‘Fishery’ is the term used to refer to exploitable living marine resources such as fish, shellfish, corals, clams, etc.  The state of the world’s fisheries is poor, and continues to degenerate. 70% of commercially valuable fisheries have collapsed or are over-fished and en route to collapse. The biggest threats to fishery health worldwide include:

• Pollution from land based sources
• Habitat alteration and destruction
• Non-sustainable and destructive fishing techniques (trawling, use of poisons, etc)
• Global climate change

The deteriorating state of the world’s fisheries has social, economic and ecological implications: commercial and artisanal fishing is a source of income and a way of life for coastal populations, seafood is an important source of food and protein for the global population and demand for it is rising, and the depletion in stocks of commercially targeted fish, as well as the depletion of marine species that are incidentally caught (by-catch) with targeted species, has altered and unbalanced the food web of the world’s oceans.  The consequences of this destabilization are ecologically complex and only beginning to be understood – however, fisheries are a fundamental part of the global ocean’s ecosystems and the impacts are more complicated and far-reaching than simply having less of any given species of marine animal. Furthermore, classic methods of fisheries management have proven inadequate to the challenge of developing sustainable fisheries policies and practices.  This is due to, among other things: the isolated and compartmentalized fashion that marine science has been conventionally conducted and the corresponding categorical approach to management of the oceans and coasts that has been standard of many countries, the long held view that the ocean’s resources are inexhaustible, the difficulty of implementing policies that are at odds with the immediate demands of the global market and industry, and the fact that fisheries’ responses to anthropogenic activities versus natural variability in their environment are not well distinguished or understood.   However, in recent years, the scientific community has come to recognize that crucial to the successful understanding of a biological system like a fishery is an examination of the relationships among and between its biological and physical elements. This approach to marine and environmental scientific method is called the ‘ecosystem’ approach. The ecosystem approach recognizes that the ocean’s living marine resources do not exist in isolation from the other components of their shared ecosystem, and that their dynamics are such that changes to a single element of the system may ripple through and impact the entire system. Although the living marine resources of the oceans are renewable, they are not inexhaustible, and as such they must be carefully ‘managed’ for continued human consumption.  Moreover, the objectives of local, national and regional fisheries policies must be protective, conservative, preventative and pre-cautionary where gaps in knowledge and data exist, in order to achieve its objective of maintaining fisheries at an exploitable level.

The IOC understands that the complexity of ecosystem management requires collaboration between different scientific disciplines, and implements programmes that employ the ecosystem based approach to the scientific study and management of the ocean’s living marine resources.