Arctic Fisheries

(from Lloyd’s Report 2012: Arctic Opening – Opportunity and Risk in the High North)

Arctic fisheries are often overlooked in assessments of the resource wealth of the Arctic; they currently only represent around 5% of the overall global catch¹ .

Yet fishing is historically a key industry – and employer – across the Arctic. Its economic relevance has been greatest in the smaller Arctic states. Fish represents 90% of the export earnings of Greenland, 33% of those of Iceland, approximately 6% of Norway’s and less than 1% of the export earnings of the United States and Russia² . In 2011, exports of Norwegian cod amounted to $1.8bn, and exports of salmon from aquaculture some $4.8bn³ . Meanwhile, individual Arctic communities are almost wholly reliant on fisheries and fish processing for their economic survival. Fishing communities are highly sensitive to marine pollution, they are often politically powerful in proportion to their size, and their interests may sometimes be at odds with other economic activities, including shipping and oil and gas development. For example, in Norway many fishermen oppose opening up the area around the Arctic Lofoten, Vesteraalen and Senja islands to oil exploration given the likely disruption to spawning habitats and risk of spills.

In some places, fishing activity has boomed in recent years. There were 30 fishing ship voyages in the Canadian Arctic in 2005, and 221 in 2010, by far the largest component of all ship voyages in the Canadian Arctic⁴ . The Greenlandic shrimp catch has grown by half again over the last decade⁵ .

Historical data on Arctic fisheries are uneven. While the Barents Sea has been relatively well studied, not least because of long-standing fisheries co-operation between Norway and Russia, data for other parts of the Arctic are hard to come by or, because of under-reporting, highly misleading⁶ . Lack of data compounds the difficulty of predicting the likely future productivity of Arctic fisheries. Climate change may boost the productivity of aquaculture. The 20% increase in phytoplankton across the Arctic Ocean between 1998 and 2009 suggests that the bottom of the food chain in some places may flourish. But there are also concerns. In the longer term, the impacts of climate change on particular fish stocks could be highly negative as those stocks are crowded out by growing species (see Figure 11).

Historical experience underlines the challenge of sustainable fishery management. Greenland’s cod fishery produced between 300,000 and 400,000 tons annually in the 1950s and 1960s. Over the following two decades it collapsed, largely as a result of overfishing. By 2008 the cod fishery had recovered slightly, but was still less than 20,000 tons.

A US Senate Joint Resolution from 2008 called on the US government to pursue international agreement on a ban on commercial fishing in the Central Arctic Ocean, beyond the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of any Arctic coastal state. In 2009 the United States government preemptively imposed a ban on the expansion of commercial shipping in US-controlled waters off Alaska.

Figure 11: Modelled changes in distributions of Arctic cod over the next 30 years

Charles Emmerson, Glada Lahn, 2012, Arctic Fisheries, Lloyd’s.©