The simple fixes that have saved the lives of sea lions and turtles
'The problem was that, in areas where there was a sea lion population, the pups would go in for the bait and they'd get trapped. They wouldn't be able to get back out and, obviously, there'd be mortality associated.'
This did not happen with adult sea lions because they could not fit inside the lobster pot. The metal bar was a simple fix to prevent the pups from getting in as well.
Camarda's family business is part of the Western Rock Lobster Fishery, the first in the world to be certified as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council, or MSC, back in 2000.
The fishery has also shifted from traditional woven pots to traps with larger gaps at the bottom so fish and undersize lobsters will fall out, and uses weighted ropes to attach the pots to floats to ensure there is no excess rope floating on the surface that could entangle a passing whale. The government and industry also reduced the lobster catch from a historical take of about 11,000 tonnes a year to a quota of 6000 tonnes, which Camarda says is working because it takes much less time to reach it, indicating a bounceback of stocks.
Industrial fishing around the world is having a serious impact on the ocean's biodiversity, from depleting stocks of the target wild fish species to dangerous levels of bycatch of non-target species.
David Attenborough's Ocean documentary has raised the profile of the destructive bottom-trawling techniques, while Greenpeace has been campaigning against longlining on the high seas over concerns about bycatch.
Yet, just as there are some forms of aquaculture that are more sustainable than others, not all wild fisheries are equally managed.
Loading
Australia has 30 fisheries that are MSC-certified to externally validate they are run sustainably – though the MSC scheme has its critics.
A major tuna fishery has now joined MSC ranks, in a stunning turnaround for a fish species that had been severely depleted from overfishing. The Southern Bluefin Tuna Fishery in Port Lincoln, South Australia, had both its purse seine and longline fisheries certified earlier this month.
Purse seine fishing uses a large vertical net, or seine, to surround and trap schools of fish in open water, with the bottom of the net pulling closed like a purse. Longlining means having a line kilometres long, with thousands of hooks. Greenpeace has argued this is an indiscriminate fishing method, pointing to data about the high bycatch of blue sharks particularly in an area around Lord Howe Rise in the south-west of the Pacific Ocean that it wants to see protected.
However, Daniel Casement, chief executive of the Australian Southern Bluefin Tuna Industry Association, says it is easy to avoid bycatch when fishing for tuna because the species is a schooling fish.
The purse seine method is very selective because it never hits the ocean floor, Casement says, and the fish are kept alive and towed into Port Lincoln for 'ranching'. The tuna are then raised in large cages with other tuna and fed sardines, the same as they would eat in the wild.
Casement says that with both purse seine and longlining, the fishers only deploy where the tuna is already schooling.
The main conservation question with bluefin tuna has been the vulnerability of the species itself as opposed to bycatch. Southern bluefin tuna were listed as 'threatened' under Australian law in 2010 but delisted in 2024.
Globally, the International Union for Conservation of Nature lists southern bluefin tuna, which is also found in the waters south of Africa and South America, as 'endangered', while Pacific bluefin tuna is 'near threatened' and Atlantic bluefin tuna moved from 'endangered' to 'least concern' in 2021.
Casement says the delisting in Australia and the recent certification reflect the fact that Australia and other members of the international Commission for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna had used science to understand fish stocks and had made difficult decisions. Both government and industry are represented in the commission.
'When they were previously determined as overfished, using that science and strong management decisions, [the commission] reduced the quotas, reduced the amount they could catch and drove a strong stock-recovery strategy,' Casement says. 'Obviously, business was impacted significantly, but the longer-term benefit is what they were focused on.'
The Northern Prawn Fishery, which extends along 6000 kilometres of coastline from Cape York in Queensland to Cape Londonderry in Western Australia, is one of Australia's largest. In 2012, it became the first tropical prawn fishery in the world to be certified by the MSC.
