Daniel Pauly

After many years studying tropical fisheries, especially in Southeast Asia, Dr Pauly joined UBC’s Fisheries Centre in 1994, becoming its Director in 2003. Dr. Pauly authored over 500 scientific articles, book chapters and other items, including 30 books and reports. These documents, mainly dedicated to the management of fisheries and to ecosystem modeling, present concepts, methods and software which are in use throughout the world, and which have resulted in numerous awards. This applies notably to the Ecopath modeling approach (see www.ecopath.org), FishBase, the online encyclopedia of fishes (see www.fishbase.org), and the global mapping of fisheries trends (see www.seaaroundus.org). 

Fisheries and globalchanges impactson marine ecosystems and global food security

Individual fisheries are generally perceived as one fleet exploiting one or several target species, in a specific area. The vision of fisheries that will be presented here, however, is that of a global, integrated system spanning the global oceans. Consumers in the European Union, the United States, Japan and increasingly China, have beento datelargely unaffected bythe local depletions these fleetsinduce, as they are buffered by seafood imports from the developing world. Global fisheries, fed by onerous subsidies, have an enormous impact on marine ecosystems, which they degrade, and on their target species, whose abundance is generally reduced by a factor of ten or more a few decades after a fishery opens.
This form of interaction with marine organisms, intensified by the effects of global warming, will lead in the next decades to a succession of local extirpation, followed by global extinctions, which will affect people in both developed and developing countries. Confronting this will require a new mode of thinking on how humans and marine wildlife can co-exist on Earth.