Roadmap for Electronic Monitoring in RFMOs

Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs) play a key role in managing highly migratory fish stocks, such as tuna, that span the jurisdictions of multiple countries as well as the high seas. Each year, tuna fisheries land approximately 5 million tons of fish with a dockside value of about 10 billion USD. In order to sustainably manage this valuable resource, RFMOs and their member countries require sufficiently accurate information on target catch, bycatch, fishing effort, and compliance with regulations.

Human observers, who are deployed on fishing vessels to collect data on fishing activities, have played a critical role in collecting this information. Observers cover a large portion of fishing activity for most of the world’s tuna purse seine fleets; ICCAT, WCPFC, and IATTC require human observers on all purse seine trips. However, other fleets, such as the longliners, have very low observer coverage targets that they often struggle to meet. The Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) and the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC) have, for example, a 5 percent observer target for longline vessels, but these fisheries often struggle to meet this low level of coverage. A combination of harsh working environments, costs, and the challenging logistics of deploying observers on many longline fleets make it unlikely that human observers will ever be able to achieve much higher coverage levels for these fleets. With such low monitoring coverage, there is uncertainty about what longline vessels are catching, which makes it difficult to set and enforce management measures that protect the health of fish stocks and the economic productivity of the fishery. This can lead to a bias towards inaction, as it can be difficult to understand whether there are issues in the fishery that require immediate attention.

Even in fisheries with high rates of observer coverage, there are opportunities to enhance the reliability of reported data. Although observers currently represent the gold standard in fishery data collection, observers must take breaks to sleep and eat, and cannot keep track of all activities happening at once. In the worst cases, they may also be subject to intimidation, interference, bribery, and even violence in the name of falsifying reports. These serious issues are one of the reasons observers are sometimes used solely for scientific data collection and not for compliance functions. The recent suspension of observer requirements on purse seine vessels in the WCPFC in response to coronavirus has demonstrated that there is still room to improve the reliability of monitoring, even in fisheries with 100 percent observer coverage.

There appears to be growing interest in improving the monitoring of many of the world’s fisheries managed by RFMOs. The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), for example, recently agreed to require 100 percent observer coverage on purse seine vessels year round, and to expand longline observer coverage on vessels over 20 meters to 10 percent in 2022. While human observers may be limited in their ability to monitor large portions of tuna fishing for some fleets, the emergence of electronic monitoring (EM) offers a solution to the challenge of increasing the robustness and coverage levels of at-sea monitoring. There are now more than two decades of experience with electronic monitoring in fisheries, with at least 100 trials, and 12 fully implemented programs.