Summary of the chapter on inland fisheries in SOFIA

Inland fisheries and their associated ecosystem services make valuable contributions to achieving several of the SDGs including SDG 1 (No poverty), SDG 2 (Zero hunger), SDG 14 (Life below water) and SDG 15 (Life on land). They produce around 12 million tonnes of fish per year of which almost all is used for direct human consumption in primarily least developed or low-income food-deficit countries. In spite of their importance, most inland fisheries are data deficient, underreported, and poorly assessed.

While fishing pressure can be significant, it is normally not the factor that determines the status of inland fisheries. Instead, the productivity of inland fisheries is primarily driven by human activities impacting environmental factors in aquatic ecosystems, including water development, agricultural and industrial pollution, deforestation, and land degradation. A proper assessment requires data from multiple sources, often collected remotely and using proxy measurements, as well as tools and intensive computer modelling that go well beyond the capacity of most Departments of Fisheries. In addition, many of the major basins cross international borders thus requiring joint analysis among the countries sharing the basin.

FAO, in collaboration with the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and selected fishery experts, has developed a global threat map for inland fisheries that combines 20 anthropogenic pressures acting across catchments and basins to create a composite threat indicator. Each individual pressure received a weight according to its importance based on a review of 9,000 articles from 45 basins, a survey of 536 inland fisheries experts from 79 countries, and boosted regression modelling using spatial data of individual pressure variables.

The results of the analysis show that across all major basins important to inland fisheries, 28 percent of fisheries are under low pressure, 55 percent under moderate pressure, and 17 percent under high pressure (Figure 1). Individual regions follow a similar pattern of proportional distributions.

 Figure 1: The status of inland fisheries in the major regions of the world (Source SOFIA 2022).

The threat analysis permits an evaluation of the pressures on inland fisheries at different levels of resolution from the global level to the level of individual basins or even sub-basins showing how different parts of a basin contribute to the overall threat level and that all parts of a basin are not necessarily affected in the same way, providing guidance for conservation and ecosystem restoration. The vulnerability of the fisheries and their socio-economic characteristics will also vary according to their spatial distribution. The analysis is designed to be repeatable and reproducible for improved monitoring of watersheds at various scales.

The status of selected inland fisheries can provide a baseline to report on progress on inland fisheries towards, for example, the Aichi Targets and the SDGs through recognition of the importance of inland fisheries to food security in some countries and subnational areas and how ecosystem restoration can sustain this. To develop a regular yet meaningful global assessment of inland fisheries will require commitment and additional resources to undertake assessments of the indicator fisheries on a routine basis and agreement to report into a common framework. This would enable FAO to collate a global assessment in a similar manner to that of the FAO marine stock status assessment. The advantage of this approach is that it uses global, publicly available data, thus allowing coverage of countries that may have very limited capacity to collect and report data to FAO.

Click here to acces the The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture (SOFIA) report.