Limited Marine Fish Availability Risk

This indicator refers to the stock status of marine fish. As the largest traded food commodity in the world, seafood provides sustenance to billions of people worldwide. More than 85% of the world's fisheries have been pushed to or beyond their biological limits. Overfishing occurs in areas that have been exploited at levels that exceed the capacity for replacement by reproduction and growth of the exploited species. Species that are being overfished are producing catches that are below the level that could be sustainably derived. As a result of intense exploitation, most fisheries generally follow sequential stages of development: undeveloped, developing, fully exploited, overfished, and collapsed. To assess areas where marine fish availability is limited, all fish stocks that were assessed by the Sea Around Us project as anything other than ‘developing’ were considered.