Northern Prawn Industry Association chief executive Annie Jarrett says the fishery has been leading on environmental sustainability since the 1990s. It developed the world's first bycatch action plan in 1999, followed by the introduction of turtle exclusion devices, which give turtles an escape hatch from prawning nets, in the year 2000.
'We managed to reduce our turtle catch by approximately 99 per cent, and the capture of rays and sharks by up to 36 per cent,' Jarrett says.
From 2015 to 2018, the fishery focused on reducing the bycatch of small fish and achieved a 43 per cent reduction, Jarrett says. In the past two years, the fishery has worked with the CSIRO to reduce interactions with endangered, threatened and protected species, particularly sawfish, a type of large ray.
WWF and consumer goods giant Unilever co-founded the MSC in 1996, though the MSC is now independent. The certification body has sometimes copped criticism from within the environmental movement.
Kate Noble, senior manager of oceans policy at WWF Australia, said the charity had publicly called for MSC reforms and expressed disappointment with the lack of progress over the past two decades.
In 2021, WWF-Australia objected to the MSC certification of the orange roughy fishery in eastern Tasmania and joined the Australian Marine Conservation Society to file an objection, based on the conservation status of the long-lived species and its slow recovery from historic overfishing.
'However, given the lack of credible alternatives, the MSC standard does provide a useful and recognised global benchmark,' Noble says. 'It is as an important step towards sustainability – not an end point.'
Matt Watson, senior fisheries program manager for the Asia Pacific at MSC, says the program is reviewed every five years to stay abreast of scientific developments.
He says the perspectives of environmental groups are important but need to be balanced.
'We've got to make sure our program remains accessible, that the scientific bar remains credible, but we also need to make sure that we're not creating a standard which is exclusive to only 1 or 2 per cent of the world's catch,' Watson says.
'If you're a longliner, the independent auditors will look for issues around bycatch and endangered species interaction. If you're a trawler, there's a bit more focus on habitat interactions. The intent there is to incentivise change, regardless of fishing practices … and they have to show us the science and their data sets.'
The 30 MSC-certified fisheries account for 38 per cent of the Australian wild catch, Watson says. There are some large fisheries outside the program, such as the South Australian sardine fishery, which voluntarily left the MSC program, but there is also a long tail of small fisheries that cannot afford certification.
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Professor Gretta Pecl, a marine ecologist at the University of Tasmania and a member of the Biodiversity Council, says seafood is an important food source and Australian fisheries are among the world's best in terms of management and sustainability.
'Seafood, if it's harvested sustainably, can actually be part of the climate solution because the protein from seafood uses a lot less carbon in terms of the production [than other protein sources],' Pecl says. '[Seafood] can be part of our broader climate and biodiversity solution.'
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ABC News
03-08-2025
- ABC News
Port Gregory's jetty is surrounded by sand as beach grows
Sitting on the edge of his local jetty, seven-year-old Jye Gleghorn's feet dangle above hard sand. But he imagines an ocean beneath him. It is a place where he can connect to his late father, Beau, who once sat on the same wooden planks at Port Gregory, 527 kilometres north of Perth along Western Australia's Mid West coast. "My dad used to ride his bike off [the jetty] and do front flips and back flips, and the jump was right here," he said, patting the edge of the jetty," Jye said. "They used to [swim] under the jetty. Sometimes they'd get the crabs." When Jye's dad was alive, the jetty was surrounded by water and filled with marine life. Now, more and more sand billows across its wooden planks every day, slowly but surely marooning what was once a treasured place of work and play for the small fishing town. Jye's great-aunt, Nat Schultz, wants him to be able to share the childhood experiences of her nephew and other local children who grew up "jetty jumping". "Port Gregory was his favourite place. He used to love coming up here fishing, going out on the boat, netting — he just loved Port Gregory," Ms Schultz said. "At night-time in summer and over the Easter break, this jetty would be full of people. "The kids would walk down at night-time, it was a hangout place, they loved it. It was their happy place to be able to come, and now they can't do that anymore." Just three weeks after his father died, Jye also lost his mother. "Jye has had a massive tragedy in his life. I want his mental health to be happy," Ms Schultz said. "This is where the memories