Fisherman casting net at sunset in Mandalay. Photo by Pyae Phyo Aung, Pexels.
Official statistics from most coastal countries only account for a fraction of what their fisheries catch, the Sea Around Us data and analyses have demonstrated.
As we observe World Fisheries Day 2025, which aims to highlight the importance of promoting sustainable fish stocks and the rights of small-scale fishing communities, it is crucial to remember that without comprehensive data, managing sustainable fisheries is akin to flying blind.
One of the major issues the Sea Around Us has brought to light is that of the lack of attention to small-scale fisheries (artisanal, subsistence, and recreational), as well as to bycatch, discards, and illegal or unreported catches in most parts of the world, which leads to potentially misleading statistics being submitted annually by many member countries of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
Consequently, FAO omits or substantially underreports small-scale fisheries statistics when it harmonizes the data submitted by its members, masking the true intensity of fishing pressure on global marine ecosystems. These data, however, are widely used by policymakers and scholars.
The Sea Around Us has worked for over 25 years on reconstructing catch statistics for all maritime countries and territories to unveil how much humanity is really taking out of the ocean. By drawing on peer-reviewed literature, local experts, and ancillary datasets, we have rebuilt a more comprehensive time series of global catches back to 1950.
The first results of the global catch reconstruction process —released almost a decade ago— showed that total marine catches were underreported by 50 per cent. They also showed that global catches peaked in 1996 and have since declined. This revised picture changed how scientists and policymakers perceive global exploitation levels and their biodiversity implications.
As of 2025, the Sea Around Us team and an army of in-country collaborators have embarked on a quest to revise each country’s reconstructed catch data and update them to 2022. The results of this project will provide a more current view of the progress or regression in both catch data reporting and sustainable marine fisheries management. In parallel, we have begun reconstructing the world’s inland fisheries catches, which are also often significantly underreported to the FAO.
At present, users can freely access global reconstructed catch data up to 2019, as well as data by Exclusive Economic Zone, Large Marine Ecosystems, Marine Ecoregions, Regional Fisheries Management Organizations, the High Seas, FAO area, and fishing country. The Sea Around Us also allocates reconstructed catches to 0.5 ° x 0.5 ° spatial cells, covering all these geographies and allowing users to overlay fishing pressure with species distributions.
The database allows for determining “who fishes where and what,” as it provides catches by taxon, commercial groups, fishing country, fishing gear and fishing sector, among other dimensions. This granularity has enabled research on distant-water fishing behaviours, revealing the globalization of fishing effort and its reach into biodiversity-rich waters and the high seas, particularly as overfishing leads to the decline and/or collapse of near-shore fish populations.
Informed decisions when it comes to managing fisheries sustainably and equitably can be fostered by the wealth of comprehensive fisheries data available on the Sea Around Us website, where people can also access free training on how to conduct catch reconstructions and perform stock assessments using the CMSY methodology. Thus, we encourage users to share this resource with fishers, managers, conservationists, policymakers, and researchers.
World Fisheries Day is not just about celebrating — it’s about empowering with knowledge those working for a bluer economy.