Rising sea levels are threatening the island homes of Mauritania's Imraguen fishermen. Above, child plays alongside flooded landscape on Nair Island.Tim Bromfield / Atlantic Rising

The Banc d'Arguin, where the Sahara meets the Atlantic in Mauritania, is a staging post for over two million exhausted migratory birds from Europe and Siberia. Terns dive for fish, dolphins raise curious heads to the terrestrial world and crabs promenade through an octopus's garden. This abundance is fed by the coastal upwelling, a wind-driven fountain of life bringing cooler, nutrient-rich water towards the ocean surface.

However, this unique ecosystem is threatened by sea level rise. Antonio Araujo, Director of La FIBA's (Fondation Internationale du Banc d'Arguin) conservation program, says "the catastrophe that is approaching us is a reality now." The Banc d'Arguin is so flat that it is impossible to hold the tides back, already there are visible impacts.

Nair, one of 14 low-lying islands in the Banc, is an important breeding site for spoonbills. In the last 10 years rising sea levels have reduced its size by half. Each year more than half the island's spoonbill nests are flooded and the eggs lost.

La FIBA has built a nesting platform above the high tide mark, but Araujo remains concerned; "it is difficult for ecosystems to survive such physical and biological stress."

The Imraguen fishermen are also affected. In 1997 spring tides divided their village, Iwik, in two. The school and four houses were lost and every year since the sea has eaten more. This is an added hardship in an already harsh environment. The Imraguen's closest source of drinking water is 45km away.

Araujo thinks the village will be forced to move in the next few years. The Imraguen will have to leave their boats unattended on the shore and suffer an additional workload, bringing their catch 500m inland everyday.

The Banc is an important nursery for a large number of species caught by the EU fleet and its loss would be devastating for the industry. Araujo stresses this is not an isolated problem for a remote community. There is no point investing in conservation projects in Europe without conserving birds' wintering grounds in the southern hemisphere. "If the Banc is lost, 40-50% of the waders of the Palaearctic will disappear," he says. Bird watching in Europe will never be the same again.

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So long and thanks for all the fish

Emile Azran stands in the sun in front of his sardine processing factory in Safi, Morocco, smoking a cigarette. Business is slow because it is the Eid holidays but soon he says the chimneys will be pumping at full steam again. The smell is putrid.

Sardines, once cheap foodstuff for the poor, have become a popular dish in Morocco. Mr. Azran’s factory, Almev, takes discarded sardine heads, tails and entrails from the canneries along the row at Safi and turns them into protein-rich animal feed. The flour-like substance is mixed with other feed and served up to contented chickens, turkeys, sheep and cows across Morocco.

The factory employs a workforce of 20 men. It is not work for the faint-hearted. The men spend hours a day knee-deep in sardines, shovelling them onto a conveyor belt, pressing water and oil out of the gloop and working alongside furnaces that fire at 1600°C. Most of his employees come from poor families, Mr. Azran tells us, and he runs the business as a social enterprise.

He describes the history of the sardine trade in the Atlantic over the last 100 years. As the cooler waters of the northern ocean have shifted south, temperature-sensitive sardine shoals have followed. The sardine industry has pursued the fish, moving down through Portugal and Morocco. Today the shoals have moved on again, passed Safi. The majority of the fishing fleet is now based further south in the Western Saharan ports of Laayoune and Dakhla.

Mr. Azran is sure that global warming has caused the migration of the sardines but is confident that it will not affect his business. For the moment, at least, the specialist knowledge and technology for processing the fish remains in Safi.  But the industry at Safi is completely dependent on the supply of sardines. If competition in the south makes it uneconomic for ships to continue delivering their catch, the industry will be forced to uproot again and follow the cooler waters and sardine shoals south.

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Photo: Yuriy via PicasaDive into the NRDC's new documentary Acid Test and you're immediately immersed in a beautiful undersea world complete with vibrant coral reefs, graceful kelp beds, and rhythmic schools of fish.

But Acid Test is no Blue Planet, thanks to heavy use of green-screen technology. And what's in front of those screens is a lot less pleasant than the fish porn projected onto them. (No offense to the scientists, commercial fisherfolk, and other experts who are doing the talking, of course -- it's more about what they're saying.)