of his dad come from, and we talk about Beau and Sarah all the time." In a region where the threat of the ocean swallowing buildings and infrastructure looms as a multi-million-dollar issue, Port Gregory faces the opposite challenge. Its beach is growing, with sand now surrounding the jetty and blanketing beach shelters. Locals, like lobster fisher Colin Suckling, have had enough. "It's embarrassing to have a jetty that people can't walk out and actually walk over water," he said. "We just want our jetty back — to be able to use it. It has been 14 years since commercial fishers like Mr Suckling and his mate Greg Horsman have been able to tie up to the jetty to unload their catches. Instead, the lobster fishers are forced to use dinghies to ferry catch and bait to and from their boats and the beach. "This jetty had more than 2 metres of water around it, back to approximately halfway along the first leg of the jetty," Mr Horsman said. The pair was frustrated with the WA government, which owned the jetty, for not acting on their calls for help. "It's ridiculous. You can't leave it as it is. They [should] either remove it or fix it," Mr Horsman said. "The longer it goes, the more costly it's going to become. So it should have been looked at possibly 10 years ago, rather than now." Once a key fishing port along the coast north of Perth, Port Gregory is now a much smaller village. The pink lake on the outskirts of town attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. Often, they visit Port Gregory as a toilet stop. Ms Schultz said the government needed to consider the volume of travellers who visited the pink lake. "We do have tourism here; we had 450,000 tourists through," she said. "They all get out and come for a wander, but they wander onto a weeded-up boardwalk at the moment." In 2021, WA Transport Minister Rita Saffioti promised to visit the jetty. "To my knowledge … she hasn't been here," Mr Horsman said. The minister was unavailable to speak to the ABC and referred questions about the jetty to the Department of Transport. A spokesperson said sedimentation at Port Gregory had been monitored since 2012, and the coastline was continually growing. "Options such as dredging and a jetty extension have been considered, however, due to the rapid rate of siltation at Port Gregory, neither of these options is viable," the statement said. "There are no plans to upgrade the jetty at Port Gregory."
ABC News
15-07-2025
- ABC News
Lab Notes: Can bottom trawling be a sustainable way to fish?
Belinda Smith: If you've seen the recent documentary Ocean with David Attenborough... Ocean trailer: After living for nearly a hundred years on this planet, I now understand the most important place on earth is not on land, but at sea. Belinda Smith: Like me, you may have been blown away by the destruction caused by bottom trawlers. In super high resolution, we see a giant net weighted by heavy chains getting dragged quickly across the bottom of the ocean. Fish, squid, all manner of animals are scooped up and swept into the net, while the gouging chains churn up the seabed, crushing everything in their path. The documentary leaves you wondering how sustainable our appetite for seafood really is, and if anything is being done to reduce the impacts of bottom trawling. Hi, I'm Belinda Smith, and you're listening to Lab Notes, the show that dissects the science behind new discoveries and current events. To tell us about the state of bottom trawling in Australia is Denham Parker, a marine ecologist at the CSIRO. How much of the world's seafood is caught by bottom trawlers? Denham Parker: Approximately 25%, about a quarter of all seafood that is landed is landed from bottom trawling. Belinda Smith: 25%? That's a huge proportion. Denham Parker: So yes, it's a large proportion of the seafood that we have globally is derived from bottom trawling. Belinda Smith: But it hasn't always been this way. Denham Parker: So bottom trawling has been done for hundreds of years. It was really established in Europe, so it's a very old practice or form of fishing. Belinda Smith: But it's really ramped up for commercial fisheries too, hasn't it? Denham Parker: Yes, particularly around the 90s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, there was a significant increase in bottom trawling. Belinda Smith: And what spurred that increase? Denham Parker: So really, with a growing global population, seafood supplies at this point in time about 3 billion people with a form of nutrients and protein. Belinda Smith: Australia is no exception. We eat on average around 14 kilograms of seafood each year. That's about twice as much lamb as the average Australian eats annually. So what species are fished by bottom trawling in Australian waters? Denham Parker: The common ones in Australia is prawns. So we have a variety of prawn trawl fisheries. As you go south, you get trawlers that tend to target more fin fish, species like ling, grenadier, gummy shark, etc. Now Belinda Smith: Attenborough's latest and probably his last documentary was a really damning critique into the practice