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A key aspect of WWF's fisheries work - integrating conservation into fisheries management - also addresses reducing the impacts of fishing on marine life.
The underlying base for all our fisheries work is ecosystem-based management (EBM), which aims to achieve sustainable exploitation of natural resources by balancing the social and economic needs of human communities with the maintenance of healthy ecosystems. This includes measures to minimize bycatch and damage to marine habitats.
Our work to integrate EBM into fisheries in part to reduce the impacts of fishing includes:
The underlying base for all our fisheries work is ecosystem-based management (EBM), which aims to achieve sustainable exploitation of natural resources by balancing the social and economic needs of human communities with the maintenance of healthy ecosystems. This includes measures to minimize bycatch and damage to marine habitats.
Our work to integrate EBM into fisheries in part to reduce the impacts of fishing includes:
- Certifying sustainable fisheries: Consumer demand for 'eco-friendly' fish can act as an extremely powerful market incentive for better fisheries management. The certification process of the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), which WWF supports, includes a management framework for fisheries to reduce bycatch.
- Protecting important marine habitats from fishing: Another way to reduce the impact of fishing on marine life is to protect important habitats from fishing activity. Together with artisanal and commercial fishers around the world, WWF is supporting the creation of no-take zones, particularly in vulnerable deep-sea areas and on coral reefs.
For example, our campaigns contributed to a new zoning plan for Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park that saw commercial and recreational fishing prohibited in 33% of the park, as well as to the creation of Australia’s 65,000km2 Heard Island and McDonald Islands Marine Reserve. The latter includes deep sea areas and is thus far the largest area in the world to be protected from commercial harvesting.
In 2006, WWF successfully worked for the establishment of Deep-Sea Fisheries Restricted Areas in three parts of the Mediterranean high seas. We are additionally working to improve the management of, and secure Marine Protected Areas on the high seas (the 64% of the ocean that lies outside of any nation’s jurisdiction) to help protect key migration routes for marine turtles and breeding areas for cetaceans.
In Turkey we working with artisanal fishers on the creation of no-take zones around breeding caves for the endangered Mediterranean monk seal to help prevent young seals from drowning in fishing nets. This not only protects the seals: fish populations are also increasing in and around the no-fishing zones.
