Welcome to Sustainable Fisheries UW

Dear Reader,

Welcome to Sustainable Fisheries UW!

We’re a new initiative started by Dr. Ray Hilborn to better communicate the science, policy, and social aspects of sustainable seafood. The website is built around Sustainable Seafood 101, a series of posts meant to explain every aspect of fisheries and seafood.

Sustainable Seafood 101 is meant to:

1. Feature the importance of seafood for people and communities around the world. Over 3 billion people rely on seafood as protein, and over 250 million rely on it for income.
2. Place seafood in a global food systems and sustainability context. Wild-caught fish have the lowest environmental impact of any animal protein.
3. Explain the systems and policies that regulate fisheries. Fishery management is conservation in practice.
4. Highlight the impacts of poverty and other social injustices that contribute to poor management and overfishing. Countries with high-capacity for management are typically wealthier (e.g. the USA, EU, NZ, AUS) and have much better sustainability rates than developing countries without capacity.

Our blog (RSS) will keep you up-to-date on current events and research, as well as management and policy actions from around the world. Coupled with Sustainable Seafood 101, our stories should be able to provide more complete information than can be gathered from a typical news article.

We are also meant to be a resource for journalists, offering free fact-checking and source-finding for any interested story-teller. We can quickly put you in touch with the right expert to answer questions or fulfill interview requests.

Finally, SustainableFisheries-UW.org will serve as the archive for CFoodUW, our former website meant to give fishery scientists and experts a platform to discuss recent research and fishery policy. Our staff will do most of the writing for this site, but we will still feature expert comments if they wish to write for us.

If you’re here on our site there is a decent chance that food and resources connect you to nature in similar ways as us. Fisheries are a fascinating and complex natural resource important to so many people around the world. We hope you enjoy reading about them as much as we like writing about them; follow along on twitter @SustainFishUW and Facebook.

Max Mossler
Managing Editor