Sea Control - Sea Control 455 - The Future of IUU Fishing with Lauren Young

Episode Date: August 20, 2023

"Future Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing Trends in a Warming World: A Global Horizon Scan,” by Lauren Young, Cathy Haenlein and Grace Evans, Royal United Services Institute, March 2023

Hello, this is Sea Control, and I am Nathan Miller. Today, Dr. Ed Salo speaks with Lauren Young, a research fellow at RUSI, about her paper on IUU Fishing and Climate Change. Jim Jarvie edited and produced today's episode. Here at Sea Control, we are approaching our 300th episode since our relaunch, and we're looking to have a show dedicated to answering your questions. If you'd like to submit a question, please email us at seacontrol at simsec.org. I would like to pause here to highlight our local chapters. Whether you are in South Korea, Egypt, Singapore, France, New York, India, or the Caribbean, chances are there's a SimSec local chapter near you. You can find a full listing of local chapters and contact information on our website at simsec.org.

So if you are interested, please reach out. Finally, I want to take this opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec podcast network, The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. And with that, Kimber's Men. You're listening to Sea Control, posted by the Center for International Maritime Safety. Good day, and welcome to Sea Control. My guest today is Lauren Young, and we'll be discussing her occasional paper for the RUSI entitled, Future IUU Fishing Trends in a Warming World, a Global Horizon Scan.

Lauren, welcome. Could you start out by introducing yourselves to the listeners, please? Yep, fantastic. Thanks, Ed. It's a pleasure to be on the podcast. My name is Lauren Young, and I'm a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies, or better known as RUSI. So yeah, our USI, often referred to as RUSI.

and we are one of the uk's oldest defense and security think tanks but don't be fooled by the royal in the title we are a completely independent charity and all the research we do is not for profit i mean i work broadly on all sorts of kind of environmental crime environmental security issues and our latest project was focusing on illegal unreported and unregulated fishing and climate change. Fun stuff there. So thanks again for joining us. Reminder to the listeners, all the opinions are our own and not reflective of any institution which we may be otherwise associated. So let's just hop in. You published this as the so-called high seas treaty was being negotiated. Did the treaty's passage or negotiations surrounding it factor into any of your conclusions?

so not directly no i have to say although it was published around the same time it was sort of a coincidence and just with the lead times with the publishing obviously a lot of the things that the paper covered were highly relevant to that treaty with it being looking at sort of protecting more of the marine protected areas in light of kind of climate change but yeah i didn't directly relate to our findings the findings were very much led by the methodology that we employed in the research paper so to give you perhaps the broader context of the research it was a horizon scan so that involved sort of collecting and synthesizing and prioritizing sort of global globally available evidence around iu fishing climate change so in a really brief kind of nutshell i'll try and keep

it short the first stage elicited submissions from experts worldwide so anybody could make a submission to forecast what the future implications of climate change would be on illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing. We had about 140 responses. The process then involved employing a group of expert assessors. So there was about 27 of them in total, and they all worked collectively together to sort of rank and prioritize those trends. So we ended up with a list of 20 priority trends some of which do you know do as i say are relevant to that that un high seas treaty but the research was much broader than that i guess is what i'm getting at but i guess the most significant trend that perhaps relates to that was our findings around marine protected areas

in general and how difficult it is sort of currently to police those and actually enforce enforce those as protected areas and obviously the concerns were there if we are looking in future to sort of increase the coverage of those protected areas there are some issues there that need to be addressed in terms of how we you know can monitor and force the current ones that exist now so you broke down to 20 the priority trends and you organized them into four thematic areas what were the areas and what can you tell us about them i know that's a big question yeah That's quite a lot. So the 20 priority trends sort of made up the crux of the large bulk of the research paper. So there's quite a lot of different themes that were covered there.