The 30 minute film, part of Discovery Planet Green's "Blue August" month of online and onscreen ocean coverage, is about the threat of ocean acidification, the gradual chemical changes in our waters linked to increased levels of carbon dioxide. Just how much CO2? Turns out that since the Industrial Revolution, the ocean has absorbed about one quarter of the carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels.

But don't go celebrating all the sequestered CO2 that's been kept from contributing to global warming, because it's beginning to cause more problems than it's solving, increasing the acidity of the water by 30 percent. And that acidity is starting to dissolve seashells in areas as close to home as the California coast, meaning tragic consequences for many organisms -- and the millions more who count on them for food, including us.

It's a scary phenomenon that scientists are only just coming to understand, and it's only going to get worse -- leaving us with "an urgent choice," as narrator Sigourney Weaver puts it, "to move beyond fossil fuels or to risk turning the ocean into a sea of weeds."

As you watch Acid Test, keep an eye on the beauty projected onto the green screen and the choice seems pretty obvious.

Acid Test premieres tonight on Planet Green and continues to air throughout the month. Catch the trailer below:

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A Penny Saved Is…

In the current issue of Science twenty-one leading ocean scientists declared a truce--it's as if Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner agreed to stop the chase for a day. The paper was authored by many of the biggest names on all sides of the debate on ending overfishing--Boris Worm, Ray Hilborn, Andy Rosenberg and Chris Costello. So what are the terms?

First, they agree on what I will call a "Goldilocks" catch level (You know--not too hot, not too cold, but just right.) If we fish too much, then fish get smaller, catch levels eventually go down and lots of species end up on the road to ruin. If we fish too little, we can keep the fish in the oceans healthy, but fish for people goes way down. Fishing just right would mean aiming to catch about 20 percent of ocean fish every year. At that level, fish would be bigger, the long term catch would be stable at a high level, and the news for ecosystems--whales, dolphins, and turtles--would be good too; at least 90% of species would be at healthy levels-which is quite a bit better than we are doing now.

The second part of the paper is where the scientists waded into the hot debate on what management works to get to the Goldilocks level. The scientists looked at the big ocean places that are making progress and asked managers what worked. The first thing they found was that most places use a mix of approaches for the mix of ecosystem types-so there is not a panacea. Pretty much everyone will agree to that.

What comes out on top, though? It comes down to effectively implementing caps on catch levels using two key tools: reducing the Total Allowable Catch and putting in place catch shares. (You can look at their table where a solution was identified in at least five of the ten fisheries, and was usually ranked an "essential" part of the solution.) This is strong stuff!

There are lots of questions yet to answer--like why is it that a catch share program always had a reduced allowable catch level? Is the theory right that catch shares make it easier to set the catch level properly? And what makes it possible for enough stakeholders to agree to close off areas of the ocean? What are the keys to community co-management, which seems to work in small-scale fisheries? I expect that the scientists will go back to their corners and duke out those questions. I can't wait.

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School of hard knocksIn this month's Atlantic, Gregg Easterbrook writes that privatizing the seas through use of individualized transferrable quotas (ITQs) is the solution to the grave problem of overfishing. Recently, NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco came out strongly (PDF) in favor of ITQs (which the agency is calling "catch shares"), and has committed her agency to " transitioning to catch shares " as a solution to overfishing. Would that the solution to overfishing were so easy!

Today, fisheries managers set a "total allowable catch" (TAC) for open-access fisheries. A fishery is open until that TAC is reached. Not surprisingly, there is often a mad scramble to capture as large a share of fish as quickly as possible. Sometimes fisheries, like the pre-ITQ Alaskan halibut fishery, are only open for a few days, or even a few hours.

Catch shares work to eliminate this incentive to catch all of the fish today. Thus, Easterbrook contrasts the orderly halibut fishery in Alaska today with the free-for-all of the pre-ITQ days. And catch shares do make a fishery more orderly. When a boat has a right to a specified share of the TAC, it removes the incentive to catch each fish before someone else does, the so-called "fisherman's dilemma." ITQs seeks to solve this problem by enclosing the commons and creating clear private ownership rights.

