569Coasts and Estuaries. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-814003-1.00032-0Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Coastal Fisheries: The Past, Present, and Possible FuturesMaria-Lourdes D. Palomares, Daniel PaulyInstitute for the Oceans and Fisheries, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

1 INTRODUCTION

Fisheries contribute greatly to the food and livelihoods of people throughout the world. Coastal fisheries contribute much, if not most, of global catches, but quantitative estimates of the extent of their contribution relative, for example, to high seas fisheries, or to inland fisheries depend on how coastal fisheries are defined. In the absence of a consensus definition of “coastal” by an authoritative international agency, we will be using here the definition initially proposed by Chuenpagdee et al. (2006) for the area accessible to small-scale fisheries, that is, the areas at most 50 km from inhabited coastlines or down to a depth of up to 200 m, whichever comes first. This definition describes the “inshore fishing area” (IFA; about 3% of the ocean surface), to which all the catches of small scale, that is, artisanal, subsistence, and recreational fisheries are assumed to have been taken (Pauly and Zeller, 2016a, b, Zeller et al., 2016). Note that this definition excludes the coastlines of uninhabited regions (e.g., much of the Arctic; Zeller et al., 2011) or islands (e.g., Kerguelen), the latter frequently having industrial fisheries fishing around them, but not “coastal” fisheries (see, e.g., Palomares and Pauly, 2011).

In addition to small-scale fisheries, large-scale industrial fisheries also frequently operate within the IFA of various countries, especially in the tropics, for reasons to be described below. In fact, this is the major cause of the frequent con-flicts between industrial fisheries and small-scale, notably, artisanal fisheries. Also, because the key features of industrial and artisanal fisheries, and the relationships between them strongly varies between different parts of the world, notably, as a function of their ecology, economics, and governance, we have grouped the world’s maritime countries into nine aggre-gates, here called “socio-ecological areas” (SEAs; Fig. 1).

This chapter reviews the major features of coastal fisheries and their catches since 1950, the first year that an-nual global fisheries statistics were published by the newly created Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

Important here is that the catch data we present and use for inferring ecosystem state (see Section 6) and the effects of global warming (see Section 7), are “reconstructed,” that is, the FAO catch data submitted by its member countries were complemented with the catches that typically are omitted in official statistics (most artisanal catches, virtually all subsis-tence catches, all catches by fleets operating illegally, and all discarded fish). Adding estimates of these neglected catches added about 50% to the global marine catch (Pauly and Zeller, 2016a, b), most of it to coastal fisheries.

Note also that the reconstructed catches are assigned to ½° latitude/longitude cells (Palomares et al., 2016; Lam et al., 2016) of which there are about 180,000 in the world oceans, and of which about 20,000 are coastal (i.e., also cover some land area). The time series of catches in coastal areas presented here are assembled by pooling the catches in coastal and adjacent spatial cells for the different seas defined in Fig. 1, such as to meet the definition of IFAs. The inference of fishing down and global warming effects is based on the trophic levels and to the preferred temperatures, respectively, of the taxa whose catches are distributed among spatial cells (see www.seaaroundus.org for details).

2 COASTAL FISHERIES AS A KEY COMPONENT OF GLOBAL FISHERIES

Fig. 2 presents time series of global reconstructed marine catches for the period from 1950 to 2014. Fig. 2A distinguishes between the catch of coastal fisheries as defined above (i.e., with the IFAs of all maritime countries and their territories),

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the catches of industrial fisheries in the offshore (non-IFA) parts of countries’ 200 mile exclusive economic zones (EEZs), and high sea (non-EEZ) catches. Fig. 2B separates the coastal catches into industrial, artisanal, subsistence, and recreational fisheries, with the industrial catch separated into landings and discards (small-scale fisheries have negligible discards).

FIG. 1 The nine socio-ecological areas (SEAs) used here to differentiate between the coastal fisheries of different parts of the world. The numbers refer to the mean annual coastal and total catch in each SEA in 2000–14.