of bottom trawling. Was any of that criticism warranted, do you think? Denham Parker: So as someone who has a real passion for the ocean and as someone who has studied the ocean for a very long time, particularly fisheries, I was really excited to know that David Attenborough was making a documentary on oceans. It was great, to be honest, very hard hitting. But obviously there's limitations in terms of that sort of documentary making in terms of it needs to be entertaining as well as it needs to be in a relatively short period of time. So there are limitations as to what can be said. I suppose what I felt was there wasn't enough information as to the hard work that's gone into trying to improve bottom trawling in terms of sustainability and in terms of bycatch reduction and in terms of mitigating seabed destruction. So in the early stages of trawling, it was very destructive. A lot of work has gone into ensuring that mitigating that destructive side of trawling as much as possible. Belinda Smith: Yeah, okay. Let's talk about that destruction and how it can be mitigated, starting with bycatch. The Attenborough documentary says up to three quarters of what's dragged out of the ocean by bottom trawlers is bycatch. Denham Parker: What is very clear is that there's a large variation amongst trawlers as to what bycatch and that's largely to do with what they're targeting. So in general, trawlers that target smaller species such as prawn have higher bycatch than trawlers that target larger fish species. And that's simply got to do with the mesh size of the net that they trawl. And if you're targeting smaller species, that mesh size needs to be smaller. And as a result, you generally tend to catch more bycatch. Belinda Smith: Is there anything being done to minimise bycatch? Denham Parker: There are a number of measures that you can employ within the fisheries. And I think this is really where Australia has done a lot of research into ensuring that bycatch is kept to a minimal. One of the things that you do is all Australian trawl fisheries have a bycatch and discard work plan. These things include gear modifications. So in general, we talk about bycatch reduction devices. And essentially, these are different sort of gear modifications to the net, which help or aid any unwanted species to escape. So this can be anything from a portion of the net that is a different shape or larger mesh size to let animals escape. They have fish eyes, which are essentially a little escape slot in the top of the net. And then this reduction devices for larger animals, such as turtle exclusion devices, which is something that's been really successfully implemented in Australia. Belinda Smith: I guess that's one of the sort of more enduring images of documentaries, right? Seeing the poor old turtles, they always get caught up in fishing nets and things like trawlers are no exception. So how would a trawler turtle exclusion device work? Denham Parker: What it is essentially is a grate, a metal bar grate that's put into the net and angled slightly upwards. So as all the animals get kind of flushed into the net, the target species can pass through those bars. But large animals like turtles will hit up against that bar and will be forced upwards to the top of the net. And then at the top of the net, there is essentially a flap. So an escape little hole that the turtle can then pop out of and escape unharmed. So these are implemented in the late 1980s, early 1990s across a lot of the trawl fisheries in Australia. And having a look at the history of these fisheries, we see that in the northern prawn fishery, for example, there were 5,700 turtle interactions in late 1980s. And then in 2020, that was decreased down to less than 70 interactions. Of that, only five mortality. So things like turtle exclusion devices, which have been developed over time with scientists as well as with the industry, they really have quite a lasting impact in terms of bycatch reduction. Belinda Smith: The other big environmental concern, of course, is the trail of destruction a bottom trawling net can leave in its wake. Denham Parker: Yes, obviously the interaction of trawling with the seabed does modify and disturb the habitat. One of the methods in which we try to mitigate that interaction is by ensuring that the gear that is towed is as light as possible so that it really doesn't penetrate deep into the seabed. So the points of contact are as few as possible and if possible, include things like rollers with rubber so that that interaction is minimised as much as possible. Belinda Smith: The seabed is a good carbon store and that carbon accumulates as dead animals and plants and their waste sink to the bottom of the ocean. But when trawlers come through, they disturb that carbon and it can be released into the atmosphere. So how much carbon does get released? Denham Parker: That's a very complex and difficult question to answer. The reason it's so complex is because it really lies at an intersect between understanding the carbon cycle, understanding the seabed, biota and understanding