On the Map

The Hidden Costs of Commercial Fishing: Sustaining Economies and Ecosystems

Image of a trawler boat sailing near Malta. Source: Peter Grima

Geography In The News logoGeography in the News is an educational series offered by the American Association of Geographers for teachers and students in all subjects. We include vocabulary, discussion, and assignment ideas at the end of each article. 

By Adeti Afe

Fishing has been a part of human life for thousands of years, helping to feed societies while maintaining a balance in marine ecosystems. Traditional fishing usually keeps fish populations in check. But now, methods for industrial-level commercial fishing can cause serious harm to marine ecosystems. Scientists warn that some of the world’s most important fishing areas and habitats could be permanently damaged due to issues like overfishing, habitat destruction, and the problems caused by aquaculture.

Image of a static map showing fish habitats off the East and Gulf Coasts, as well as in the Caribbean Sea. Credit: NOAA
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) maintains Fishmapper, an interactive mapping tool for examining important habitats for managed fish populations worldwide. Credit: NOAA

 

Overfishing disrupts the balance of marine life. When certain fish populations decline, predators lose their prey, and smaller fish can overpopulate. This creates even more problems in the ecosystem. Coral reefs, for instance, rely on fish to control the growth of algae. Without enough fish, algae can grow uncontrollably, killing the reef’s ecosystem.

The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that more than one-third of global fisheries are overfished. Over the past 50 years, the number of overfished areas has tripled. A major factor contributing to this is bycatch, which is the unintentional capture of animals like sea turtles, dolphins, and sharks in fishing nets. Millions of animals are killed this way each year, adding to the damage in already struggling ecosystems. Sea turtles are often caught unintentionally by getting tangled in nets and are harmed before they can be freed. Similarly, endangered species such as certain whales and dolphins suffer high mortality rates due to poor fishing practices. Bycatch damages the biodiversity necessary for healthy ecosystems.

Image of a trawler boat sailing near Malta. Source: Peter Grima
A trawler in Malta. Trawlers drag nets through the sea, either above the sea floor or along the sea floor. This method of fishing is indiscriminate and has negative impacts on sea ecologies. It is banned in many areas. Source: Peter Grima

 

The methods used in industrial fishing often cause harm to underwater habitats. Bottom trawling, for example, involves dragging heavy nets along the seafloor. While effective at capturing fish, this practice devastates coral reefs and seagrass beds, which are essential habitats for many marine species.

The Complex World of Fish Farming

To meet the growing global demand for seafood, many businesses have turned to aquaculture, also known as fish farming. On the surface, aquaculture appears to be a solution to overfishing, but it introduces its own set of environmental and ethical concerns. Farmed fish are often raised in overcrowded enclosures, which can lead to water pollution from waste.

Aquaculture relies heavily on fishmeal and fish oil derived from wild-caught fish, which means it continues to put pressure on already overfished stocks. Escaped farmed fish can further disrupt ecosystems by competing with native species for resources or introducing genetic and behavioral differences that harm wild populations.

Finding a Better Way

The negative effects of commercial fishing extend beyond the environment, impacting human communities. Illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing increases the problem. Operating outside the bounds of international and local laws, IUU fishing often targets the waters of vulnerable nations. This practice robs local fishers of their resources and disrupts efforts to maintain sustainable fishing practices.

Several actionable steps can mitigate the damage caused by commercial fishing. Stricter regulations on fish catch limits and the establishment of marine protected areas (MPAs) can help ecosystems recover and maintain biodiversity. MPAs provide safe zones where marine life can thrive without the pressure of fishing.

Technological advancements can also play a role by including selective fishing gear that can reduce bycatch. Consumers can make a difference by choosing sustainably sourced seafood, certified by organizations such as the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC).