FIG. 2 Catches from 1950 to 2014 of (A) the world’s marine fisheries and (B) coastal fisheries as defined here (see text).

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As shown in Fig. 2A, coastal fisheries as defined here, made up an average of 55% of global marine fisheries in the 5-year period from 2010 to 2014, while Fig. 2B shows that small-scale fisheries (i.e., artisanal, subsistence, and recre-ational) in the same period, contributed 36% of the marine catches consumed directly by people, that is, excluding fish reduced to fish meal or discarded.

3 REGIONAL AND TEMPORAL DIFFERENCE IN COASTAL FISHERIES

The nine panels in Fig. 3 document the different components of different SEAs of the world in terms of the catches. Fig. 3 demonstrates that small-scale fisheries generate, in all SEAs, a substantial part of the catches, even exceeding industrial catches in the Arctic and Indian Oceans.

An important feature of small-scale fisheries is that they do not fluctuate as strongly as industrial fisheries, for two basic reasons: (1) the fishing power of artisanal fisheries is rarely sufficient to annihilate marine fish stocks, something which industrial fisheries are not only capable of, but also frequently do and (2) when a species targeted by a small-scale fishery declines, other species are exploited, so that overall catches are maintained.

However, another important reason for the relative stability of small-scale fisheries in Fig. 3 is that their catches were often estimated indirectly, from the demography of fisher communities and slowly changing individual catch rates, or from fish consumption data in places where industrially caught fish was not available. Still, we believe that the relatively stable or slowly increasing artisanal catches in Fig. 3 are realistic. Moreover, they would be higher if it were not for competition from industrial fishing, our next topic.

FIG. 3 Catches of industrial, artisanal, subsistence, and recreational fisheries by SEAs, 1950–2014.

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4 LARGE-SCALE INDUSTRIAL VERSUS SMALL-SCALE ARTISANAL AND RECREATIONAL FISHERIES

The co-occurrence in the IFA of industrial and small-scale, particularly artisanal fishing, is bound to generate conflicts between these two sectors. This is particularly true in the tropics, where marine primary and secondary production occur closer inshore than that in higher-latitude areas. The reason for this is that in the tropics, the phytoplankton production is almost entirely consumed in the surface waters, with very little marine snow (dead phytoplankton debris, mostly from the fecal pellets of herbivorous zooplankton) reaching deeper waters, due to the high temperatures accelerating microbial deg-radation in the water column (Longhurst and Pauly, 1987).

Conversely, in high latitudes, the marine snow resulting from autumnal phytoplankton blooms tends to be accumulated on the sea floor of shelf and slope areas, where it then sustains deep benthic communities through the winter (Ursin, 1984). These benthic communities, in turn sustain benthic fish populations, which themselves sustain trawl fisheries which may be operating far from coastlines. In the tropics, in contrast, the coupling of pelagic with benthic food webs occurs only inshore, mostly in shallow waters, down to a depth of about 50 m. Hence, trawlers must operate close inshore to maintain reasonable catches, especially given that they target exportable penaeid shrimps. This targeting, incidentally, is the reason why coastal industrial fisheries generate so much as discards of edible fish (Zeller et al., 2017). Artisanal fisheries, on the other hand, target mainly fish for local consumption, in many cases the very fish that shrimp trawlers tend to discard as unwanted bycatch. This is, at its most simple, at the heart of the perennial conflict between artisanal and industrial fishers, especially along tropical coastlines (Pauly, 2006).

The response of governments the world over has been attempts to separate the protagonists, and thus many countries re-strict industrial fishing, especially trawling in coastal areas. These restrictions are often not respected, however, which then leads to questions about the seriousness of various governments in protecting small-scale fisheries, and the livelihood they provide. This also leads to questions about equity, as the industrial vessels frequently operate (legally or not) in the coastal areas of developing countries (Belhabib et al., 2015). There, they compete with artisanal fishers for fish and invertebrate resources, which then either ends by supplying local markets or the markets of European countries, the United States, and other advanced economies (Swartz et al., 2010; Pauly et al., 2014).

