The piece was published earlier this year. However, writing a post about it on the Sea Around Us blog became a timely issue in the past days, given all the extreme weather events that have recently taken place across the world, from the devastation in Puerto Rico caused by hurricane María to the severe drought that has left millions of Ethiopians in need of emergency food assistance.
Cape Town, Daniel Pauly and Rashid Sumaila. Photos by Vicky Lam.
By Vicky Lam – Research Associate & Program Manager, Nereus Program, University of British Columbia.
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In late August, Professors Daniel Pauly, Rashid Sumaila and Dr. Vicky Lam, as representatives of the Global Fisheries Cluster in UBC’s Institute for Oceans and Fisheries, were invited by the World Bank to attend a technical consultation meeting in Cape Town, South Africa. The plan was to discuss a potential project that aims at understanding the likely impacts of climate change on fisheries in African countries.
Not only An Ocean Mystery: The Missing Catch made headlines when it premiered on Earth Day 2017 at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, but it has also been collecting awards in different parts of the globe.
This 40-minute long documentary directed by Alison Barrat from the Khaled Sultan Living Oceans Foundation follows the Sea Around Us Principal Investigator, Daniel Pauly, as he and his colleagues piece together a more realistic true picture of the amount of fish we have taken from our oceans and the speed at which we are running out of fish.
Fish are expected to shrink in size by 20 to 30 per cent if ocean temperatures continue to climb due to climate change.
A new study by researchers at the University of British Columbia updates previous estimates published in 2013 and provides a deeper explanation of why fish are expected to decline in size.
Nature published, both in its print and online editions, a brief feature on the Sea Around Us’ paper “Global marine fisheries discards: a synthesis of reconstructed data,” which appeared in Fish & Fisheries last June.
According to the research, conducted by Dirk Zeller, Tim Cashion, Deng Palomares and Daniel Pauly, industrial fishing fleets have been dumping nearly 10 million tonnes of good fish back into the ocean every year for the past 10 years.