Commercial fishing is essential for feeding millions of people around the world, but it comes at a cost. Our oceans, and the communities that depend on them, are under serious pressure from overfishing, habitat destruction, bycatch, and unsustainable fish farming. These practices are pushing marine ecosystems to their breaking point. The good news is that we still have a chance to make a difference. By enforcing smarter regulations, using better technology, and making informed choices as consumers, we can create a fishing industry that works well with the environment. If we act now, we can protect the health of our oceans and ensure they continue to provide for generations to come.

To get a glimpse of fish habitats and fishing areas mapped worldwide, use the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Essential Fish Habitat tool.

And that is Geography in the News, updated January 31, 2024.

Material in this article comes from “Gone Fishing, or, Who Will Catch the Last One?” (1999), an original article for Geography in the News by Neal Lineback, Appalachian State University. 

Sources Consulted for this Article
Vocabulary and Terms
  • Overfishing: Catching fish faster than they can reproduce.
  • Bycatch: Sea creatures caught accidentally in fishing nets.
  • Bottom trawling: A harmful fishing method where nets are dragged along the ocean floor.
  • Aquaculture: Raising fish in farms for food, also known as fish farming.
  • Fishmeal: A food made from ground-up fish, often used to feed farmed fish.
  • IUU fishing: Illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing that breaks fishing laws.
  • Marine protected area (MPA): Parts of the ocean where fishing is restricted or banned to protect ecosystems.
  • Marine Stewardship Council (MSC): An organization that certifies seafood as sustainable.
Questions for Discussion and Further Study
  1. What are some of the main environmental issues caused by commercial fishing, and how do they affect marine life?
  2. The article mentions how overfishing impacts local fishing communities and their ability to make a living. How do you think these communities might respond?
  3. Do you believe fish farming could be a solution to overfishing? Why or why not?
  4. What actions can governments, companies, and individuals take to make commercial fishing more sustainable for future generations?
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Resources

NSF Announces Transdisciplinary Track in HEGS Program

The Human-Environment and Geographical Sciences (HEGS) program at the U.S. National Science Foundation has published a new solicitation (NSF 25-507). Proposals submitted after October 1, 2024 should follow the new solicitation.

HEGS supports basic scientific research about the nature, causes, consequences or evolution of evolution of the spatial dimensions of human behaviors, activities, and dynamics as well as their interactions with environmental and social processes across a range of scales. The new program solicitation welcomes proposals that address these issues with empirically grounded, theoretically engaged, methodologically rigorous, and generalizable research that advances geographical and geospatial sciences.

Competitive HEGS proposals should advance fundamental geographic theory and geospatial methods with rationale to support the falsifiability of hypotheses, clear and rigorous sampling and analytical methodology, establishing validity, and generalizability to broader contexts. Regular HEGS awards range from $100,000 to $500,000, inclusive of indirect costs. Budgets must be commensurate with proposed activities and must directly support the objectives of the research. Budgets above $500,000 may sometimes be possible for proposals that are co-reviewed with other NSF programs. Prospective PIs are encouraged to contact non-HEGS program directors to discuss co-review possibilities and programmatic fit. Budget requests are reviewed carefully at all stages of the evaluation process, and proposals with budgets that are justified and appropriate to the scope of the project are prioritized. Submitters of proposals are encouraged to consult the NSF awards database for perspective on the range of budget requests that characterize the program.

A new track for proposals, Transdisciplinary REsearch in Environmental Social Science (TREES), provides funding to support research that integrates social science and environmental science to advance social sciences in understanding the complex interactions between people and the environment. TREES proposals submitted to HEGS should fuse multi-disciplinary perspectives, theories, and methods to advance the science of socioenvironmental systems and basic human-environmental and geographical sciences.TREES awards are expected to be 3–4 years in the range of $200,000–$250,000 per year.

If PIs are uncertain of the fit of a prospective project for the HEGS program (or other NSF programs), they may send a concept outline of 1 to 2 pages describing 1) the research questions and objectives, 2) theoretical foundations, 3) data collection plans, including sampling considerations, 4) analytical plans, and 5) the anticipated budget request to HEGS Program Directors ([email protected]).

