By Mary Mazzoni, Source: Triple Pundit

Ocean health issues took center stage at the 2014 SXSW Eco conference in Austin, Texas last week. On the second day of the conference, renowned oceanographer, explorer and author Sylvia Earle, who you may also know as the founder of Mission Blue, gave a keynote speech on her vision for more sustainable seas. Her speech was one of the most buzzed-about at the conference, and the subject definitely hit home.

The following day, a group of sustainable seafood experts assembled for a panel discussion on how networks are the future of fish. What do they mean by ‘networks,’ you ask? To put it simply: 200 million people directly or indirectly depend on fishing for their livelihoods, many in developing countries. In nations where infrastructure is limited and regulations lax — and cost-effective, sustainable solutions are not readily available — fishermen often choose unsustainable and even illegal catch methods in order to make a living.

For these fishermen, the only networks they know for catching and selling their fish are unsustainable. This contributes to the rampant overfishing of our oceans and the opacity of the seafood supply chain. But introducing more sustainable networks to fishermen and fishing communities around the world just may help solve the problem.

And it’s a problem that’s only getting more serious: Upwards of 80 percent of the world’s fisheries are being fished at maximum capacity or are exploited — and that only refers to the fisheries we can measure. So far, researchers have only been able to assess about a third of the world’s fisheries due to infrastructure issues and lack of funds in developing nations. Meanwhile, about a third of all seafood is mislabeled in North America, either by species, origin or catch method, and 28 billion tons of illegal fish makes its way into the legitimate supply chain every year.

As Cheryl Dahle, CEO of Flip Labs and founder Future of Fish, put it: “We’re missing a lot of information, and what we know isn’t that great.”

Read more at: Triple Pundit