Deng Palomares and Belize fisheries 2023-12-06

Belizean fishers want changes in policy and practice to revert declining catch trends

Deng Palomares and Belize fisheries 2023-12-06

The Sea Around Us project manager, Dr. Maria ‘Deng’ Palomares, with Belizean fishers. Photo by the Belize Fisheries Project.

Belizean fishers’ experience in the water confirms the declining trends in fishery catches – and, therefore, in fish populations – uncovered by the Belize Fisheries Project (BFP), of which the Sea Around Us is a member together with Comunidad y Biodiversidad (COBI), the Environmental Law Institute (ELI), Healthy Reefs for Healthy People Initiative (HRI) and MRAG Americas.

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Ageeba - Mediterranean coast -Egypt

Egyptian Mediterranean fisheries in urgent need of better management

Ageeba - Mediterranean coast -Egypt

Ageeba beach on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast. Photo by Aya Gallab, Wikimedia Commons.

Egyptian fisheries need to be better managed to secure the overall health of the Mediterranean Sea’s marine living resources, new research has found.

In a recent paper in the journal Ocean and Coastal Management, researchers with the Sea Around Us initiative at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries and the Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport reconstructed Egypt’s marine fisheries catches from the Mediterranean in the last 100 years and found strong evidence of resource overexploitation. Such overexploitation has pushed fishers to go farther and deeper, increasingly resorting to species lower in the food chain.

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