The subsidies data (shown on the bar charts for each country) is broken down into the three categories of subsidies outlined by the University of British Columbia; beneficial subsidies (shown in green), harmful subsidies (shown in red) and ‘ambiguous’ subsidies (shown in yellow). Explanations of these categories can be found on this page on UBC’s Sea Around Us project website and by clicking the headers for each category.

This organization, along with Fishchoice, were discovered through a great post about fisheries systems on John Thackara’s Doors of Perception website. This post shows these organizations as examples of how to “unlock an intractable problem: how to reconfigure food systems that lock their participants into ecocidal behaviour.”

The End of the Line, an important new documentary about overfishing, will screen in cinemas across the UK on June 8th . Watch a preview and get more details at The End of the Line website.

The equipment used by the fishing industry to catch fish helps to damage ocean ecosystems – and fixing this is a design problem.

The most commonly used types of fishing gear are crude, blunt instruments that are not designed to be selective about what they catch. In the introduction to his book The End of the Line, Charles Clover invites us to imagine what trawling would be like if it happened on land: two vehicles pull a mile of weighted net between them across the landscape, ripping down trees and plants, consuming animals of all types regardless of whether they were targeted or not, and leaving behind a swath of rubble and torn up earth.

Longlines, miles of fishing line set undersea with hooks attached at regular intervals, are less damaging than trawls as they don’t damage the seabed so essential to life in ocean ecosystems. But seabirds are caught within the longlines as they are set, and creatures such as dolphins and sea turtles are either hooked or entangled in the lines.

Shrimp fisheries have a notoriously high bycatch rate, an estimated 85% of whatever life is pulled up from the sea is thrown back, dead or dying, because it is considered unusable or not sellable1.

But it is possible to design new types of gear that are selective in what they catch. Turtle Excluder Devices use flaps in nets that sea turtles can escape from, sound emitters attached to gear scare off marine mammals such as dolphins and streamers on longlines deter seabirds from being entangled. These types of selective gear often rely on the behavior of different sea creatures to help filter what fishers are targeting from what they aren’t.

These methods have met with some success, but can industrial designers contribute to designing new kinds of selective fishing gear?

WWF is running an ongoing international competition, and offering a $30,000 grand prize, to do just that. The WWF Smartgear competition website showcases some past winners of the competition, which ends this year on June 30.

Reversing the damage to ocean ecosystems will involve efforts to reduce the total amount of fishing that happens globally, it will involve setting aside large areas of the sea where fish populations can replenish and where life on seabeds can grow uninterrupted. But where industrial fishing does occur, it will require fishing gear that does far less harm to ocean ecosystems.

For more information:
See the WWF Smartgear competition page:
http://www.smartgear.org/

For images of the most common types of fishing gear, see this page on the Australian Fisheries Management Authority website:
http://www.afma.gov.au/information/students/methods/default.htm

Reference:
1. Clucas, I., 1997. Discards and bycatch in Shrimp trawl fisheries.
Available at: http://www.fao.org/docrep/w6602e/w6602E09.htm