Even if good solid global limits are placed on fishing, especially for overfished and endangered stocks (like the archetypal bluefin tuna) there still remains the issue of illegal fishing. If many of the world's governments agreed to control fishing, it'd be nice if there was a way to control the rogue fishermen and fishing boats. No way to do that, right?
Apparently in this technologically advanced era, there might be a way to do it.
The plan to map illegal fishing from space
"With satellite data from SpaceQuest and financial and engineering support from Google, two environmental activist groups have built the first global surveillance system that can track large fishing vessels anywhere in the world.
A prototype of the system, called Global Fishing Watch, was unveiled today at the IUCN World Parks Congress in Sydney. The tool makes use of Google’s mapping software and servers to display the tracks followed in 2012 and 2013 by some 25,000 ships that were either registered as large commercial fishers or were moving in ways that strongly suggest fishing activity.
The project was led by Oceana, a marine conservation advocacy group, and the software was developed by SkyTruth, a small non-profit that specializes in using remote sensing technologies to map environmentally sensitive activities such as fracking and flaring from oil and gas fields."
I like it. This makes me smile. This is good news for the world. Hopefully it's not too late.
(Read the whole article. It's heartening. The world isn't out of hope yet.)
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