fishery science. There have been attempts to answer it. However, those attempts and the assumptions that they made in their model in terms of trying to quantify the carbon that is released as a result of trawling have been questioned. Like I said, not an easy thing to do. With Belinda Smith: this potential for carbon release as well as habitat destruction, how much of Australia's oceans are bottom trawled? Denham Parker: Australia has done a lot of work in mapping the seabeds and understanding where sensitive habitats lie and understanding where the trawl footprint lies relative to that. You'll be surprised to know that in recent years, the trawl footprint is only about 1.1% of Australia's economic exclusive zone. Belinda Smith: The economic exclusive zone being the area of ocean around 370 kilometres from the coastline where Australia has exclusive rights to do activities like bottom trawling. So how does that 1.1% compare to other regions? Denham Parker: There was a global research paper written that looked into a similar sort of trawl footprints across 24 regions in the world. What that found was that the average trawl footprint within an EZ is about 14% and on the higher sides of it in areas like the Mediterranean and the Adriatic Sea, it exceeded 50%. Belinda Smith: Really? Oh my gosh. Yeah, right. That's huge. Denham Parker: So in that sense, Australia is doing really well in that it is probably one of the world leaders in understanding spatial management and understanding where your sensitive habitats lie through mapping and where your trawling footprint is and ensuring that those two don't overlap. I think another important statistic is that 54.8% of Australia's EZ is actually protected from trawling. Belinda Smith: After an area has been trawled, how long does it take to recover? Denham Parker: That's an interesting question and that largely depends on the ecosystem that was there prior. Belinda Smith: So for say a seagrass meadow versus a coral reef, would one bounce back faster than the other? Denham Parker: Yeah, again, one would bounce back faster than the other, but it's not as simple. It also depends on the environment health outside of simply just the impact of trawling. A lot of those sort of questions can only be answered with experimental design where you really would have a trawled area that otherwise or later becomes a marine protected area and you would be able to monitor the bounce back then. Belinda Smith: Considering that bottom trawling is needed to meet our appetite for seafood, is there a way of doing it sustainably and how can we consumers know? Denham Parker: Yes, there is a way of bottom trawling sustainably and in fact there are a number of bottom trawl fisheries that are considered to be sustainable at this point. So globally I think there's approximately 70 bottom trawl fisheries that are certified by the Marine Stewardship Council, the MSC certification. Belinda Smith: The MSC is an independent body that checks if a fishery is operating sustainably, both in terms of the species they're fishing and their impact on their ecosystems. Denham Parker: As a consumer, if you're looking to make informed choices in terms of sustainability for your seafood that puts on your plate, look for the MSC green tick label on products. In terms of Australia, I think there's approximately 25 MSC certified fisheries, of that around eight are bottom trawl fisheries. Belinda Smith: Right, okay. It seems like a fairly low proportion of the total number of trawl fisheries out there. How do you get more people to think sustainably? Denham Parker: I suppose how you can force fisheries to become more sustainable is through government interventions, right? So like I said, Australia is really a world leader in terms of fisheries management because there is this interaction between researchers, governments and fishermen themselves. Belinda Smith: Ultimately, making fishing practices as sustainable as possible is a win for both the environment and the people fishing, a point also made in the Attenborough documentary. The fishermen are Denham Parker: not against sustainability. In fact, they're absolutely for sustainability. They realise that their investment is in the ocean and it's best that they conserve their investment as much as possible. We test a lot of mitigation devices with industry, so they take them out themselves and test them and collect data for us and we bring that back and see which are efficient and which are not. It's really that interaction that really helps us understand each fishery as an individual and how we need to or what we need to do to improve that fishery sustainability. Belinda Smith: That was Denham Parker, a marine ecologist at the CSIRO. Thanks for listening to Lab Notes on ABC Radio National, where every week we dissect the science behind new discoveries and current events. I'm Belinda Smith. This episode was produced on the lands of the Wurundjeri and Menang Noongar people. Fiona Pepper's the producer and it was mixed by Tim James. We'll catch you next week. You've been listening to an ABC podcast.