HEGS depends on the willingness of qualified reviewers to provide helpful advice to NSF program directors on the merits of the proposals and constructive comments for PIs to improve their projects. Reviewers also benefit from gaining first-hand knowledge of the peer review process, learning about common problems with proposals, discovering strategies to write strong proposals, and, if serving on a panel, having dynamic and insightful discussions with other reviewers. Anyone interested in reviewing HEGS proposals please email HEGS Program Directors ([email protected]) with a short bio and a CV.

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Robert “Bob” Moline

The daily work rhythms Robert “Bob” Moline observed for nearly 40 years reflected a passion for landscape, weather, culture, and thinking about the human place in the environment. After teaching his 8:00 am meteorology class, Bob took his daily run through the prairie and forested landscapes of the campus arboretum. Then, it was time to print and post the daily upper air and surface weather charts, teach another class or two, followed by late afternoons spent listening to jazz at high volume while organizing his slide carousels for the next day. Bob Moline was a beloved professor and colleague and the guiding force in building both the geography and environmental studies programs at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota. Although he passed away in January 2024, his influence continues to be felt through the thousands of people he inspired to pay careful attention to the skies, to the landscape, and to their place in the region and river basin.

Bob Moline, was born in Gary, Indiana and grew up on the Southside of Chicago where his dad was pastor of Gustavus Adolphus Lutheran Church. Bob graduated from Chicago’s Hirsch High School in 1951 and entered Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, where he majored in science and met his future wife, Janet Reedquist. After college he served in the Air Force from 1955-1959 as an instructor in the weather training program at Chanute Air Base in Illinois and then at Etain, France, where he taught meteorology and held the post of Chief Weather Observer. The experiences in the Air Force prompted Bob to pursue a career in teaching. When he and Janet returned to the United States, he began graduate work in geography at the University of Illinois.

As Bob was finishing his master’s degree in 1961, Gustavus Adolphus College was in the process of establishing a geography program. Bob’s alma mater, Augustana College, had established its geography program in 1949. Like Gustavus, it was affiliated with the Swedish-American Lutheran Church. A telephone call between the deans at Gustavus and Augustana identified Bob as a likely candidate, and an interview at the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago led to a job offer. Soon Bob and Janet Moline were on their way to Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota, where he would spend the next 37 years teaching full-time, raising two children (Jeff Moline and Karen Wallin) and living out the remainder of their lives until Janet died in 1999.   For most of the years since that time Bob remained in St. Peter with his new wife Kay.

Sharing the basement of Old Main and later the Nobel Hall of Science with the lone geologist, Bob Moline set about building the geography department while working on his Ph.D. in geography at the University of Minnesota. Under the supervision of University of California-Berkeley-trained Ward Barrett, Bob completed his dissertation in 1969 on agricultural drainage of wetlands and shallow lakes entitled, “The Modification of the Wet Prairie in Southern Minnesota.”  This work led to two published monographs on public attitudes in water resources management. Bob’s long-term research passion was to update Jan Broek’s classic 1932 study of landscape evolution in California’s Santa Clara Valley to document the transition from prunes and cherries to microprocessors and computer software.

Bob’s teaching portfolio reflected his diverse interests: Meteorology, Water Resources, Cultural Geography, The American West, and a course whose title reflected the questions he cared most about: Environmental Attitudes and Landscape Change. Bob knew well the value of maps and the importance of field experiences. He curated the map collection at Gustavus Adolphus College, one of the largest map libraries in the country at a liberal arts college. Between 1974 and 1998 he led an annual January Term field course titled San Francisco: The City and Its Region. To bring the expansive western landscape into the classroom, Bob shot his photographs in side-by-side mode and equipped his classroom with side-by-side slide projectors operated in tandem. In recognition of his excellence in the classroom, Gustavus awarded Bob with the college’s Distinguished Teacher Award in 1987. In presenting the teaching award, a faculty colleague described Bob as evincing “enthusiasm from the heart, commitment to the land, and deep care for students.”

