The World's Forgotten Fishes - 22

4. WILD FRESHWATER FISHES ARE PRICELESS

90% OF GLOBAL
FRESHWATER FISH
CATCH COMES FROM
RIVER BASINS WITH
ABOVE-AVERAGE
STRESS LEVELS31
But the reality is that like the freshwater
ecosystems on which they depend, the
world's wild freshwater fisheries are
under increasing pressure from two
main threats.
Environmental factors - The
primary drivers of freshwater fisheries
health are environmental: sustainable
fisheries need resilient and healthy

ecosystems. Pollution, excessive
water abstraction, dams and other
infrastructure, sand mining, and land
use change (e.g., loss of floodplains) are
undermining the ecological viability
of critical fishery habitats. Take India's
Ganges river basin where over half the
human population is below the poverty
line and where many people rely on
freshwater fish as their primary source of
protein. Multiple environmental threats
have contributed to a huge decline in the
Ganges fishery over the last 70 years.
Perhaps the biggest decline has been
observed in the hilsa fishery, which made
up the majority of catch in the Lower
Ganges. For example, the hilsa fishery
upstream of Farakka crashed from 19
tonnes per year to just 1 tonne per year
after the construction of the Farakka
barrage in the 1970s, strongly indicating
that the barrage had prevented the fish
from reaching their spawning grounds29.

FRESHWATER AQUACULTURE RELIES ON HEALTHY WILD POPULATIONS
OF FRESHWATER FISHES
Aquaculture constitutes 46 per cent of world fish production - 63 per cent (51 million
tonnes)33 of which is freshwater aquaculture34. With the global population expected
to reach 9.8 billion by 2050, humanity's reliance on aquaculture for food security is
expected to grow. But aquaculture is not a substitute for wild fisheries. Sustainable fish
production from aquaculture relies on healthy and genetically varied brood stock,
which is collected from the wild 35. Furthermore, millions of people rely on wild
populations for subsistence fishing, while for poor families, aquaculture fish are less
affordable than wild caught.

The World's Forgotten Fishes page 22

Unsustainable fishing pressures
- High intensity fishing, destructive
fishing practices (e.g., mosquito nets
and dynamite fishing), targeting
threatened species, and the stocking
of invasive non-native species threaten
the future of many freshwater
fisheries. And overfishing can have
devastatingly swift consequences.
After a bumper harvest of 64,000
tonnes of salmon in Russia's Amur
river in 2016, excessively high quotas
led to a catastrophic drop in the
country's largest salmon run.
In the autumn of 2018, WWF
researchers counted an average of
1 chum salmon per 10,000 square
feet of river at their spawning grounds,
compared to the norm of around
500 fish. In the summer of 2019,
the average was 0. This collapse
will have far reaching impacts on
local communities and the ecosystem
as a whole.
For many of the world, though,
freshwater fisheries' relative
invisibility means they have been
easy to ignore. It's hard to believe,
but they aren't mentioned specifically
in any of the 169 indicators of the
UN Sustainable Development Goals
(SDGs) despite the essential role they
play in alleviating hunger and poverty
for some of the world's poorest
people32 . Theoretically, freshwater
fisheries are included in marine
fisheries under SDG 14 (Life under
Water) but when it comes to reporting
and assessing them, they fall off the
map. There is a growing realisation of
the essential contribution freshwater
fisheries make towards both
nutritional and economic security
for hundreds of millions of people,
but it is far too limited and far too
slow. Recognising these gaps, six
global organisations formed the
Inland Fisheries Alliance in 2021 to
raise the profile of freshwater fisheries
and catalyse efforts to improve their
health and management.
The question now is will decision
makers finally start factoring
freshwater fisheries - and the hundreds
of millions of human mouths they
feed - into their equations? And if so,
will they do it fast enough to stave
off disaster?

The World's Forgotten Fishes

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