I question the assumption, though, that private ownership will convert fisherfolk into stewards of the long-term health of the fishery. As the recent financial collapse has shown, merely having a market with clear private ownership rights does not protect against short-sightedness, misvaluation, and greed--all of which come into play when we talk about overfishing. All ITQs do is remove the economic incentive to catch the full TAQ immediately-they do nothing to address the more structural problems that bedevil fisheries management decisions: the political aspect of nominally scientific resource management decisions and overcapacity in the fishing industry.

First and foremost, catch-shares can only be an effective tool to prevent overfishing if fisheries managers set the TAC at an appropriate level. And therein lies the rub. In theory, the TAC is set scientifically, based on applying a fixed harvest rate to the estimate of exploitable biomass in the fishery. But fish recruitment fluctuates based on a host of environmental conditions-rendering the fixed harvest rate problematic. Fishery managers are under intense pressures not to lower a TAC, even when the long-term survival of a fishery depends on reducing or even eliminating fishing pressures. The levels of uncertainty involved in estimating "exploitable biomass in the fishery" make it very difficult to defend decisions with immediate and serious economic impacts.

That brings us to the real problem with fisheries-- overcapacity, often subsidized by the very governments Easterbrook accuses of poorly regulating the fisheries. The accusation is correct-fisheries are poorly managed, but I seriously doubt that ITQs are the answer. There are simply too many boats chasing too few fish. The argument that ITQs will result in lower fishing pressure depends heavily on the assumption that as the industry consolidates in the hands of "efficient producers," those producers will voluntarily retire a portion of their shares. This assumption of producer self-regulation is entirely speculative, and to my mind unlikely. The recent financial crisis is enough to give anyone pause about the ability of markets to self-regulate. Instead, we are likely to see near-monopoly catch share holders seeking to bend the TAC calculation to their short-term economic interests. This will happen against a backdrop of technical advances that facilitate fishing pressures undreamt of in the past, with immense floating fish processing factories decimating entire fish stocks in one go. It is hard to see how creating a market for trading catch shares will solve this problem.

Fisheries present an unusual set of challenges that make it extremely difficult to have effective regulatory oversight. Regulators have clearly defined geographies of authority but fish do not cooperate by staying in one place. Many fisheries straddle Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs - waters under the effective control of a coastal state) and the high seas (you may remember that Spain and Canada almost went to war over precisely this issue in the 1990s), rendering ITQs meaningless. The Alaskan Pollock fishery, for example, spans the so-called Bering Sea Donut Hole--a region of the high seas in an area otherwise within the EEZs of the United States, Canada and Russia. Other fisheries straddle the EEZs of more than one state, making decisions about TAC and catch share into international agreements. Even when a fishery is wholly within the EEZ of a single state, most coastal states do not have the capacity to enforce TACs within their jurisdiction, let alone police catch shares.

This is not even to mention bycatch--the dirty little secret of the fishing industry. At least half a million endangered marine mammals (PDF) and an unknown number of endangered sea turtles die every year as bycatch. By most estimates, at least 40% of every catch (PDF) is discarded as bycatch-fish other than the target species. ITQs are likely to exacerbate this problem because it creates a powerful incentive for fishing boats to discard not only unwanted or uncommercial fish, but also any fish potentially subject to someone else's share.

Moreover, the social justice implications of ITQs are troubling. Privatizing the ocean through ITQs further reinforces the same dynamic we see in other forms of privatization that accompanies development schemes around the world. A strata of society with access to capital, loans and equipment benefits richly but the poor become even poorer because they lose access to traditional resources.

This is not to say that catch shares are necessarily a bad idea, but neither are they a panacea. What's needed is a cultural change-subsidy removal for fishing fleets, new opportunities for fisher folk, and a recognition that there are real, albeit imperfectly understood, biological limits to ocean ecosystems. Uncertainty argues for precaution in setting TACs, no matter how economically inconvenient that is, and no matter how painful this will be for affected fishing communities in the near-term. There is not always another fish in the sea.

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When I was growing up, my family lived in New Orleans for several years, on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. One of my father's friends had a boat, and he liked to take it out shrimping. My dad and I would often join him and his son.

I loved those early morning boat trips (except for the time that I got very seasick -- probably my fault for snacking on Fritos -- and the trip that I'm about to tell you about). The lake was so big that you could barely see the shoreline.