Sydney Morning Herald
13-06-2025
- Sydney Morning Herald
The simple fixes that have saved the lives of sea lions and turtles
A perpendicular metal bar at the opening of a rock lobster trap is a matter of life and death for baby sea lions. 'It shows how you can do simple things to work with the environment and fish sustainably,' says Fedele Camarda, a fourth-generation rock lobster fisher from Fremantle in Western Australia. 'The problem was that, in areas where there was a sea lion population, the pups would go in for the bait and they'd get trapped. They wouldn't be able to get back out and, obviously, there'd be mortality associated.' This did not happen with adult sea lions because they could not fit inside the lobster pot. The metal bar was a simple fix to prevent the pups from getting in as well. Camarda's family business is part of the Western Rock Lobster Fishery, the first in the world to be certified as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council, or MSC, back in 2000. The fishery has also shifted from traditional woven pots to traps with larger gaps at the bottom so fish and undersize lobsters will fall out, and uses weighted ropes to attach the pots to floats to ensure there is no excess rope floating on the surface that could entangle a passing whale. The government and industry also reduced the lobster catch from a historical take of about 11,000 tonnes a year to a quota of 6000 tonnes, which Camarda says is working because it takes much less time to reach it, indicating a bounceback of stocks. Industrial fishing around the world is having a serious impact on the ocean's biodiversity, from depleting stocks of the target wild fish species to dangerous levels of bycatch of non-target species. David Attenborough's Ocean documentary has raised the profile of the destructive bottom-trawling techniques, while Greenpeace has been campaigning against longlining on the high seas over concerns about bycatch. Yet, just as there are some forms of aquaculture that are more sustainable than others, not all wild fisheries are equally managed. Loading Australia has 30 fisheries that are MSC-certified to externally validate they are run sustainably – though the MSC scheme has its critics. A major tuna fishery has now joined MSC ranks, in a stunning turnaround for a fish species that had been severely depleted from overfishing. The Southern Bluefin Tuna Fishery in Port Lincoln, South Australia, had both its purse seine and longline fisheries certified earlier this month. Purse seine fishing uses a large vertical net, or seine, to surround and trap schools of fish in open water, with the bottom of the net pulling closed like a purse. Longlining means having a line kilometres long, with thousands of hooks. Greenpeace has argued this is an indiscriminate fishing method, pointing to data about the high bycatch of blue sharks particularly in an area around Lord Howe Rise in the south-west of the Pacific Ocean that it wants to see protected. However, Daniel Casement, chief executive of the Australian Southern Bluefin Tuna Industry Association, says it is easy to avoid bycatch when fishing for tuna because the species is a schooling fish. The purse seine method is very selective because it never hits the ocean floor, Casement says, and the fish are kept alive and towed into Port Lincoln for 'ranching'. The tuna are then raised in large cages with other tuna and fed sardines, the same as they would eat in the wild. Casement says that with both purse seine and longlining, the fishers only deploy where the tuna is already schooling. The main conservation question with bluefin tuna has been the vulnerability of the species itself as opposed to bycatch. Southern bluefin tuna were listed as 'threatened' under Australian law in 2010 but delisted in 2024. Globally, the International Union for Conservation of Nature lists southern bluefin tuna, which is also found in the waters south of Africa and South America, as 'endangered', while Pacific bluefin tuna is 'near threatened' and Atlantic bluefin tuna moved from 'endangered' to 'least concern' in 2021. Casement says the delisting in Australia and the recent certification reflect the fact that Australia and other members of the international Commission for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna had used science to understand fish stocks and had made difficult decisions. Both government and industry are represented in the commission. 