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“My wife told me to sell the boats,” says Brad Pettinger, a longtime trawl fisherman in the Pacific Northwest. “But I said, honey, who’s gonna buy them? At that time we just didn’t have anything.”

The “anything” was fish to catch. Fifteen years ago, America’s vast $50 million Pacific groundfish fishery, which stretches some 1,200 miles from Southern California to the Canadian border, collapsed.

Several critical species — from the spiky, orange canary rockfish to the large lingcod — had dropped to below one-quarter of their natural, un-fished levels. Sharp restrictions were brought in, and the fishery was officially declared an economic disaster. Many fishermen found themselves stranded and facing bankruptcy. “It was a perfect example of too many trawlers chasing too few fish,” says Pettinger, who is now director of the Oregon Trawl Commission. “It was a dark time.”

It’s a situation that has been repeated around the world, as overfishing, habitat destruction and climate change cause fish to disappear from the oceans at alarming rates. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 90 percent of fish stocks are being exploited at or beyond their maximum sustainable levels.

Overfishing is often seen as a classic case of what economists call the “tragedy of the commons.” Clearly, fishing communities have a collective interest in making sure marine life sticks around; but it’s in each boat’s individual interests to grab as much as possible, as soon as possible. Once a fishery has broken down, fixing it is fraught with difficulties.



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Hostility and distrust among the fishing industry, environmentalists and regulators means progress is often glacial. Rules to limit how much is caught can be hard to implement and often backfire — for example, when quotas force fishermen to discard thousands of tons of perfectly edible fish.

Yet since the turn of the 21st century, something remarkable has happened in United States waters. After decades of shrinking fish populations, some trends have begun to shift.

The number of overfished stocks in federally managed fisheries has dropped by two-thirds, from 92 in 2000, to 29 in 2015. Meanwhile, the tally of federally managed fish populations that have been rebuilt went from zero to 39.

What brought this change? According to Jane Lubchenco, the former head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (N.O.A.A.), the first piece of the puzzle was a new law “with teeth and timetables.”

“We’d had legislation with good language about ending overfishing for decades,” she says. But fears about the economic impact of greater restrictions on fishing kept the legislation ineffective. So the problem kept getting worse.

An amendment in 2007 to the 30-year-old Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act marked a big departure from this. It mandated that by 2011 every federally managed fishery had to have a scientifically determined, legally enforced annual catch limit, and a management plan for how it would stick to it.

It was the culmination of years of work by dozens of groups inside and out of government. But according to Margaret Spring, who worked for Senator Daniel K. Inouye, a Democrat from Hawaii, at the time and is now chief conservation officer at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, an essential ingredient for success was strong bipartisan support and relationships — particularly with the bill’s sponsor, Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska.

“I didn’t work for Senator Stevens — I’m a Democrat, right?” says Spring. “But I was practically staffing him; I was writing the bill.”

The fact that the new catch limits were determined by science, rather than economics or politics, was a breakthrough, says Spring. “You can’t skip the science. You can’t say ‘I know the science says this, but I’m going to allow a higher catch because it’s convenient or I need it for my community.’”

However, good catch limits are only the start. The real challenge is for managers to devise a plan that allows them to stick to these limits, without sinking the fishing industry.

Traditional techniques often fall short on this front. Cutting the length of the fishing season, for example, can encourage boats to enter into a frantic race to catch as much as they can before the fishery is shut down. This can lead to missed targets and, ultimately, even shorter seasons for an industry already on its knees. In the Alaskan halibut fishery in the early 1990s, the fishing season was reduced to a few perilous and chaotic 24-hour “derby style” openings.

One tool designed to fix this lose-lose situation is known as a “catch share.” Under this system each boat is given a long-term share (say, 5 percent) of the total annual quota, to give the fleet a strong vested interest in rebuilding fish stocks. As Lubchenco explains: “If you have 5 percent of the pie, you’d like to see the pie grow.”

Several fisheries, including the Pacific groundfish fleet, adopted catch share programs (also called Individual Fishing Quotas) as part of their plan to meet the new catch limits. The total number of federal fisheries using catch shares rose from five in 2000 to 16 in 2015.