In many, predominantly higher latitude countries, the conflicts alluded to above often take the form of a competition between “commercial” fisheries (an ambiguous term, covering both industrial and artisanal fisheries) and recreational fisheries. Here, however, the issue is not one of mitigating conflicts, but one of making the best of fish resources. Thus, a fish caught in West Africa by a recreational fisher (yes, there are recreational fisheries along the coast of West Africa) will generate seven times as much revenue to the country where it is caught than the same fish caught commercially (Belhabib et al., 2016); similar ratios have been documented from other parts of the world.

5 A NEGLECTED SECTOR: SUBSISTENCE FISHERIES

Subsistence fisheries exist throughout the world and essentially consist of coastal people catching fish or gathering inver-tebrates in shallow waters or intertidal areas for their own and their family’s consumption, or for bartering against other goods. Only a few countries or territories monitor and report on their subsistence fisheries, Alaska being one of the positive exceptions.1 However, despite near universal official neglect, subsistence fisheries are extremely important to the food se-curity of numerous countries, particularly small island developing states (SIDS) in the Pacific and Indian Ocean (Chapman, 1987; Hauzer et al., 2013).

The Sea Around Us catch reconstructions (Pauly and Zeller, 2016a, b) involved quantifying the subsistence catch of all maritime countries and their aggregate catch; in the period 2010–14, this was 3.6 million tons per year. As such, it represents about 3% of the world’s marine fisheries catch, but at the same time it represents almost 5% of that part of the marine catch that is used for human consumption. Also, because much of the subsistence catch in SIDS is caught by women (Chapman, 1987; Harper et al., 2013), it contributes directly to the well-being of coastal families, which is not necessarily the case for the catches made by men, whose income is often diverted away from their families. Finally, we note that the global recre-ational catch, which is also taken overwhelmingly in the IFA as defined here, is approximately 1 million tons per year, and that some of this may also be considered subsistence catches.

1 www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?ADFG=fishingSubsistence.main.

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6 “FISHING DOWN” AND OTHER ECOSYSTEM IMPACTS OF COASTAL FISHERIES

Pauly et al. (1998) demonstrated the occurrence in many exploited aquatic ecosystems of a process now widely known as “fishing down marine food webs” (FD). The process, due to the greater decline under exploitation of larger high trophic level fish in ecosystems relative to the smaller, low trophic level fish and invertebrates, can be demonstrated using time series on the mean trophic level (mTL) of fisheries catches which tend to decline overtime. This assumes that the different fisheries jointly exploiting an ecosystem can access all of its fishable species, which generally occurs once that ecosystem is exploited industrially.

In the two decades since it was first described, the ubiquity of FD has been widely confirmed, for example, by Bhathal and Pauly (2008) for India, Gascuel et al. (2016) for Northwestern Europe, Pauly et al. (2001) for Canadian waters, and Liang and Pauly (2017) for Chinese waters (see also www.fishingdown.org). However, FD can easily be masked by fishing opera-tions moving gradually offshore when their catches and the mTL of their catch decline (Bhathal and Pauly, 2008; Liang and Pauly, 2017), and thus again catch large, high mTL fish (Fig. 4). Thus, Kleisner et al. (2014), based on the logic of Fig. 4, and with considerations in Bhathal and Pauly (2008), devised an approach and software to reexpress a single aggregate series of mTL data into distinct time series of mTL pertaining to what can be conceived as a strip more or less parallel to a coastline.

Fig. 5 shows the result of an application of this approach to the global catch of marine fisheries. Therein, the longest time series of mTL, which largely represents coastal fisheries, declined from 3.56 in the early 1950s to 3.06 in the early 2010s, that is, by 0.5 TL in 65 years, or 0.077 TL per decade. In the late 1950s, however, industrial fishing moved further offshore, and started to catch fish with an mTL of about 4.0, which declined to about 3.6 in the late 2010s, that is, 0.067 per

FIG. 4 Schematic representation of the offshore expansion of fisheries, which, following the initial addition of an industrial component to regions 1–2 will then expand to region 3, when costal stocks are depleted and the mTL of the catch has declined, etc. The catch in newly accessed regions will have a higher trophic level. (Modified from Kleisner, K., H. Mansour and D. Pauly. 2014. Region-based MTI: resolving geographic expansion in the marine trophic index. Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser., 512: 185–199; see text.)

