A Death Sentence for Atlantic Bluefin Tuna?

The mighty bluefin tuna has been steadily swimming towards extinction for some time now. The fish's populations have declined by as much as 80 percent in recent years. Environmentalists thought — and hoped and prayed — that the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) would lend the struggling swimmers a helping hand — er, fin. They thought wrong.

ICCAT is the international body that establishes yearly catch quotas for bluefin tuna. ICCAT recently wrapped up its annual meeting this past weekend in Paris, where delegates established catch quotas for 2011. In 2010, fishing nations were allowed to harvest 13,500 tons of eastern Atlantic bluefin tuna. Some scientists called for a 50 percent reduction in this quota for 2011 in order to give the threatened bluefin a fighting chance. Environmentalists (including some Change.org members) rallied for a complete moratorium on catching bluefins, while others requested a halt in fishing during spawning season. ICCAT's response? Decrease the annual fishing quota by a mere four percent, from 13,500 tons to 12,900 tons.

This paltry decrease in fishing quotas combined with all the black market fishing that goes on every year could be the death knell for bluefin tuna. Some scientists say that with 2011's quota, bluefin tuna stocks have a 30 to 40 percent chance of completely collapsing. "The word 'conservation' should be removed from ICCAT's name," Oliver Knowles, a Greenpeace International oceans campaigner, said in a press release. "Governments here have just agreed to a bluefin fishing plan that scientists conclude has a shocking one-third chance of failing to protect the species. Would you get in an airplane or car if you were told that it had a 30 percent chance of crashing?" You wouldn't, of course, but bottom lines apparently mean more to fishing nations than an entire species bottoming out.

This most recent ICCAT decision is just one of a series of punches dealt to the down-and-out tuna. Already, many fishing nations (especially in the Mediterranean and Japan) fail to report or underreport their yearly fishing data and turn a blind eye to illegal bluefin fishing. This past March, environmentalists pushed the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) to list Atlantic bluefin tuna as an endangered species and restrict its trade. No such luck. The ICCAT decision was seen by some as bluefin tuna's "one last chance" — now that's out the window, too.

That's not to say that there aren't still ways we can help protect bluefin tuna. We can — it will just require a little creativity.

The CITES and ICCAT decisions prove that regulatory bodies aren't very interested in, well, regulating anything. The way to get tuna the protection they need, then, requires going over ICCAT's and CITES's heads. Greenpeace has an idea to do just that under its Marine Reserves Plan. Through its report, "Roadmap to Recovery, a Global Network of Marine Reserves," the non-profit outlines a scheme that would turn 40 percent of the world's oceans into a comprehensive, global network of marine reserves. These protected areas would be totally off-limits to fishing and other extractive and destructive practices.

Plans like Greenpeace's Marine Reserves are innovative because they focus on conserving habitat rather than actual fish. Of course by protecting habitat, we'd also accomplish one incredibly important task — save the threatened species like bluefin tuna that call those regions home.

Time may be running out for Atlantic bluefin tuna, but its certainly not too late to save the struggling swimmer. Sign Greenpeace's petition and lend your support to a plan that would designate 40 percent of the world's oceans as protected marine reserves.

Photo credit: OpenCage via Wikimedia Commons