Global marine fisheries are in crisis. The proportion of fisheries that are fully fished, overfished, depleted, or recovering from overfishing increased from just over 60 percent in the mid-1970s to about 75 percent in 2005 and to almost 90 percent in 2013. Biological overfishing has led to economic overfishing which creates economic losses. To quantify the value of this economic loss, in 2009 the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) published a study on the economic performance of global fisheries, The Sunken Billions: The Economic Justification for Fisheries Reform.
The primary objective of this study is to reinforce the messages of the 2009 publication and to catalyse calls for accelerating and scaling up the international effort aimed at addressing the global fisheries crisis. The analysis reveals economic losses of about $83 billion in 2012, compared with the optimal global maximum economic yield equilibrium. this study examines the range of complex issues that surround the reform of global fisheries management, including the financial and social costs of transitioning to a more sustainable resource management path, the considerable governance challenges associated with managing the largely open-access ocean resources, and the complicating factor of climate change. It lays out a comprehensive estimate of what the economic benefits of transitioning to higher value-added and more sustainable fisheries might look like.