In July 2024, the Sea Around Us turns 25 years old.
During this quarter-century, the project has been dedicated to examining the impacts of fisheries on the marine ecosystems of the world. It has been and remains instrumental in ocean conservation.
The Sea Around Us open-web platform gets 260,000 sessions annually and is the only provider of comprehensive spatially allocated historical global marine fisheries catch data. This platform has allowed us to produce groundbreaking research whose findings have been key to our daily fight for healthy oceans.
Among the critical findings that have emerged from analyzing our data are:
• Estimates that over half of the global catch is underreported and that marine catches have been declining by 1.2 million tonnes/year since 1996.
• The discovery that China’s overreporting of its fisheries catches was masking the steady decline global catches have experienced since the mid-1990s.
• Evidence that fisheries in the High Seas jointly generate only 5-8% of the world’s marine catch and are not essential for food security.
To celebrate the Sea Around Us 25th anniversary, we will produce various pieces of content, such as the poster below that highlights some of the milestones we have achieved in the last two decades.
[Double click on the image to enlarge it]
In addition to the digital version of this poster, visitors to the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries can enjoy a large-format, hard-copy version of it on the third floor, close to the Sea Around Us offices.