As I said, it was a global horizon scan as well. So there are certain trends and things that relate to different regions, different aspects of IU fishing as well. But as you say, we sort of broadly put those 20 trends under four thematic areas. So the first being loosely around shifting fish stocks and distributions. so that i mean to go to go into the science there i mean that's sort of the basis of kind of what some of our assumptions were around putting this project together i mean the science is already showing that sort of fish and temperatures are predicted to rise but i think it's by four degrees by 2100 and oxygen levels are expected to decline by about three to four percent so this is going to

have an impact on fish biomass both in terms of the population numbers but also the distributions of the fish and it is sort of already impacting some of the you know impacting fishes across the world and obviously if it's impacting the fishes it's going to have an impact on iu access as well so that is kind of the crux of what that first thematic area is sort of based around so we see things like those the redistribution of the fish having impacts on sort of existing management and enforcement frameworks we also see it combining with things like melting sea ice coverage and that you know having impacts and kind of creating a kind of race race to fish in the polar regions so the arctic and antarctic but it also has impacts on things like the humboldt current system

obviously the humboldt current system is a very productive region in peru and chile and if climate change changes that productivity then that's going to have impacts on on the dishes as well and potentially you know decrease their levels of productivity leading them to perhaps use more sort of illegal fishing methods but it also had impacts in that theme on supply chain lengths and transparency around fisheries as well so that's sort of a theme that kind of came onto that one as well and those ones in that that sort of the changing fish stocks and distributions was highest ranked in our trends which kind of shows that our assessors our expert group thought they they're going to be highly significant over the coming years as climate change begins to sort of

impact further. So coming on to the second group of trends, I'll try and keep it a little bit shorter this time. So the second group of trends was the contested maritime boundaries and ungoverned spaces. So this kind of is sort of loosely around some of the issues that we're already seeing at the maritime boundaries, and they can be disputed kind of regions already, but works on the principle that climate change is a threat multiplier. So there are concerns that, For example, as sea levels rise and as coastal erosion occurs, the existing EEZ boundaries might be contested. And there are also concerns that as the changes in fisheries regions occur, as we already discussed, there's a potential for EU actors to pursue those fish across jurisdictional boundaries and there's potential for tensions to arise from that as well.

So perhaps just to highlight some of the themes that came out of those trends, There was concerns around the South China Sea and the existing kind of geopolitical tensions that are already there. There was also, as I mentioned briefly before, in relation to the High Seas Treaty, there was concerns over there being increased incursions into MPAs as well. So as those fish stocks move into MPAs, also if those MPAs are expanded, if other vulnerabilities are occurring, then increasing IU activity might increase the tensions around those as well. and then the third group of trends related to evolving socio-economic and criminal agitators dynamics so essentially there's three sides to these trends i've put it the first being the impact that climate change will have on small scale fishes so there's a potential there that if as i say i think i mentioned before that if their livelihoods are undermined by climate change

and the impacts that that will have there's a potential that they could be driven into sort of but other IEU activity. And the second relates to IEU activity that's being conducted on a industrial scale, so a much larger scale. This often occurs across jurisdictions and by repeat offenders. As climate change stands to change, I guess, the geophysical and socio-political context, it will make things more fragile and increase the vulnerabilities. And so we're likely to see a shift in those criminal offending patterns and also increased levels of the sophistication of criminal actors as well and lastly to the third point also the third side of those trends there's already a clear nexus as we're seeing currently between iu phishing and other organized crime

organized criminal activity so we're you know a lot of the trends sort of we're predicting that that's going to make make those kind of those connections that that nexus between those crime types more well multiply the threats and sort of make it more more difficult to tackle climate change impacts and then and finally as a theme that we had running through the trends related to challenges and opportunities for monitoring and enforcement so these trends really explored how we police the sea and sort of discussed how climate change well well yeah will impact monitoring enforcement efforts more broadly essentially building on a lot of what was in a lot of the trends that were in the previous chapters looking at how those declines and

displacement of the fish stocks but also the sort of changing nature of IU activity more broadly will make it more difficult for those charged with enforcing the law will make that a bit more difficult and there'll also be a need for those law enforcement and monitoring activities to adapt as well and I should say I think with that that final that final group of trends then they're not all necessarily future ones a lot of those challenges for monitoring enforcement were you were sort of already seeing it and it you know already seeing occurrings already there's already sort of witnesses that have been highlighted so but really with climate change being the threat multiplier there's a real need for those to be addressed and sort of address all

those vulnerabilities. Great. Yeah. I mean, that's a lot of really important things and a lot of ripples that come out from just the shifting of these fish stocks. What do you think are the highest priority recommendations that you have and what hurdles do you see in implementing those recommendations? So we didn't go down the route of making kind of concrete recommendations with this research because we found it quite difficult it being such a kind of global context to be very specific about what recommendations were needed when it didn't have a very regional focus however what we did did come across we saw certain themes being highlighted or certain certain considerations that needed to be taken into account you know occurring frequently

