PART I: FISHERIES TRENDS The Global Fisheries Crisis as a Rationale for Improving the FAO’s Database of Fisheries Statistics1

Global fisheries are in a crisis, and so are the marine ecosystems upon which these fisheries depend. Major policy and management changes are required to halt and reverse the trends that have brought about this situation. Underlying these changes is the need for availability of data sets, pertaining to large areas, that unequivocally demonstrate any large-scale fisheries impacts on marine ecosystems. Not until recently have such secondary data begun to be assembled, although data sets have been available for some time upon which such demonstrations could be based. This applies particularly to the global fisheries statistics assembled and maintained by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), which are assembled by large, arbitrary statistical areas (rather than by ecosystems), and which are not verified against local data sets. The present contribution documents a multi-pronged approach to develop and test a methodology for reconstructing historic catch time series (including misreported catches), and spatially assign these to ecosystems on a large spatial scale. This will serve as baselines for assessing the ‘health’ of ecosystems, and to evaluate the effects of fishing and management scenarios. Important components of this methodology are a global 1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Fisheries Project Planning Meeting of the Bejier International Institute of Ecological Economics, June 21-23, 1999 in Woods Hole, Mass. spatial catch allocation and mapping routine (www.seaaroundus.org), the Ecopath with Ecosim approach and software for constructing food web models of marine ecosystems (www.ecopath.org), and FishBase, an information system on the fish of the world (www.fishbase.org). Along with putting global fisheries data on a spatial ecosystem basis, these tools can greatly contribute to deepening our understanding of the ecosystem services upon which fisheries rely.