On one occasion, our nets were coming up empty, so my dad's friend steered the boat toward the mouth of the lake where it meets the Gulf of Mexico and ventured into a cove where he hoped to find some shrimp. Soon, the boat started dragging. We feared that the net had gotten snagged on the bottom of the lake. But when they winched it in, the cause turned out to be quite a bit scarier for my 10-year-old self.

The boat had gone right over a school of stingrays, which had probably ventured into the lake from the Gulf, and our net was full of them. As the net came up, it looked like they were going to spill into the boat. My dad and his friend struggled to release them without damaging the boat or the fishing equipment, but eventually they had no choice but to cut the net away.

I watched from the prow as those ghostly stingrays spread out beneath us, silently gliding away from the hapless weekend fishermen who had inadvertently disturbed them.

Drawing food from the sea is one of the most fundamental interactions that we can have with the our oceans, and I'm glad that I have those early experiences in New Orleans to draw upon. The stingray incident taught me a respect for the ocean and its creatures -- and a concern for how we interact with them -- that sticks with me today.

The fish we choose to eat -- and the way we fish for them -- can have a tremendous impact on our oceans. As part of a personal goal to eat healthier, I'm trying to increase the amount of fish in my diet. It's a lean protein with great health benefits. But there are risks, as well: Some types of fish can be contaminated with mercury and PCBs, and sometimes seafood is harvested in a way that's bad for the oceans.

A new Sustainable Seafood Guide from the Natural Resources Defense Council can help me -- and you -- make better choices about what we eat. It provides seven basic guidelines to follow when shopping for seafood or ordering at a restaurant, as well as specific advice about America's five favorite types of seafood, from shrimp to tuna to fish sticks.

I was a little disheartened to see that many of my favorite varieties of fish -- grouper, halibut, orange roughy, cod -- had landed on the recommended "avoid" list. (Pacific cod and halibut are OK, but the Atlantic varieties are badly depleted.) I was aware of the overfishing problems that many species face, but this put it in pretty stark terms.

Today is the first-ever World Oceans Day, designated by the United Nations as an occasion to celebrate and protect the world's oceans. And there are certainly a lot of problems facing our seas -- overfishing, habitat destruction, acidification, water pollution, giant trash vortexes in the Pacific ... the list goes on.

We might not be able to tackle all of those big problems all at once. But as NRDC's Laura Pagano suggests, one way that each of us can make a difference right now is to make smarter choices about the seafood we eat and understand its impact on the oceans.

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If scientists are correct, 2048 will be a terrible year for sushi restaurants. And diners selling tuna melts, too.

The End of the Line isn't going to make you feel so good about hitting the neighborhood sushi bar.In fact, if I had any money to invest in a seafood venture, Carl Safina's suggestion to "consider the jellyfishburger" may be the best advice. By mid-century, jellyfish may be the only "fish" left to catch.

Though it lacks the starpower of a certain former vice president, The End of the Line does for the fish what Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth did for the climate: scare the pants off the viewer. The documentary deftly makes the case that industrial exploitation of the world's fish stocks will result in the end of seafood by 2048, if not sooner, and that some species may already be in collapse.

Accompanied by many graphs, interviews with prominent marine scientists, and scenes of gruesome fishing practices, Charles Clover, a British journalist and narrator of this film, says that he first became aware of the dangers of overfishing when he mistakenly stepped into a meeting at The Hague in the early 1990s. "They said that trawling is like plowing a field seven times a year," he said. "As a farmer's son, I know that you can't possibly plow a field that often and expect it to produce."

The film particularly highlights the plight of the Atlantic bluefin tuna, whose breeding population may have already collapsed in 2007. Because high-end restaurants like Nobu fetch high prices for bluefin, some in the fishing industry have regularly ignored international quotas for the endangered bluefin, and the quotas themselves tend to be much higher than the science suggests.

In 2008, scientists recommended to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas that quotas should be set at 10,00-15,000 tons of bluefin per year to regenerate the fish stock. ICCAT chose to set them at 29,000 tons. And the fishing industry? It hauled 61,000 tons anyway.

