I would like to follow up on this. Heike has provided a bit of historical context. She is an environmental historian who has detailed the change in fisheries and the ecosystems associated with them. The public perception of this is now largely a bad-news story. A lot of the fisheries issues are perceived as bad news--species collapsing, fisheries closing, and so on. The question is, how do we turn this around? How do we turn this into a success story?
We think what's required is to change the focus of management from managing for exploitation to managing for rebuilding. That's the title of our presentation, “Managing our fisheries and oceans towards recovery”. This is not a pipe dream. It is something that's actually been going on in the United States over the last ten years, and worldwide in an increasing number of jurisdictions that are thinking forward and helping oceans and ocean resources and the communities that depend on them to recover.
What we did recently is to bring together a panel of experts at the National Center For Ecological Analysis And Synthesis in Santa Barbara, an NSF-funded independent organization. We brought together what I would call the leading fisheries experts and marine scientists from five continents around the globe, people who are at the cutting edge of science and who know about the local situations in different continents. What emerged was a picture that you can bring things back, not only historically but in real time. It usually takes less than a decade, and a number of tools are available right now to do this. But they need to be combined in an intelligent way to bring down a key parameter, and the key parameter is called the exploitation rate.
The exploitation rate is the amount or number of fish or invertebrates we take from the ecosystems every year, relative to what is there; it's the proportion. Say we're taking 10% a year, or we're taking 40% a year. What we've shown is that traditionally, basically all jurisdictions--Alaska is the one exception--have overshot the traditional target of having an exploitation rate that's associated with maximum yield. The traditional objective enshrined in our law and in United Nations law was to manage for maximum yield, the maximum catch that's sustainable over time. It turns out that was too high, and it also turns out that that goal in Canada and elsewhere was overshot. At that point, you're losing catch and you're also having massive ecosystem impacts, which Heike and others have documented.
How do we move back from that? How do we scale back from that? What we found is that you need a diverse and effective blend of management tools that have been used worldwide and in fact are used in Canada to some extent. However, we believe that they have to be combined in a way that makes them most effective.
Those solutions fall neatly into two categories. One is traditional tools of restrictions: restriction to the total catch that can be taken out; the total effort, how many days at sea; the total number of boats, which is fishing capacity; the area that can be fished, which translates into areas that are closed to fishing; and then restrictions to fishing gear. Those are five traditional solutions. Then there are three new solutions that increasingly gain traction around the world. One is catch shares, where fishermen have a long-term guaranteed share in the catch, whatever the catch may be. What that does it to transform the incentive from over-exploitation to managing the resource sustainably. I'll give you an example in a second.
Another solution is community co-management, where communities actually work with government to come up with their own management plans, and the third solution is fisheries certification--for example, the MSC label for sustainable fisheries.
I want to give you two examples. One is just south of the border and is an area that's also fished by Canadian fishermen, called Georges Bank. Georges Bank was heading the same way as the northern cod and other groundfish stocks in the Atlantic region over the last 40 years, the same trajectory of decline due to foreign overfishing in the 1960s and 1970s, then a rebuilding as the 200-mile limit came in and removed those boats from the scene, then a decline again as Canadians ramped up their fishing capacity.
In 1994, as Canadian stocks started collapsing, there was a rebuilding plan put into effect. That plan had three aspects: first, to reduce fishing effort, that is, days at sea; second, to put in two large closed areas; and third, to have effective restrictions on some fishing gear.
In 1995 there was a recovery of the stock, which has increased about tenfold since then and continues to increase. Canadian fishermen I talk to are reaping the benefits, because Georges Bank goes into our territorial waters. They say it's like fishing in the old days. They have never seen anything like it, and it's because of a rebuilding strategy that had diverse tools, a clear target, and clear timelines.
To wrap up, I think there's a new consensus coming up in the scientific community. We brought these people together from previously divergent factions—marine ecologists like me, fisheries scientists like Ray Hilborn, and others who previously criticized us. We've come together to develop this toolkit for rebuilding fisheries. There is a recognition that overfishing has depleted a significant number of stocks and ecosystems. The solution to that problem is to reduce fishing pressure to achieve better economic and ecological outcomes. There are numerous examples of benefits flowing directly to fishermen in increased income and increased stability of the resource. There's a growing recognition that there needs to be a new focus on restoring biodiversity and rebuilding fisheries. This requires a broader approach than we've taken before, using the diverse management tools that I've highlighted.
I was just in Washington last week, Washington, D.C., and I saw the excitement among policy-makers created by a piece of legislation that came into effect about ten years ago, the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which was just reauthorized two years ago. That piece of legislation has made U.S. rebuilding possible. It provides a structured framework for managing stock recovery through specific targets and timelines--that is, where you want the stock to recover to, and the point in time at which the target is to be reached.
I'll close with an analogy. To me it's like rebuilding a house that has broken down. What do you need? Well, you need a target, a plan, and a timeline for your contractor. You can't just say it has to happen sometime. It has to happen this year or next year. This is what the U.S. has done, and this is what Canada is lacking. Rebuilding, if it occurs, is a political process here. It's not a process that has a structured approach based on targets and timelines. We talked to the minister about this earlier today, and she was very interested in reauthorization of the Fisheries Act, because it's something that takes the political pressure out of the system and puts everything on a biological basis.
Finally, I want to point out that the high seas and the emerging fisheries that Heike talked about are still great challenges, not just in Canada, but internationally. How do we deal with the diverse pressures on high seas stock, tuna, billfish, sharks? How do we deal with emerging species such as sea cucumbers at the bottom of the food chain, which we haven't even thought of in traditional fisheries? These are some of the important science issues we have to address, and there are also policy changes that we need to be aware of.
Thank you for your time.