Bob Moline put his geographic expertise into practice by running a regional rain gauge network with local farmers and serving on the Minnesota state power plant siting committee, the River Bend regional planning organization, the Minnesota Water Resources Board, and the City of St. Peter Planning Commission. In the preamble to the city’s 1995 comprehensive plan Bob managed to quote Lewis Mumford, Michael Sorkin, and James Howard Kunstler.

Bob’s geographical fascination never wavered. He seemed to never not be a practicing geographer. His love of places and his deeply ingrained sense of the world as landscape were constants throughout his life. His family vacations, often road trips to the American West, were geographical field trips. Visitors to his house were met with walls covered in maps, each with beloved stories. Who could have much patience for faculty meetings when, out there, the landscape, even the most mundane, was waiting to be explored? Bob Moline’s legacy of service and endless geographic curiosity lives on through his many former students who have found positions in university geography departments, high school geography classrooms, city planning departments, and water resources agencies across the country. Bob is survived by his brother Norm Moline, professor emeritus of geography at Augustana College (Rock Island, Illinois), his spouse Kay, and children Jeff, Karen, and their families.

This memorial was prepared by former colleagues and family members Mark Bjelland, Robert Douglas, Jeff Moline, Norm Moline, and Anna Versluis.

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Victor Gregor Limon

By Emily Frisan

Education: Master’s in Urban & Regional Planning, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, Bachelor of Science in Geography, University of the Philippines, Diliman

Past Experiences: GIS Analyst, Ecological Determinants Lab at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa; Cartographer, An Atlas of West Maui; Technical Staff, National Anti-Poverty Commission, Republic of the Philippines

Researching Unique Spatialities

Victor Gregor Limon got his start in data analysis, after graduating from his undergraduate degree in the Philippines. Working with the country’s National Anti-Poverty Commission, he helped inform poverty reduction policies, measures, and strategies at the national level. Throughout his master’s program at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, Limon worked in the Ecological Determinants Lab as a GIS Analyst to evaluate the County of Honolulu’s “Housing First” program. His work evaluating data informed the organization to identify opportunities which “allowed homeless individuals to receive housing without requiring them to go through honors, like requirements or processes, and just housing them first because that’s what they need.” Now Limon’s research in the lab encompasses evaluating social and built environments, local policies, and cultural influences on the health and well-being of adolescents and adults.

His experience working with the city and county offered Limon experience in municipal government, which opened up an opportunity for him to join the Office of Climate Change, Sustainability, and Resiliency of the City and County of Honolulu as a data analyst. He now provides support to Honolulu’s energy, adaptation, hazard mitigation, and policy programs, while maintaining its Annual Sustainability Report, greenhouse gas inventory, tree plantings map, and other data resources.

Climate change’s impacts vary by place and neighborhood, says Limon. In Hawaii, especially, there are many microclimates, and spatial variations can be very marked, with wild contrasts: “It’s important to figure out that the climate impacts vary by place and the people who live in those places.”

 

Finding Oneself in Geography

Whether working with climate or health data, Limon’s work acknowledges how “not all places and not all groups of people are the same.” His master’s thesis examined the spatial variation of COVID-19 prevalence and infection rates, focused on the pandemic’s impact on Native Hawaiians and residents of Honolulu. Historical, long-standing inequalities have disrupted the ability to obtain reliable and targeted public health data on Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, but “geography was very useful in figuring out why certain places, certain groups of people are more vulnerable than others. Geography was really the perfect tool to answer that question.”

When considering what else his future could hold, Limon doesn’t know what he would have been if he hadn’t discovered geography. “I would have been a totally different person with totally different skills, and I would have qualified for a totally different job,” he said. “Geography was instrumental in giving me the skills to figure out why there are changes. Why places are different. Why people are different and figuring out what causes those differences.”

Learn more about what a degree in geography can do for you by reading more AAG Career Profiles and discover the resources we offer for your professional development journey.

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