The deep sea is the largest habitat on earth. The area over 4 000 m in depth covers 53 percent of the sea's surface, which in turn covers 71 percent of the world's surface! The continental slopes alone occupy 8.8 percent of the world's surface compared to 7.5 percent for the continental shelves and shallow seas.
Major commercial fisheries have developed on the continental slope and deep sea over the last 30 years as inshore fisheries have become fully, or overexploited, and global market demand for fish has continued to strengthen. Deep-sea fishes that have become targets for fisheries have been as varied as orange roughy, oreos, alfonsinos, Patagonian toothfish, pelagic armourhead, redfish, hoki, and macrourids. Many of these species have developed particularly valuable market niches. Other deep-sea species that have been more traditionally fished include sablefish, blue ling, black scabbard fish, Greenland halibut, morids, cusk eels and hakes.
The particular characteristic of the most recent phase of deepwater fisheries development has been the great rate at which these fisheries have developed as advances in technical capacity have overcome the difficulties that, in the past, protected these regions - the last marine frontier - from fisheries exploitation. Even in areas of traditional deep-sea fisheries, heavy, if not unsustainable, fishing mortality and damage to deep-sea habitat have become a threat, if not the reality. This rapid development has, in many instances, overcome the mechanisms for governance and resource management relating to the high seas, mechanisms that in most cases were the legacy of the 1982 agreement of the Law of the Sea, a convention that barely anticipated the challenges that deep-sea fisheries would bring. The rapid development of deepwater fisheries has also sorely challenged the limits of existing knowledge that is needed to manage these resources sustainably, the ability of decision makers to reconcile the constraints of existing information with commercial pressures to develop fisheries, the ability of resource managers to establish rational harvesting strategies and the more-usual-than-not, inability to impose regulatory decisions on vessels operating on the high seas in the absence of necessary national legislation that would enable States to control their own flagged vessels when prosecuting these fisheries. These were among the imperatives that drove the convening of DEEP SEA 2003.
The scientific and management challenges
The sustainable management of deep-sea fisheries poses a number of scientific challenges. It is believed that recruitment of successful year classes of many deep-sea species may be intermittent and the fecundity of such deepwater species is often low and their age at first maturity high. Many deep-sea species may spawn only periodically over the years and grow slowly. The determination of their age remains difficult and for some species age determination remains contentious. Because of these biological characteristics, such species have low productivity and are potentially vulnerable to overexploitation with long stock recovery times when their biomasses are depleted. However, it was also recognized that there is a suite of deepwater species whose productivity is similar to that of many shallow-water species. Here, the scientific issues are more easily addressed and the management challenges reflect most of those that arise in the administration of demersal fisheries found on the continental shelves.
The great depths at which these species live pose additional scientific and technical challenges in estimating abundance compounded by the high levels of temporal and spatial variability exhibited by some species, and the difficulties in knowing important biological parameters (e.g. the backscattering cross section and species composition of fish assessed by acoustic surveys). These scientific and technical difficulties translate directly into management challenges for regulating the development and continuing prosecution of deep-sea fisheries in a sustainable manner.
Because deep-sea species often aggregate at predictable locations and in high densities, they are especially commercially attractive as this enables fishers to attain high, and thus profitable, initial catch rates. As large catches can be taken in a short time, the stocks may be rapidly depleted, often before catch data can be collated and the necessary scientific analyses undertaken to enable effective management actions to be implemented.
The challenges of technology
The advance of deepwater fishing is a story of success in facing the technical challenge of fishing off-shelf resources that inhabit regions of the sea ranging as deep 2 000 m. These technological developments have not been restricted to vessel and gear design. Of equal, if not greater, importance have been developments in underwater acoustic telemetry that has enabled aimed-trawling of fish aggregations, global positioning systems to locate seamounts and other seafloor features associated with commercially exploitable deepwater fish concentrations and acoustic detection of fish aggregations. These developments which, on the one hand provided the means of developing the deepwater fisheries, on the other, also provided the techniques for stock assessment, mapping of species’ distributional ranges and habitat mapping. These too, were issues that were identified as important for DEEP SEA 2003 to address.
The challenges of governance
While it was recognized that management failures to ensure the sustainability of many deep-sea fishery resources arose from lack of adequate scientific knowledge it was also recognized that in many cases, even if this lack of necessary information had been addressed, the abilities of existing management regimes and the competencies of existing legal and institutional arrangements have proved insufficient to provide a successful and effective basis for management of deepwater fisheries resources, the majority of which are found in high-seas situations. This lack of effective governance structures has compounded the scientific and management failures and provided, in their own way, to the rapid depletion of many high-seas deep-sea fisheries in recent times.
Addressing the need for the Conference
The first planning for DEEP SEA 2003 began informally in Réunion, February 2001 among a small group of fisheries administrators and scientists and lead to an agreement to explore the possibility of the Ministry of Fisheries, New Zealand and the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries, Forestry - Australia co-sponsoring an international conference to address issues of governance and management of deep-sea fisheries. These countries subsequently noted their intention to convene this Conference at the 25th Session Committee on Fisheries in Rome, February 2003, and subsequently it was agreed that the Conference would be convened with the technical cooperation of the FAO.
Once the decision to proceed had been confirmed by the principal proponents a Steering Committee was formed[3] and, following financial backing by the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation, Australia, a Programme Committee was also formed. The Programme Committee recognized that appropriate consideration of many issues would be essential if the requirements for identifying, addressing, and subsequently addressing, the problems of the governance of these fisheries were to be achieved.
It was against this background that the organizers sought to organize a meeting of scientists, managers, industry, and other individuals with an interest in the sustainable management of deep-sea fisheries to address two major objectives:
The Programme Committee recognized that much of the information needed to manage the deepwater ecosystems and their fisheries as sustainable resources had yet to be gathered. Further, the choice of the best management models and most appropriate management strategies were characterized by uncertainty. In terms of regulation, many of the deep-sea resources, particularly those of the high seas, had been further constrained by the still-emerging international protocols for regulation of high-seas fisheries.
Thus it was the view of the Programme Committee that to achieve these objectives the Conference would need to balance the role of science, national and international policy, and the politics required for the sustainable management of deepwater fisheries. As such a number of subjects were identified to be in need of consideration. This was to be done in the form of a number of conference themes. These themes were to address:
It was agreed that the Conference should provide a forum for those with an interest, or business, involved in deep-sea fisheries including:
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[3] See Appendix I for a list
of the DEEP SEA 2003 Steering and Programme Committee members. |