Giving fishermen a business incentive to fish sustainably can “unleash their creative capacity” to help solve the problem, says Shems Jud, Pacific regional director of oceans at the Environmental Defense Fund.

On the West Coast, members of the groundfish trawler fleet have worked with universities, nongovernmental organizations and net makers to design and adopt more targeted trawl nets, volunteered to create protected “no take” zones, warn one another if an overfished species appears in a new area, and have independent observers monitoring their catch on every trip.

The fleet has also become a valuable source of ecological knowledge, as part of an unusual collaboration between environmental groups and the trawling industry, which aims to improve vulnerable habitat protection while reopening some less-sensitive areas to fishing.

“Once we established trust, fishermen would bring decades of information to our meetings,” says Jud. “Some of them would even bring their old plotter charts with handwritten notations. What we could glean from that material was a much finer scale assessment of where the sensitive coral, sponge and rocky reef habitats really were, compared with just using the N.O.A.A. essential fish habitat database.” The project has resulted in a 155-page proposal to the fishery’s managers, which the authors hope will be a boon for both the beleaguered marine environment and the struggling fishing industry.

Unintended “bycatch’” in the West Coast groundfish fishery has gone from around 20 percent to under 5 percent under the new management system, and in 2014 the Marine Stewardship Council certified the fishery as sustainable and well-managed, noting that it was the most diverse and complex fishery it had ever assessed. A consumer website and app, Seafood Watch, has also upgraded 21 West Coast groundfish species in its sustainability rankings. “We’ve shown we can be responsible stewards,” says Pettinger.

Catch shares have also brought business benefits, by making fishers individually accountable for their annual catches, giving them the flexibility to trade their allowances, and allowing them to plan better. “No longer do we have to throw something over because we caught a little too much, only to try to catch it again next week,” says Paul Kujala, a fisherman. He adds, however, that catch restrictions and high costs mean that much of the fleet has yet to see real increases in income.

Related More From Fixes Read previous contributions to this series.

On a national level, research suggests that catch shares lead to overall improvements in economic efficiency, increase revenue and reduce waste, and lead to more stable – although not larger – fish populations and catches. A study published last month argues that modified versions of the tactics used successfully in the United States could help a majority of the world’s fisheries recover in the next 10 years.

Catch shares are not always the right solution, however, and they remain very controversial in some quarters. For example, the system can lead to consolidation, with bigger, more efficient boats buying up smaller boats’ shares – an outcome that can devastate small fishing towns.

Christopher Costello, a resource economist from the University of California, Santa Barbara, argues that many pitfalls can be avoided through good design. “Consolidation isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but if that’s something you want to avoid you can put in a cap,” he says. For example, in the Alaskan halibut fishery catch share, nobody can own more than 1.5 percent of the total quota. Quotas can also be allocated to community trusts and co-ops to protect small-scale fishers.

But what happens if, despite everything, the fish just don’t come back? This is the situation facing those trying to manage New England’s iconic Atlantic cod population, which has hit a 40-year low despite scientifically set catch limits and a catch share program. It’s one of the 29 federally managed fish stocks that have so far failed to bounce back. A major reason in this case is climate change –- specifically, rapid and extraordinary warming in the Gulf of Maine that is interfering with cod spawning and survival. As the oceans warm, good fishery management and conservation are likely to become more challenging — and more important.

Back on the West Coast, fishers and nongovernmental organizations are still working together on bringing the fish — and the industry that relies on them — back to health. Representatives from both groups would now like to see some outdated regulation scrapped, and are exploring the possibility of replacing human observers with electronic monitoring, which is less expensive.

“Fishermen are very good at looking at the problem and fixing it if they have the tools in the toolbox to do it,” says Pettinger. “We have the potential to land 40 million pounds of rockfish next year. That’s something that hasn’t happened in 20 years. It shows great promise.”

Sylvia Rowley is a freelance British journalist and filmmaker. She covers environmental solutions for Al Jazeera’s program “earthrise.”