- A new paper suggests that regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs) haven’t done a very good job setting up systems to conserve fish stocks and broader ecosystems.
- The paper questions RFMOs’ readiness for a coming new era of marine governance, with the high seas treaty set to take effect in January.
- The authors rated 16 RFMOs based on 100 management-related questions, such as “Are there consequences for violations of conservation measures …?” and used the answers to help identify “leaders” and “laggards.” The average rating was 45.5 out of 100.
- They also determined that on average, more than half of RFMOs’ target stocks are overexploited or collapsed, reinforcing previous research.
When a new treaty to protect biodiversity in international waters, or the high seas, takes effect in January, there’s an open question about how it will interact with the regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs) that govern fishing there.
Most RFMOs have been in place for decades; their mandate includes conserving fish stocks and broader ecosystems. A new paper suggests they haven’t done a very good job setting up systems to do so and questions their readiness for the coming new era of marine governance.
The study, published Nov. 24 in the journal Environmental Research Letters, provides a wide-ranging analysis of RFMOs and concludes they have a “generally low overall performance.” It determined that on average more than half of RFMOs’ target stocks are overexploited or collapsed, reinforcing previous research. The paper’s main focus is how RFMOs operate. The authors rated 16 RFMOs based on 100 management-related questions, such as “Are there consequences for violations of conservation measures …?” and used the answers to help identify “leaders” and “laggards.”
These 100 questions were the “core of this work,” Gabrielle Carmine, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University in the U.S. and lead author of the paper, told Mongabay. She completed this research as a Ph.D. candidate in the Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab at Duke University in the U.S.
“RFMOs have been critiqued for years, and unlike official RFMO performance reviews, this review is truly independent,” Carmine said in a statement.
Carmine told Mongabay she was genuinely “excited” about the high seas treaty, more formally known as the agreement on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ), but worried that laggardly RFMOs could restrict conservation progress. None of those studied came close to implementing all of the best management practices she and her co-authors looked at.
“Our findings show … the places where RFMOs can improve,” Carmine said.
“The future collaboration of BBNJ and RFMOs should aim to fill those long-term conservation mandate gaps in current RFMO performance,” she added.
The paper follows a well-known 2010 study in the journal Marine Policy that charged RFMOs with “failing the high seas.” It looked at RFMOs’ management practices based on 26 criteria, judging the inputs — the “organization intent” — and then separately the outcomes, such as fish biomass trends over time.
Carmine said she wanted to update and expand upon that work, which was conducted by scientists at Sea Around Us, a research initiative at the University of British Columbia in Canada. The new study relied on Sea Around Us data and one of its senior co-authors, Jennifer Jacquet, now a professor at the University of Miami in the U.S., did her Ph.D. and postdoctoral work in the Sea Around Us lab. But it did not involve current Sea Around Us scientists.
Like the 2010 study, the new one looks firstly at inputs, or organizational practices, and then at actual fisheries outcomes. For inputs, it rates the RFMOs not on 26 but on 100 criteria across 10 categories, including bycatch, inclusion of scientific knowledge, transparency and access and equity.
“As the environment changes, so does some of the things we have to assess these institutions by,” Carmine said, explaining the additional criteria.
The authors scored each RFMO on a 0-100 scale based on its policies and practices as of the end of 2021, using primarily information from the RFMOs’ websites. They didn’t account for changes over the last four years. The average rating was 45.5. The highest rating, 61.5, went to the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC), and the lowest, 29.5, went to the North Atlantic Salmon Conservation Organization (NASCO).
However, WCPFC and NASCO manage completely different species. With such differences in mind, the authors divided the 16 organizations into three categories: five tuna RFMOs, which are the most well-known and commercially important RFMOs, including WCPFC; seven general RFMOs, many of which focus on bottom-dwelling species; and four smaller RFMOs, such as NASCO, that deal with salmon or halibut.
“What this comparative research really reveals is how much better RFMOs could be doing based on what some of them have achieved,” Jacquet told Mongabay in an email. “For instance, we asked 100 questions and there were only 6 questions for which all 16 RFMOs received a 0. That means we’re not setting the bar too high — achieving a higher score is possible. Some RFMO is doing better, somewhere.”
Carmine pointed to the Indian Ocean as a place where the scores indicate weak management across RFMO categories. Of the four tuna RFMOs that have a convention area (the fifth manages a particular species wherever it’s found), the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC) received the lowest score, 48. Meanwhile, the Southern Indian Ocean Fisheries Agreement (SIOFA), a general RFMO, also rated toward the bottom of its category, at 44.
Paul de Bruyn, IOTC’s executive secretary, declined to comment for this article, citing a secretariat policy. Thierry Clot, SIOFA’s executive secretary, didn’t directly comment on the paper’s scoring but noted in emails to Mongabay that SIOFA only became “fully operational,” with a scientific committee in place, in 2016.
The study’s analysis of fisheries outcomes found that on average, 56% of targeted fish stocks in RFMO convention areas were overexploited or collapsed as of 2018. This was based on Sea Around Us data and definitions, not those from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, which researchers also commonly use.
Like the 2010 study, the paper found no significant correlation between the management inputs score and fisheries outcomes. Carmine and her co-authors present a few theories as to why. A key one is that RFMOs respond too slowly to changing conditions; by the time good policy takes effect, it’s often too late. RFMOs “don’t necessarily have the capacity or ability to keep pace with both the fast-changing environment and the industries that are profiting off of the extraction from high seas fish and biodiversity,” Carmine said. “They move really quickly.” She said the “status quo” is often extraction, and the burden of proof to act falls on those seeking to protect the environment.
Despite the lack of a general correlation, the paper found that five particular best practices out of the 100 correlated with better fisheries outcomes. These included reducing allowable catch after overfishing, maintaining marine protected areas and banning the ship-to-ship transfer of fish at sea, a practice known as transshipment that’s been linked to illegal fishing.
The authors’ recommendations include addressing corporate capture of RFMO decision-making processes. Industry representatives often have an inside track at meetings, whereas conservationists often attend as nonvoting “observers” and are sometimes barred from important meetings.
“Corporations benefiting from fishing the high seas are attending RFMO meetings as part of state delegations through their employees and/or hired advocacy group representatives, presenting a potential conflict of interest,” the authors write.
Ryan Orgera, global director of Accountability.Fish, a U.S.-based advocacy group, praised the authors for raising this issue.
“They astutely point out that one of the main issues is that the fox guards the henhouse…national delegations are overrun with industry representatives,” he told Mongabay in an email.
Jacquet said that the 2010 study was a “big deal” at the time and that “[i]t’s unfortunate and sad how little progress we have made in the interim.” She added that RFMOs are still “failing the high seas.”
Banner image: Tuna fishing vessel. Image courtesy of Bernal Saborio via Flickr. (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Critics push for more transparency at RFMOs that govern high seas fishing
Citations:
Carmine, G., Cronin, M. R., Barkley, C., Tuohy, C. L., Crespo, G. O., Österblom, H., … Halpin, P. N. (2025). An expanded evaluation of global fisheries management organizations on the high seas. Environmental Research Letters, 20(12), 123001. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/ae1b1e
Cullis-Suzuki, S., & Pauly, D. (2010). Failing the high seas: A global evaluation of regional fisheries management organizations. Marine Policy, 34(5), 1036-1042. doi:10.1016/j.marpol.2010.03.002
FEEDBACK: Use this form to send a message to the author of this post. If you want to post a public comment, you can do that at the bottom of the page.
Credits
This story first appeared on Mongabay
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and Mongabay, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
