"We know what to do — we just have to find a way to do it”

 Dr Sumaila has experience working in fisheries and natural resource projects in Norway, Canada and the North Atlantic region, Namibia and the Southern African region, Ghana and the West African region and Hong Kong and the South China Sea. He will be addressing delegates on issues of environmental financing, fisheries and ocean protection at Cork City Hall on June 8th.

The title of Dr Sumaila’s talk is ‘Not Everything, Not Everywhere, Not All At Once’. “I will be highlighting what we need to do and not do in order to ensure that we have ‘fair seas.’ Intra and intergenerational equity as well as environmental justice will all be featured,” he explains.

Asked if he predicted the crisis in our oceans and what should be done, Dr Sumaila says: “Oh yes. Bioeconomic theory predicts the crisis of the ocean very well. Because the ocean and the fish it contains are essentially common property, the tendency is to race for the fish because it is not your fish until you catch it. This tendency ultimately leads to overfishing and depletion of the fish. Adding fuel to the fire are unhelpful government policies, such as the provision of subsidies that stimulate overcapacity and overfishing — for example, fuel subsidies.” 

What can be done? “Fortunately, scientists, indigenous knowledge holders, managers and civil society have, over the last hundred years, developed approaches to help us manage our oceans and fisheries effectively and sustainably. All we need is for our leaders to have the guts to apply these approaches and tools appropriately for their circumstances.”   

How optimistic is Dr Sumaila that the damage to our oceans can be reversed — or has the destruction gone too far?

“In many instances, the destruction has gone too far but I am still optimistic because (1) nature is very kind. If you give it a chance, it will come back. (2) As Nelson Mandela used to say, when one is trying to solve a hard problem, it often feels impossible but if you keep at it, one day you wake up and it is solved. So let’s keep at it, especially because we know what to do — we just have to find a way to do it.”    

Is there anything we can learn from Iceland, or elsewhere, when it comes to sustainability of the oceans?

 “Iceland is known for the use of individual transferable quotas (ITQs), a management tool that allocates fishing quotas to individuals or fishing companies. The allocated quota can be traded in the market for quotas. This is shown to increase the profitability of fisheries but its track record on the social and sustainability fronts are shown to be dubious. The Western Alaska Community Development Quota (CDQ) Programme is a variant of this. It allocates a percentage of all Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands quotas for groundfish, prohibited species, halibut and crab to eligible communities. Taken together, CDQs are arguably more successful than ITQs socially, environmentally and economically.”   

Dr Sumaila’s talk will deal with the following: ‘To get to infinity fish from vanishing fish, we need to abandon the notion that we have to take everything everywhere all at once.’   

He explains: “Vanishing fish is the idea that currently, we are over-taking resources from — and over-polluting — our oceans. ‘Infinity fish’ explains the fact that if we manage our oceans and fisheries wisely, it is possible to continue to reap benefits from the same forever. Mathematically, these benefits would add up to infinity. I will try to convince my audience that there are things that we need to abandon if we want to achieve infinity fish.”