Swift action is required to save many of the world's fisheries that are declining faster than expected, a study in a leading scientific journal shows.
A recovery of fisheries could increase worldwide landings by up to 40 percent, helping to feed a global human population that is forecast to rise from 7 billion to 9 billion between now and 2050, according to the report in Friday's edition of Science.
Coastal fisheries and sharks are among those hardest hit by overfishing, while flounder, herring and sardine are suffering less, the scientists wrote in the journal run by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The study focused on the world's "unassessed" fisheries - those that lack good data about the size of stocks. Unassessed fisheries make up 80 percent of the global catch and the vast majority of the world's 10,000 fisheries, the authors said.
"Small-scale unassessed fisheries are in substantially worse shape than was previously thought," Christopher Costello, lead author of the study at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told a telephone news conference.
"The good news here is that it's not too late," he said. "These fisheries can rebound. But the longer we wait, the harder and more costly it will be ... In another ten years, the window of opportunity may have closed."
Unassessed fisheries are declining worldwide and are in a worse condition than their assessed counterparts, the study found. Many well-studied fisheries in developed nations have been recovering in recent years thanks to better management.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/28/us-fisheries-decline-idUSBRE88R0ZE20120928
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