Report: Guaranteed fish shares may prevent overfishing

— -- A study of a new management strategy at some of the world's fisheries is one of the most hopeful in years, according to environmental and fisheries groups.

A report released in Friday's issue of the journal Science takes a look at a practice called catch shares, which experts say could greatly reduce the chance that the world's fish population will be decimated by overfishing.

Fisheries are fishing regions in lakes, rivers, gulfs and oceans that are populated with specific fish. For example, the Gulf of Mexico has a red snapper fishery and the Atlantic Ocean has one for sea scallops.

A paper published in Science in 2006 predicted that 90% of the fish and shellfish species taken from the ocean to feed people worldwide may be gone by 2048 because of overfishing and habitat degradation. Current estimates are that every year humans harvest 150 million metric tons of seafood, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Christopher Costello, a resource economist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and colleagues looked at 11,135 fisheries worldwide between 1950 and 2003 and found that catch shares lowered their chances of collapse by 50%.

Catch shares allocate a given percentage of a fishery's harvest — an amount determined by the governing body that has jurisdiction — to fishermen and fishing cooperatives. Traditional management has been more 'first come, first served" until the year's catch is caught.

Proponents say catch shares give fishermen an incentive to steward the health and abundance of the fish population to ensure that their percentage yields as many fish as possible.

Catch shares "help us end over-fishing, they also help to end the race for fish," says Galen Tromble of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Office of Sustainable Fisheries.

That's when fisherman invest in bigger boats and more equipment so they can fish as fast as they can before the season closes, which in turn can result in environmental damage and substantial "by-catch," non-target fish that are caught, killed and discarded.