Mitigating the impact of fisheries on climate change Issues note
This note explores the issue of climate change mitigation in capture fisheries. At a global scale, fisheries’ greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are estimated to account for around 4% of all emissions from food production and 0.5% of total emissions. Fuel use during fishing is estimated to account for between 60% and 90% of the sector’s emissions up to the point of landing. Reducing GHG emissions from fisheries can help governments reach economy-wide emissions reduction targets and potentially reduce fishers’ reliance on fossil fuels. Policy options include:
Implementing management measures to restore the health and productivity of fish stocks, and encourage more efficient fishing, thereby improving the volume and the value of catch per unit of fishing effort and reducing capture fisheries’ emissions and emissions intensity.
Promoting technology adoption and innovation through regulation or government support to increase the use of existing fuel efficiency technologies and encourage the development of zero or low-emissions vessels and gear.
Reforming government support policies to avoid encouraging the consumption of fossil fuels in fisheries or encouraging unsustainable fishing.
Economy-wide policies, such as carbon pricing, could also help to reduce emissions in fisheries.
A fundamental question facing policy makers is the type of policy intervention and the sequence in which they should be applied to reduce GHG emissions from a fishery in the most effective way, while also reducing any distributional impacts. Further, any intervention that reduces the costs of fishing – by increasing the energy efficiency of fishing – poses a high risk of encouraging unsustainable fishing in the absence of effective management. Thus, good fisheries management is needed to ensure policies introduced to reduce emissions do not result in unsustainable fishing as fishers increase effort in response to reduced costs. This note provided background material for the “Climate Change and Fisheries” workshop, that was held back-to-back with the 132nd meeting of the OECD Fisheries Committee, on 21 November 2023.1 It gives a brief overview of the role of capture fisheries in GHG emissions, the sources of emissions in capture fisheries, and the range of policy responses available to help fisheries reduce these emissions.
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The OECD Secretariat warmly thanks all presenters and workshop participants, as well as OECD colleagues from the Agriculture and Resources Policies Division (TAD/ARP) and the Climate, Biodiversity and Water Division (ENV/CBW), for their input and feedback in the preparation of this note. The programme of the workshop is provided at the end of this note for reference. This note does not necessarily represent the view of the OECD or that of its members.