The last 20 minutes of the documentary, which offer suggestions for how consumers can make changes, feel like an afterthought. And after the powerful first 70 minutes, which effectively frighten viewers about the state of the world's fish stocks, the consumer tips fall flat.

Though it's predictably grim (what environmental documentary about the oceans is going to be reassuring?), there were some moments that took me by surprise. Did you know lobster is on the upswing? And some fishing practices in the United States (yes, the U.S.A.!) are considered on the cutting edge of sustainable practices? What's more, any environmental documentary that ends with comforting words from former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens certainly knows its, um, fishy business.

Gruesome, candid, and definitely not a date movie, The End of the Line is required viewing for anyone who's ever snacked on the bounty of the sea.

Watch it: In honor of World Oceans Day, The End of the Line will show June 8 at the Seattle International Film Festival. Check the SIFF website for details.

For readers outside of Seattle, check the film's website for many screenings in the U.S. and the U.K. during the month of June.

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Around the world, over-fishing is leading to severe depletion of valuable fisheries. This is as true in U.S. coastal waters as it is in many other parts of the world. In New England waters, for example, after two decades of ever more intensive fishing, the groundfish fishery has essentially collapsed. But, we are not alone. According to the United Nations Environment Program, fully 25 percent of fisheries worldwide are in jeopardy of collapse due to over-fishing. Clearly, something needs to be done. Yet, what has long been considered the obvious answer -- restrictions on fishing -- has been shown time and time again to be the wrong answer. The right answer is enlightened use of markets.

The fundamental cause of the depletion of fish stocks is well known to economists: virtually all ocean fisheries are "open-access," that is, fishermen -- small operations or large corporations -- can fish all they want. These individuals and companies are no more greedy than the rest of us, but because no one holds title to fish stocks in the open ocean, everyone races to catch as much as possible. Each fisherman receives the full benefit of aggressive fishing (that is, a larger catch), but none pay the full cost (an imperiled fishery for everyone). One fisherman's choices have an effect on other fishermen (of this generation and the next), but in an open-access fishery -- unlike a privately-held copper mine, for example -- these impacts are not taken into account. What is individually rational adds up to collective foolishness, as the shared resource is over-exploited. This is the "tragedy of the commons." What to do?

Government intervention is, alas, required. Fishermen don't welcome such regulation in their economic sphere any more than anyone else does. And they have a point. Conventional regulatory approaches have driven up costs, but not solved the problem. And we know why. If the government limits the season, fishermen put out more boats. If the government limits net size, fishermen use more labor or buy more costly sonar. Economists call this over-capitalization. Costs go up for fishermen (as resources are squandered), but pressure on fish stocks is not relieved.

The answer is to adopt in fisheries management the same type of innovative policy that has been used for decades in the realm of pollution control -- tradeable permits, called "Individual Transferable Quotas" ( ITQs) in the fisheries realm. Sixteen countries -- some with economies much more dependent than ours on fishing -- have adopted such systems with great success. New Zealand regulates virtually its entire commercial fishery this way. It's had the system in place since 1986, and it's been a great success, putting a brake on over-fishing and restoring stocks to sustainable levels ­- while increasing fishermen's profitability!

There are several ITQ systems already in operation in the United States, including for Alaska's pacific halibut and Virginia's striped-bass fisheries. More important, the time is ripe for broader adoption of this innovative approach, because a short-sighted ban imposed by the U.S. Congress on the establishment of new ITQ systems has expired.

The first step in establishing an ITQ system is to establish the "total allowable catch." The next step -- and a crucial one -- is to allocate shares of that total limit to fishermen in individual quotas that are theirs and theirs alone (read: well-defined property rights). Setting the individual quotas will not be easy. The guiding principle should be simple pragmatism -- using the allocations to build political support for the system. Making the quotas transferable eliminates the problem of overcapitalization and increases efficiency, because the least efficient fishing operations find it more profitable to sell their quotas than to exploit them through continued fishing. If you can't catch your whole share, you can sell part of your quota to someone else, instead of buying a bigger boat.

In addition, these systems improve safety by reducing incentives for fishermen to go out (or stay out) when weather conditions are dangerous. And it was just such perverse incentives of conventional fisheries regulation that were blamed for the tragic loss of life when a fishing boat was lost in a storm off the New England coast just a few winters ago.

