Blog
Sumaila: Manage fisheries domestically and internationally
Dr. Rashid Sumaila has proposed a new approach to managing global fisheries that could finally put an end to international disputes over fisheries subsidies: manage domestic and international fisheries separately. His proposal, published in the January 2012 issue of Nature, could solve the problem faced by World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiators, whose efforts to broker [...]
FERU Director speaks at UNFCCC COP 17 Oceans Day
Dr. Rashid Sumaila, Director of the Fisheries Economics Research Unit, presented his research at Oceans Day in Durban, South Africa, on December 3, 2011. His presentation, titled Climate Change Impacts on the Biophysics and Economics of World Fisheries, was part of a session that highlighted the linkages between climate change and food security for African communities. “It was a great [...]
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting – February 16-20, 2011
FERU Director Rashid Sumaila will be presenting his analysis of the ecological and economic deficits of nations at the 2011 AAAS Annual Meeting in Vancouver, BC. Linking data from the Global Footprint Network (http://www.footprintnetwork.org) and the International Monetary Fund, Dr. Sumalia will provide data and analysis about ecological and economic deficits and reveal a simple “ecolonomic [...]
World Oceans Summit 2012
FERU Director Rashid Sumaila will be one of the speakers at the World Oceans Summit held in Singapore on 22-24 February, 2012. For more information,visit the World Oceans Summit website.
Subsidies to Spanish fishing fleets
As has been noted in several publications by the Fisheries Economics Research Unit (FERU), subsidies are a very important issue in world fisheries. Spain’s fishing fleets are no exception, as has been recently investigated by Kate Willson, Mar Cabra and Marcos Garcia Rey of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The authors undertook an [...]
Commercially Valuable Fish Species Hit the Red List
Negotiators at the Kobe III meetings in La Jolla California, who collectively manage tuna fisheries in more than 91% of the world’s oceans, are being presented with a bleak picture from several recent studies. Bruce Collette and his colleagues at the National Marine Fisheries Service Systematics Laboratory in Washington DC, conducted the first global assessment [...]
World Oceans Day at the UN
In recognition of World Oceans Day June 8th, the UN held a panel discussion entitled “Our oceans: greening our future” in New York. Participating in the event, The Fisheries Centre’s very own Rashid Sumaila spoke on the economic challenges facing global fisheries and on the finite nature of the ocean’s resources. Drawing on Adam Smith for inspiration [...]
Science Forum Discussion of Consumer Awareness With Rashid Sumaila
Rashid Sumaila, head of the Fisheries Economic Unit here at UBC, was interviewed Tuesday by WorldScience on the state of world fisheries and the role consumers can play in bringing sustainability to our fisheries. The interview can listened to here. Rashid will also be taking questions through Dec. 2. [audio:http://feru.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2011/06/Forum-fish-Sumaila.mp3] Forum_fish_Sumaila Co-produced by the BBC [...]
Food Security Implications of Global Overfishing
Members of the Fisheries Economics Unit at the UBC fisheries centre are pleased with favourable reviews for their paper “Food security implications of global marine catch losses due to overfishing” published last year in the Journal of Bioeconomics. While the cost of overfishing on marine biodiversity and ecology has been emphasized in recent literature, this [...]
The End of the Line: How a film changed the way we eat fish
The End of the Line, the first major documentary to focus public attention on the consequences and extent of overfishing, is now “making waves” outside of the movie theatre, inspiring tv shows like Hugh’s Fish Fight, shaming restaurant owners into changing their menus and drawing wider media attention to the issue according to a recent [...]
Climate Change: Altering the Physics, Ecology, and Socioeconomics of Fisheries
Members of the Fisheries Economics Research Unit attended the annual meeting for the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington D.C Friday. With Rashid Sumaila as organizer, Daniel Pauly as moderator and fisheries economists Andrew Dyck and Vicky Lam presenting, members of the Fisheries Centre and their research were well represented at this [...]
Risks and expected costs in global fisheries management
A recent article appearing in the scientific journal Nature lead by Dr. Branch has sparked new debate among fisheries scientists regarding how to best measure biodiversity in global fisheries. The Fisheries Economics Research Unit’s director, Dr. Sumaila summarizes what this debate may mean for the economics of fisheries management in a follow-up comment to the [...]
