World Bank has issued new report entitled ‘The Sunken Billions Revisited: Progress and Challenges in Global Marine Fisheries’, which confirms what many intuitively know: overexploitation is not a good strategy to manage a renewable natural resource like fish stocks, for steady profits, reliable jobs and long-term growth. For global fisheries as a whole, about $83 billion were foregone in 2012, compared to a more optimal scenario, largely because of overfishing.
The report, which uses a bio-economic model developed by Professor Ragnar Arnason of the University of Iceland, is an update of a 2009 study published by the World Bank and the FAO, called The Sunken Billions: The Economic Justification for Fisheries Reform. By explicitly quantifying the potential economic benefit forgone in global marine fisheries, The Sunken Billions underscored the urgency of improving marine fisheries governance and generated additional momentum toward restoring overexploited fish stocks.
Since then, the World Bank and partners have worked with numerous countries to help put fisheries on a more sustainable path. Below are five snapshots from recent or ongoing efforts that showcase different paths to arrive at sustainable development in this sector.
This study, however, adds to the original one by deepening the regional analysis. In addition, this study examines the range of complex issues that surround the reform of global fisheries management, including the financial and social costs of transitioning to a more sustainable resource management path, the considerable governance challenges associated with managing the largely open-access ocean resources, and the complicating factor of climate change. Although it does not attempt to address all of these issues fully, it lays out a comprehensive estimate of what the economic benefits of transitioning to higher value-added and more sustainable fisheries might look like.
This study estimates annual lost revenues at $83 billion in 2012. The primary objective of this study is to reinforce the messages of the 2009 publication and to catalyze calls for accelerating and scaling up the international effort aimed at addressing the global fisheries crisis. The analysis reveals economic losses of about $83 billion in 2012, compared with the optimal global maximum economic yield equilibrium.
These sunken billions represent the potential annual benefits that could accrue to the sector following both major reform of fisheries governance and a period of years during which fish stocks would be allowed to recover to a higher, more sustainable, and more productive level. These stocks cannot be recovered immediately, even if ideal sector governance were somehow imposed overnight. Rather, the process of recovery implies large transition costs and long-term sector restructuring.
Find out more by reading the report herebelow
Source: World Bank