Further, because ITQ systems eliminate the motivation for government to limit the duration of the fishing season, supplies available to consumers improve in quality. Prior to the establishment of an ITQ system for Alaskan halibut, for example, the government had reduced the fishing season to just two days, but subsequent to the introduction of the system, the season length grew to more than 200 days.

A decade ago, environmental advocates -- led by the Environmental Defense Fund -- played a central role in the adoption of the sulfur dioxide allowance trading program that's cut acid rain by half and saved electricity generators and rate-payers nearly $1 billion annually, compared with conventional approaches. The time has come for environmentalists to join forces with progressive voices in the fishing industry and in government to set up ITQ systems that can keep fishermen in business while moving fisheries onto sustainable paths.

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Because nothing signals a democracy on the mend like a profusion of czars, salmon defenders are now calling for a federal salmon czar.

According to Wikipedia my deep and nuanced understanding of Russian history, we can expect a salmon czar to quickly go drunk with power, lord over peasant salmon, and assassinate political rivals in fits of paranoid rage.

Or, you know, coordinate various government bureaucracies and administrate a sensible management plan.

"It would be better to have one Washington, D.C. office with real power to deal with salmon issues, instead of the highly dispersed and dysfunctional mish-mash that now governs," writes the Daily Astorian editorial board.

But, really, can't they find more democratic titles for these new positions?

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ROME—The fishing industry must do more to confront the effects of climate change as well as get a grip on the perennial problem of overfishing, said a UN report to be published Monday.

The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture report said responsible fishing practices must be more widely implemented and called for new strategies to cope with climate change.

“Climate change is already modifying the distribution of both marine and freshwater species. Warmer-water species are being pushed towards the poles and experiencing changes in habitat size and productivity.

“And climate change is affecting the seasonality of biological processes, altering marine and freshwater food webs, with unpredictable consequences for fish production,” the study said.

Urgent efforts are needed to help fishing communities strengthen their resilience to climate change, especially those who are most vulnerable, said Kevern Cochrane, one of its authors.

The report, compiled by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, said the key problem was still overfishing and warned that communities relying heavily on fishing could face serious problems if stocks continue to dwindle.

Overfishing, which affects 19 percent of major commercial fish stocks monitored by the FAO, was being facilitated by a higher number of trawlers in operation and increasingly effective technology, it said.

Areas with the highest levels of fully-exploited stocks are the northeast Atlantic, the western Indian Ocean and the northwest Pacific, the FAO said.

It also criticized paltry efforts to regulate bottom-trawl fishing, manage shark fisheries and tackle illegal fishing, saying there had only been “limited progress”.

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PARIS—Climate change will cause key species of fish to migrate towards the poles, badly depleting many commercial fisheries, scientists said in a study published on Thursday.

“The impact of climate change on marine biodiversity and fisheries is going to be huge,” said its lead author, William Cheung, of the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, eastern England.

Cheung’s team used a high-powered computer model, based on knowledge of 1,066 species of fish, their habitat and climate change, to predict what might happen by 2050 according to three scenarios for global warming.

Warmer water will lead to “large-scale redistribution” of these species, with most of them moving towards the poles, shifting on average by more than 40 kilometers (25 miles) per decade, they said.

Arctic Norway will benefit from an increased catch, but in sub-polar regions, the tropics and semi-enclosed seas, “climate change may lead to numerous local extinction,” hitting developing countries most of all, the paper warned.

Part of this trend will be offset by colder-water species that venture into a warmer habitat.

In the North Sea, for instance, stocks of Atlantic cod may fall by more than a fifth as the species heads towards chillier waters.

On the other hand, the European plaice, a more southerly fish, could increase in the North Sea by more than 10 percent.

In the United States, there would be a fall of up to 50 percent in today’s cod fisheries on the east coast.

Some species will face a high risk of extinction, including the striped rock cod in the Antarctic and the St. Paul rock lobster in the Southern Ocean.

The paper, appearing in a British journal, Fish and Fisheries, says the turnover of species will be “dramatic,” affecting 60 percent of present biodiversity, and with repercussions for the entire food chain.

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