About 75% of the world’s industrial fishing vessels are not publicly tracked, with many of them hiding their positions at sea by turning off their automatic identification systems (AIS), The practice, known as “going dark,” mostly is concentrated in East, West, North Africa and South Asia, according to a new report by Nature magazine…
Researchers determined this by using artificial intelligence, collecting AIS data and analyzing 2 million gigabytes of satellite data from the European Space Agency between 2017 and 2021, Global Fishing Watch spearheaded the Nature study, “These previously invisible vessels radically changed our knowledge about the scale, scope and location of fishing activity,” Jennifer Raynor, a study author and a natural resource economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote in The Conversation.
Vessels commonly go dark to cloak crimes, such as entering prohibited areas, conducting illegal transshipments at sea and using explosives to catch huge amounts of fish.
Africa loses an estimated $11.5 billion to illegal fishing annually, by far the most of any region globally, according to the Financial Transparency Coalition (FTC). Illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing decimates fish stocks and threatens the livelihoods of the roughly 5.2 million people who work in the continent’s small-scale fisheries.
The scourge is perpetrated mostly by China’s distant-water fishing (DWF) fleet, the world’s worst IUU fishing violator, China illegally fished in the exclusive economic zones (EEZ) of more than 80 countries with more than 10 million hours of fishing between 2019 to 2021, a new report by Investigative Journalism Reportika (Ij-Reportika) shows.
