Nova Scotia fisheries vulnerable to economic crisis, health of marine ecosystems in decline says report

The over-fishing that depleted many of Nova Scotia’s formerly abundant commercial fish stocks, and led to the infamous cod collapse of the 1990s, has left the province’s fishing industry vulnerable to the current economic crisis – as is being seen today in the lobster fishery.

This is one of the key findings of a new report by GPI Atlantic, a Nova Scotia based non-profit research group that is developing new measures of progress for the province.

The report, Fisheries and the Marine Environment in Nova Scotia: Searching for Sustainability and Resilience, highlights key ecological, socioeconomic and institutional aspects that should be monitored by government agencies and considered by decision-makers.

The report shows that the fishing industry’s vulnerability to today’s economic crisis can be traced to the overfishing of many species of larger fish off Nova Scotia – fish near the top of the marine food chain, including cod and other groundfish, as well as sharks. This means that the fishery is less diverse than before, increasingly dependent on species lower in the food chain, notably lobster and other shellfish.

“Fishing down the food chain seemed to work for a while, with species like lobster and crab fetching high prices. That helped to buffer fishers from the social and economic fallout of the groundfish collapse,” observes Dr. Tony Charles, a professor at Saint Mary’s University and the report’s lead author. “But now lobster prices are plummeting, and fishers cannot make a living from that fishery alone, yet cod, sharks and other species higher in the food chain remain depleted. We’ve closed a lot of doors and there are few options for fishers to turn to when there is a crisis in the fishery.”

This isn’t the first time fishers have had to deal with a crisis in the fishing industry. Thousands of fishers were affected by the collapse of the cod fishery in the early 1990s.

“Although the current economic crisis in the lobster fishery is not as severe as the collapse of the cod fishery, many fishers and communities are still facing hardship,” notes author Chris Burbidge. “Hopefully, this crisis will only be temporary and the fishery will bounce back soon. But you can imagine the social and economic impacts if the fishery were to experience a long-term collapse similar to the cod.”

Dr. Charles believes the province needs a more resilient fishery. “A resilient fishery is able to weather changing social, economic or environmental conditions and still remain a viable source of livelihood for fishers and revenue for the province. Over-reliance on just a few fish stocks, such as lobster and other shellfish, is not a characteristic of a resilient fishery.”

The GPI Atlantic fisheries and marine report, which updates and extends a previous 2002 report, lays out areas in which action is needed to ensure sustainable prosperity along our coasts into the future.

Focusing on nine “headline indicators”, the report covers both ecological and human aspects, including economic, social, environmental, and community perspectives.

“On the biological side, there are mixed signals on the abundance of fish in the sea and the size of individual fish,” notes Burbidge. “But there is clear bad news on other ecological fronts.”

In addition to the indicator demonstrating that Nova Scotia is “fishing down the marine food web”, there is negative news in the state of marine “species at-risk” such as the highly endangered North Atlantic right whale. The extent of shellfish closures along the coasts, a measure of marine environmental quality, is also worsening over time. On the human side, conventional measures are mixed in their message: the fishery Gross

Domestic Product (GDP) is generally doing well, but employment, a key measure of socioeconomic well-being of fishers and fishing communities, is on a downward trend. A novel measure of resilience and overall health in the fishery, the age profile of fishers, shows a worrying trend as the average age of fishers is increasing considerably over time, indicating that young people are finding it hard to enter the industry.



The report can be accessed at:

www.gpiatlantic.org