Lydia C. L. Teh’s research while affiliated with University of British Columbia and other places

Eradicating poverty and harmful fisheries subsidies are two pressing challenges frequently addressed in international agendas for sustainable development. Here we investigate a potential solution for addressing both challenges simultaneously by asking the hypothetical question: to what extent can harmful fisheries subsidies provided by a country finance the cost of lifting fishers out of poverty? Focusing on 30 coastal least developed countries, we find that fishers in 87% of these countries do not earn sufficient income to satisfy the extreme poverty line income of USD 1.90/person/day, and that it would cost an estimated USD 2.2 to 2.6 billion to lift these fishers to different levels of poverty line incomes. Our analysis further suggests that at the country level, redirected harmful fisheries subsidies can cover the entire cost of covering the poverty income gap for between 37 to 43% of assessed countries. Our results provide quantitative evidence that can be used to support simultaneous progress towards achieving several Sustainable Development Goals, including those dealing with poverty reduction, food insecurity, and ocean sustainability.

Technological advances over the past century have greatly reduced the proportion of human labour required to produce the world’s food. On land, these advances have continually increased yields, feeding a growing human population even as the number of farmers has fallen. It has long been recognized that technological advances do not necessarily increase fishery yields in the same way; since the natural productivity of wild fish stocks puts a strong limit on capture fisheries, high labour inputs can lead to overfishing. However, the global evolution of labour in marine fisheries has not been assessed, leaving the overall interactions among technology, fishers and catches unknown. Here we reconstruct the global number of marine fishers from 1950 to 2015 and show that the total number of fishers grew with no sign of reversal despite mechanization, as large increases in lower- and middle-income countries overwhelmed an ~60% decrease in higher-income countries. As a result, the wild fish catch per fisher has declined since the 1990s despite major technological advances—a stark contrast to the 70% increase of the production per farmer over the same period. Our results show that, globally averaged, fisheries displayed diminishing—or even negative—returns on labour over 1950–2015, which has been detrimental for food production efficiency, marine ecosystems and fishing communities.

Eradicating poverty and harmful fisheries subsidies are two pressing challenges frequently addressed in international agendas for sustainable development. Here we investigate a potential solution for addressing both challenges simultaneously by asking the hypothetical question: to what extent can harmful fisheries subsidies provided by a country finance the cost of lifting fishers out of poverty? Focusing on 30 coastal least developed countries, we find that fishers in 87% of these countries do not earn sufficient income to satisfy the extreme poverty line income of USD 1.90/person/day, and that it costs an estimated USD 2.2 to 2.6 billion to lift these fishers to different levels of poverty line incomes. Our analysis further suggests that at the country level, redirected harmful fisheries subsidies can cover the entire cost of covering the poverty income gap for between 37 to 43% of assessed countries. Our results provide quantitative evidence that can be used to support simultaneous progress towards achieving several Sustainable Development Goals, including those dealing with poverty reduction, food insecurity, and ocean sustainability.

Rebuilding overexploited marine populations is an important step to achieve the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 14—Life Below Water. Mitigating major human pressures is required to achieve rebuilding goals. Climate change is one such key pressure, impacting fish and invertebrate populations by changing their biomass and biogeography. Here, combining projection from a dynamic bioclimate envelope model with published estimates of status of exploited populations from a catch‐based analysis, we analyze the effects of different global warming and fishing levels on biomass rebuilding for the exploited species in 226 marine ecoregions of the world. Fifty three percent (121) of the marine ecoregions have significant (at 5% level) relationship between biomass and global warming level. Without climate change and under a target fishing mortality rate relative to the level required for maximum sustainable yield of 0.75, we project biomass rebuilding of 1.7–2.7 times (interquartile range) of current (average 2014–2018) levels across marine ecoregions. When global warming level is at 1.5 and 2.6°C, respectively, such biomass rebuilding drops to 1.4–2.0 and 1.1–1.5 times of current levels, with 10% and 25% of the ecoregions showing no biomass rebuilding, respectively. Marine ecoregions where biomass rebuilding is largely impacted by climate change are in West Africa, the Indo‐Pacific, the central and south Pacific, and the Eastern Tropical Pacific. Coastal communities in these ecoregions are highly dependent on fisheries for livelihoods and nutrition security. Lowering the targeted fishing level and keeping global warming below 1.5°C are projected to enable more climate‐sensitive ecoregions to rebuild biomass. However, our findings also underscore the need to resolve trade‐offs between climate‐resilient biomass rebuilding and the high near‐term demand for seafood to support the well‐being of coastal communities across the tropics.

Global obligations to achieve sustainable oceans by 2030 require countries to commit to solutions that balance ocean use and protection. To do so necessitates baseline understanding of the ocean’s contribution to socio-economic well-being, which we do by measuring the economic activity of ocean-related sectors. Economic assessments tend to be data intensive and are typically reliant on professional economists, yet they are increasingly relevant to non-economists who engage in ocean management and communication, where they are integral in facilitating trade-off analysis of future ocean change. Thus, there is a need to make ocean economic assessment more accessible to nonspecialists. We fill this need by providing a pragmatic framework for conducting an economic assessment using British Columbia’s ocean sector as a case study. Our results show the impact of the province’s ocean sectors on four economic indicators and indicate that the ocean contributed almost $5 billion (or about 2%) to provincial gross domestic product (GDP) and generated about 106,120 jobs (over 4% of the province’s total) in 2015. Of these, the marine transport sector made the highest overall contribution followed by cruise lines, with GDP impacts of 66% and 13%, respectively. It should be noted that this estimated economic value is not representative of the full value of the ocean as it excludes oil and gas, research and education, and other activities that do not meet our criteria for inclusion, and it does not account for cultural and ecological values. Nonetheless the study highlights the substantial number of economic benefits generated by the blue economy. More significantly, the framework provides a simplified procedure for quantifying economic benefits, and can be applied by nonspecialists to perform rapid economic assessments in a variety of contexts.

Extreme temperature events have occurred in all ocean basins in the past two decades with detrimental impacts on marine biodiversity, ecosystem functions, and services. However, global impacts of temperature extremes on fish stocks, fisheries, and dependent people have not been quantified. Using an integrated climate-biodiversity-fisheries-economic impact model, we project that, on average, when an annual high temperature extreme occurs in an exclusive economic zone, 77% of exploited fishes and invertebrates therein will decrease in biomass while maximum catch potential will drop by 6%, adding to the decadal-scale mean impacts under climate change. The net negative impacts of high temperature extremes on fish stocks are projected to cause losses in fisheries revenues and livelihoods in most maritime countries, creating shocks to fisheries social-ecological systems particularly in climate-vulnerable areas. Our study highlights the need for rapid adaptation responses to extreme temperatures in addition to carbon mitigation to support sustainable ocean development.

Dialogue on improving small-scale fisheries for food security tends to centre on developing countries due to the generally more acute socio-economic problems these countries face in meeting global Sustainable Development Goals. Current management approaches to improve small-scale fisheries thus tend to cater specifically to the context of developing country fishers. This inadvertently excludes the small-scale fisheries of developed countries from international dialogue, which is a missed opportunity given the insights that can be drawn from understanding progressive challenges that emerge as small-scale fisheries evolve through different stages of socio-economic development. Japan is a developed country whose small-scale fisheries cannot be ignored- yet, most international dialogue about Japanese fisheries centre on its industrial fisheries. Against this backdrop, we stress that it is essential to raise the profile of Japanese and other developed country small-scale fisheries in order to ensure that challenges and potential solutions to their future ecological and socio-economic sustainability are heard and included in the global small-scale fisheries dialogue.