Recognising the role which markets play in depleting fish stocks in the developing world offers scientists and managers a new weapon for evaluating and managing the fish stocks that remain.<\/p>\n
\u201cReef fishery stocks are under increasing threat from factors such as global warming, runoff and logging, and overfishing. With over 500 million people worldwide dependent on reef resources, it is crucial to understand what is causing declining stocks,\u201d says Tom Brewer of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CoECRS) at James Cook University.<\/p>\n
Most studies about the human impacts on coral reefs focus on the negative role of human population size, but local subsistence pressures, national urban markets, and international demand for certain species combine to deplete fish stocks in ways that are not well understood. This study went a step further, accounting for the affect of local, provincial, and national markets on fish stocks.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe found that markets can be as important as environmental conditions and local fishing pressure in determining the condition of fish stocks – and for some kinds of fish they are even more important. The closer you get to a major town or city, the more overfished are the most sought-after reef species such as gropers, parrotfish, snappers and emperors.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe bigger the market, the larger the area fisheries resources are drawn from – big markets cast a wider net. The network of markets allows cities to project their footprint even to remote areas with larger markets obtaining fish through their links to smaller markets,\u201d Mr Brewer says.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause of this, proximity to even very small local markets can have surprisingly strong impact to the local area, particularly when they are connected to larger markets.\u201d<\/p>\n
The research by Mr Brewer and colleagues Josh Cinner, Alison Green and John Pandolfi finds that more attention needs to be paid to markets and their ability to mine fish to ensure the continued availability of fish for food and income and the ecological integrity of reefs.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe best scenario is when reefs can provide communities with food and income without endangering the capacity of the reefs to be productive in the long term. Our research shows how this can be compromised by inadequately regulated markets,\u201d Mr Brewer explains.<\/p>\n
With relatively recent improvements of fishing equipment, refrigeration and increasing market access, reef resources in the Solomons have become depleted. This is a picture being repeated worldwide, the team warns.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile our study focused on one particular group of islands and their internal economy, there\u2019s not much doubt that similar circumstances play out on the global stage, too. When global markets for reef fish are inadequately regulated, as is sometimes the case in the aquarium and live reef food fish trades, local fish stocks in remote areas can become overexploited despite low local populations and local demand,\u201d says Dr Alison Green of The Nature Conservancy.<\/p>\n
The team\u2019s paper \u201cThresholds and multiple scale interaction of environment, resource use, and market proximity on reef fishery resources in the Solomon Islands\u201d by Tom D Brewer, Joshua E Cinner (CoECRS and JCU), Alison Green (The Nature Conservancy) and John M Pandolfi (The University of Queensland) appears in the latest issue of the journal Biological Conservation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
New research carried out in the Solomon Islands has drawn a direct line between the depletion of local fish stocks and their proximity to national or even local markets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-2521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-industry-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2521"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2521\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2521"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldfishing.net\/icefish-conference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=2521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}