Fishing is like a bank account
Photo courtesy of: The Daily Mail A recent post on the Science Magazine news blog repeats a comment by Elliot Norse of the Marine Conservation Biology Institute. Regarding deep sea fisheries, Dr. Norse says: “A population of fish is like a bank account, and its productivity is like the interest it earns. In shallow waters, [...]
Overfishing the oceans YouTube
Below is a short video that looks to be a mashup of clips from around the web including one of Dr. Sumaila. Watch below or click through to the YouTube clip.
Scenarios of global biodiversity
Head of the Fisheries Economics Research Unit, Rashid Sumaila is excited to have his first appearance in the journal Science, co-authoring an article titled “Scenarios for Global Biodiversity in the 21st Century.” The article, which first appeared online yesterday explores scenarios of biodiversity changes in the future using metrics such as species extinctions, species abundance [...]
New tone in WTO fish talks
Negotiators at the WTO are reportedly optimistic about recent advances on talks to curb fisheries subsidies. While significant differences remain, a new mood is said to surround discussions and the ambassador of one industrialized nation is reported to have said that talks are now focusing on the most harmful of subsidies, rather than subsidies in [...]
Global ocean economics project papers published
On Tuesday Sep. 14, 2010, four papers stemming from the Global Ocean Economics Project were released in a special issue of the Journal of Bioeconomics. The four papers and their relationship to one another are described in an introduction to the special issue. Thanks to all the contributing authors for their hard work and to [...]
The global ocean economics project at IIFET 2010
Members of the Fisheries Economics Research Unit recently had the pleasure of presenting a summary of our work on the Global Ocean Economics Project to a packed room at the 2010 meeting of the International Institute for Fisheries Economics and Trade (IIFET). It was great to see a so many people interested in our work, [...]
Contributions to the Green Economy Report
The Fisheries Economics Research Unit has been working hard to prepare a chapter for the upcoming Green Economy Report, which is part of the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Green Economy Initiative. For our contribution to the Report, which is to organize and prepare the fisheries chapter, we have been in collaboration with more than [...]
Asian Development Bank meets in Tashkent, Uzbekistan
The Asian Development Bank’s annual meeting this year was in Tashkent, Uzbekistan and sustainable fisheries were hot on the agenda. The Fisheries Economics Research Unit’s Dr. Rashid Sumaila was in attendance to speak about the importance of overfishing to Asia, which, consumes more than two thirds of the landings from the world’s marine environments. Dr. [...]
End of the line film plugged by Ellen DeGeneres
The star of the Ellen DeGeneres show has recently plugged the documentary film End of Line in which Dr. Sumaila is featured. Photo via: Wikimedia Commons From Ellen’s Twitter stream recently: “Have you heard of this documentary “End of the Line?” I just heard about it. If you care about the planet, please watch it.” [...]
Graduate discusses global seafood sustainability in Science magazine’s policy forum
Ahmed Khan, a graduate of UBC’s Fisheries Economics Research Unit now studying at Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada says that Governance may be an influential factor to consider when it comes to seafood supply. This comes from a recent article in Science magazine’s policy forum titled Sustainability and Global Seafood which appeared in the February [...]
Explaining the importance of the ocean to humanity in video
Dr. Sumaila appears in a video with several notable celebrities including Leonardo Dicaprio and Prince Charles. In this video concerning the health of the earth’s oceans and climate change Dr. Sumaila says: Scientists have predicted: every second breath of humans depends on the oceans. So the oceans are central to our livelihoods and our survival [...]
Introducing Dr. Ling Huang, the newest member of the fisheries economics research unit
The newest member of the Fisheries Economics Research Unit is Dr. Ling Huang from Duke University in the United States. Dr. Huang will be working as a post-doctoral researcher with Dr. Sumaila on several projects over the coming years. Dr. Huang’s research interests have focused on fisheries topics such as in her job market paper [...]
Review of game theory paper available now
Megan Bailey of the Fisheries Economics Research Unit has just published her first work of 2010. Her paper titled Application of game theory to fisheries over three decades provides a review of how game theory has been used in the field of fisheries and possible avenues for future applications and policy analysis. Photo by Eric [...]
