere to imaginary lines in the ocean.
Andre Boustany, Nereus Alumnus (Duke University), attended the ICCAT Advisory Committee Meeting and the Highly Migratory Species Advisory Panel Meeting in March. Boustany sits on the advisory panel for both.