'When they were previously determined as overfished, using that science and strong management decisions, [the commission] reduced the quotas, reduced the amount they could catch and drove a strong stock-recovery strategy,' Casement says. 'Obviously, business was impacted significantly, but the longer-term benefit is what they were focused on.' The Northern Prawn Fishery, which extends along 6000 kilometres of coastline from Cape York in Queensland to Cape Londonderry in Western Australia, is one of Australia's largest. In 2012, it became the first tropical prawn fishery in the world to be certified by the MSC. Northern Prawn Industry Association chief executive Annie Jarrett says the fishery has been leading on environmental sustainability since the 1990s. It developed the world's first bycatch action plan in 1999, followed by the introduction of turtle exclusion devices, which give turtles an escape hatch from prawning nets, in the year 2000. 'We managed to reduce our turtle catch by approximately 99 per cent, and the capture of rays and sharks by up to 36 per cent,' Jarrett says. From 2015 to 2018, the fishery focused on reducing the bycatch of small fish and achieved a 43 per cent reduction, Jarrett says. In the past two years, the fishery has worked with the CSIRO to reduce interactions with endangered, threatened and protected species, particularly sawfish, a type of large ray. WWF and consumer goods giant Unilever co-founded the MSC in 1996, though the MSC is now independent. The certification body has sometimes copped criticism from within the environmental movement. Kate Noble, senior manager of oceans policy at WWF Australia, said the charity had publicly called for MSC reforms and expressed disappointment with the lack of progress over the past two decades. In 2021, WWF-Australia objected to the MSC certification of the orange roughy fishery in eastern Tasmania and joined the Australian Marine Conservation Society to file an objection, based on the conservation status of the long-lived species and its slow recovery from historic overfishing. 'However, given the lack of credible alternatives, the MSC standard does provide a useful and recognised global benchmark,' Noble says. 'It is as an important step towards sustainability – not an end point.' Matt Watson, senior fisheries program manager for the Asia Pacific at MSC, says the program is reviewed every five years to stay abreast of scientific developments. He says the perspectives of environmental groups are important but need to be balanced. 'We've got to make sure our program remains accessible, that the scientific bar remains credible, but we also need to make sure that we're not creating a standard which is exclusive to only 1 or 2 per cent of the world's catch,' Watson says. 'If you're a longliner, the independent auditors will look for issues around bycatch and endangered species interaction. If you're a trawler, there's a bit more focus on habitat interactions. The intent there is to incentivise change, regardless of fishing practices … and they have to show us the science and their data sets.' The 30 MSC-certified fisheries account for 38 per cent of the Australian wild catch, Watson says. There are some large fisheries outside the program, such as the South Australian sardine fishery, which voluntarily left the MSC program, but there is also a long tail of small fisheries that cannot afford certification. Loading Professor Gretta Pecl, a marine ecologist at the University of Tasmania and a member of the Biodiversity Council, says seafood is an important food source and Australian fisheries are among the world's best in terms of management and sustainability. 'Seafood, if it's harvested sustainably, can actually be part of the climate solution because the protein from seafood uses a lot less carbon in terms of the production [than other protein sources],' Pecl says. '[Seafood] can be part of our broader climate and biodiversity solution.'