throughout the different trends so we made kind of a broad broad set of considerations that we feel stakeholders need need to take into account and perhaps begin further research to make more concrete recommendations for regional perspectives so then what are the biggest considerations that we put across i think the big one for us was advanced planning is essential and i think there's a real you know there's a real need to kind of be proactive in addressing climate change and obviously that's that's a balance in the sense that we need you know as i mentioned previously that there's a need to obviously address some of the existing challenges that already exist around iu fishing but the future of trends that are predicted to occur are rooted in these already

sort of visible trends so if we can be proactive and sort of have forward forward-looking fisheries kind of crime assessments and things we can predict predict what's to come and begin addressing them before the problem really occurs some of the other considerations you know were around the major ones were around bolstering existing sort of vessel monitoring capabilities and you know other monitoring enforcement efforts putting more resources into that because as you know again as climate change you know makes multiplies the sort of threat of IEU fishing but also kind of changes the dynamics at play if we have increased you know the vessel monitoring and the sort of more like data capture and monitoring around by you fishing in general then it's going to be easier

to kind of address those changes as they occur with climate change another big one that came that came out as a consideration was sort of a concerted global effort to sort of increase the resilience among artisanal fishing communities because a lot of the a lot of the trends that were around you know certainly the changing kind of you know social and economic dynamics but also the criminological dynamics stemmed from the small scale kind of fishing communities being perhaps the most impacted by some of climate change's effects so enhancing that resilience against sort of climate change for those fishing communities will be key as we go forward and finally i think one of the big ones which is something our previous research has shown

that obviously in the context of climate change is becoming more increasingly important is that the high volume large-scale iu fishing needs to be treated with the severity that it deserves so it is it qualifies as a serious crime against the un convention against transnational oil bias crime but it isn't treated as such in sort of national legislations and in the way that we enforce enforce the law globally on a broad scale and so that was one of the major ones that it does needs to be there needs to be a kind of shift in in the way we globally are tackling the problem and really treating it with the severity that it deserves so are you all looking at like any more projects related to this type of illegal fishing so russia doesn't have any other major

research projects immediately on the horizon with with iu fishing in mind there will be future ones we have done we have conducted quite a few research projects over the last five years but we are still around this project finishing off a few a few bits of research so that will take the form of we're going to have the three case studies being released over the next couple of months which are shorter form outputs which are looking at some of the issues that were copied in this paper but looking at them in a little bit more detail in sort of regional thematic areas but also we have a podcast coming out as well so we have a i think it's going to end up being about 12 12 episodes of a podcast so as part of this broader the broad horizon scan we employed

the help and expertise of experts from all over the world from multiple different backgrounds so from academics to actual you know law enforcement practitioners we had ex-interpol ex-us coast guards all involved in this and this podcast sort of bring some of those guys on board to explore some of the challenges in a bit more detail so yeah i'd say look out for that one it's coming soon so what are you working on after this what is your next projects that we you know could be out there to look for so we are as i say like as a team at rusey we work on all sorts of different environmental crime issues a lot of the stuff that was of our next next ventures tends to be a little bit more terrestrial focused so a lot more things on the land to do with yeah wildlife on land at

the moment but we're also looking out branching into some research on things to do with the critical minerals around the net zero transition so looking at how there's opportunities there for organized crime and also you know other concerns security concerns human security but also environmental security concerns about extracting those minerals that are needed for the net zero transition so that's quite an exciting project that's coming up but yeah as i say we don't fully fully focus on things at sea we do we do a large portion of work on that but there is sort of anything environment anything that's a natural resource we we focus as well excellent so how can our listeners keep up with you are you on social media

yep so russi has a web page so it's i think it's russi so r-u-s-i.org we are also on i think all the social media channels i think except instagram but we're on twitter we are also on linkedin and all of our outputs all of our all of our research is sort of a ghost goes through those channels as well and we also do quite a lot of like more shorter more digestible op-eds and commentaries things through the RUSI website so if you log on to there you can sign up for updates very specifically to whatever subject you're interested in so if it's very specifically you know the environment side of stuff or the fishing side but there's also with RUSI there's quite a lot of other defensive security topics that are covered so you can sign up to those as well.

Well thank you so much and we will of course link the article in the show notes for the listeners to get out there and find, you know, we want to thank our guests, Lauren Young and Lauren, you know, you're welcome to come back anytime. So thank you for joining us and our listeners. Thank you for tuning in and we will see you next time. © transcript Emily Beynon We hope you all have a good evening, and I'll see you for the next show now.