FIG. 5 Decline of the mean trophic level of fisheries catches in the world’s inshore fishing areas (see text), demonstrating a “fishing down” effect. The dotted lines represent the marine trophic index (MTI) trends calculated directly from the taxa caught and their trophic levels, while the solid line is the output of the regional marine trophic index (RMTI) method of Kleisner et al. (2014).

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decade. Finally, the increase of catches in the mid-1980s was based on catches further offshore, starting with an mTL above 4.1 and declining very slowly that is, remaining at TLs typical of the various species of tuna (see www.fishbase.org, from which most of the TL values used for this analysis originate).

Note that these mTL declines have occurred, since 1996, in conjunction with declining catches. Thus, the mTL declines are not due to new species of low-TL trophic levels being caught, while the high-TL species maintain their catch. Hence, we do not have here a case of fishing “through” the food web, which would imply increasing catches (Essington et al., 2006). Rather, Fig. 5 demonstrates that the world marine fisheries, and particularly coastal fisheries, suffer from fishing down.

7 COASTAL FISHERIES AND CLIMATE CHANGE

Coastal fisheries are beginning to be affected by climate change (Fig. 6) and this impact is only going to increase. Along subtropical and temperate coastlines, climate change will induce a change in the fish communities available for exploita-tion, as already noticeable in many countries. This is due to the poleward shift of fish and marine invertebrates attempt-ing to maintain themselves in waters with suitable temperatures (Cheung et al., 2009, 2010). In the tropics, however, no warmer-adapted species will replace the fish and invertebrate species that are displaced by the high temperature, and hence there can only be a net loss as species relocate (Cheung et al., 2013). Thus, it is in the tropics that coastal fisheries will be affected most by global warming, that is, the regions that have least contributed to the greenhouse gas emissions that are the cause of the warming.

FIG. 6 Increase in the mean temperature of the catch from inshore areas (as defined in Cheung et al., 2013), as expected given global warming. North America and Greenland are an exception that still requires an explanation.

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8 THE GOVERNANCE OF COASTAL FISHERIES

Jentoft and Chuenpagdee (2009)) suggested that the governance of coastal fisheries was a “wicked” problem, that is, ex-tremely difficult to solve, and even to define. Yet, some of their issues are easily resolvable, once the major features are understood (Fig. 7). Thus, it is obvious that industrial fisheries, given their enormous catching capacity and their propensity for using habitat-destroying gear, cannot coexist with artisanal fisheries (Pauly, 2017). Thus, if a government has as an explicit policy (as many do) to encourage artisanal fisheries, it must also ensure industrial vessels do not operate inshore, both legally and in practice. At the same time—and this contributes to the “wickedness” alluded to above—uncontrolled small-scale fisheries can also deplete coastal stocks (Lam and Pauly, 2010), as demonstrated at numerous locations, for example, the Philippines. Thus, their development, and especially the increase of artisanal fishers’ populations will have to be countered (Pauly, 2006). This is probably where the greatest challenges lie.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTSThis is a contribution of the Sea Around Us, a research initiative at the UBC’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries funded by various philan-thropic foundations, notably the Oak, Marisla, Paul M. Angell, and MAVA Foundations.

FIG. 7 Schematic illustration of the difference between (coastal) small-scale fisheries and industrial fisheries, that is, coastal and offshore. (Updated from Thompson, D., 1988. The world's two marine fishing industries – how they compare. Naga, ICLARM Q. 11 (3), 17 and Pauly, D. 2006. Major trends in small-scale marine fisheries, with emphasis on developing countries, and some implications for the social sciences. Maritime Stud. (MAST) 4(2), 7–22).

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