By Charlotte Wagner and Jonathan Green, Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI)

The 2024 session of the UN High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) that took place in New York and ended today conducted an in-depth review of some of the foundational SDGs on no poverty (SDG 1) and zero hunger (SDG 2). But the key role that sustainably managed, pollution-free fisheries play in achieving these Goals remains at the margins.

Small-scale fisheries are disproportionately affected by toxic and persistent pollution from land, which, combined with ocean acidification and warming, threatens the integrity of these critical ecosystems. The impact of ocean pollution on food security and health is poorly understood and likely underestimated due to insufficient data, especially in low-income regions where seafood is crucial for nutrition and livelihoods. Ocean pollution endangers the ability of small-scale fisheries to provide safe and nutritious food to large portions of the planet’s population. Yet, addressing ocean pollution is hampered by knowledge gaps and inadequate attention from policymakers.

Small-scale fisheries are crucial for global food security

Half of the world’s population rely on fish and other seafoods for nutrition. Small-scale fisheries, also known as artisanal fisheries, are key to providing marginalized populations with food and employment. Globally, 90% of fishers are employed in small-scale fisheries, and in lower-income countries (LICs), the vast majority of catch originates from them. There are 500 million people who are directly dependent on small-scale fisheries for nutrition and livelihoods. As such, they are a key resource among poorer and marginalized groups and constitute the backbone of many local economies, with families and communities heavily involved.

Many of those dependent on small-scale fisheries face multi-faceted marginalization and for these communities small scale-fisheries are important for poverty prevention. In the case of economic shocks that often disproportionally affect the poor, such as unemployment during the COVID-19 pandemic, small-scale fisheries are important safety nets. Nearly half of those engaged in small-scale fisheries are women, and dependent households, including many women, children, and elderly, rely on the protein, fatty acids, and essential micronutrients that fish consumption provides for health and development.

Pollution threatens the sustainability of small-scale fisheries

Small-scale fisheries are especially vulnerable to ecosystem degradation because of their proximity to human activities. Typically, small-scale fishers use low-tech fishing methods, fish close to the coast, and primarily catch fish for subsistence or local consumption. Increasingly, fishers find their coastal ecosystems polluted with plastic debris, much of which comes from land and, to a lesser extent, discarded fishing gear. It is not uncommon that more than 30% of landed catch consists of plastic. Some of it ends up on dinner plates, and ultimately in people’s bodies, with countries in Southeast Asia and Western Africa faring much worse than the global average.

In many ways, plastic pollution is only the tip of the iceberg, with most ocean pollution too small to be visible to the eye, but no less concerning. Like plastics, other toxic pollutants like heavy metals and persistent organic pollutants (POPs) – such as certain flame retardants, firefighting foams, pesticides, and industrial chemicals – break down only very slowly or not at all, and the ocean is their final destination. They originate from human settlements, agriculture, industry, and poorly managed waste sites along the coast and coastal river systems, have penetrated the deepest and most remote ecosystems, and land back in our bodies through seafood we consume. Decades after some persistent pollutants were banned in most countries, they continue to threaten marine keystone species, like killer whales. In the case of polychlorinated biphenyls, a type of man-made carcinogenic compound, concerted international regulation has successfully reduced concentrations in fish by 90%, but in other cases, pollution levels in marine ecosystems continue to be elevated or even increasing.  

Organochlorine pesticides such as DDT were banned in most industrialized countries because they devastated birds of prey populations – including, for example, the collapse of bald eagle populations in North America in the 1940s. They cause breast cancer and obesity in children of mothers exposed to DDT during pregnancy, and recent work suggests that this elevated risk of being overweight may persist across two generations, raising important questions around intergenerational justice. In coastal Malaysia, continuously high levels of organochlorine pesticides in barnacles suggest they continue to be used in agriculture in some regions.

Ocean pollution is one of the greatest threats to the world’s most productive marine ecosystems – such as coral reefs – and is already identified as a global health crisis because of its impact on people consuming fish and other seafoods.

Recently, the importance of mitigating pollution to accomplish healthy, sustainable oceans has been gaining traction and the ongoing negotiations towards a UN treaty on plastic pollution are an attempt to find global consensus for a problem of global magnitude. However, cleaning up coastal fisheries will require a concerted effort to control global streams of a large variety of persistent, toxic pollutants. Considering their full life cycle in industry, agriculture, and waste streams, stringent water quality controls, and co-management of fisheries are important steps in that direction.

In some circles, foods originating from the ocean are heralded as a solution to food insecurity and poverty. However, pollution is a widespread, largely invisible, and growing problem. In small-scale fisheries, the issue of ocean pollution combines with that of food security. By poisoning ecosystems that so many lower-income communities rely on, pollution threatens to exacerbate global food security and health inequalities. With chemical production projected to triple by 2050, coordinated policy action among nations needs to address pollution of these critical ecosystems. Without upstream pollution control, conservation measures within these key food systems will be less effective and, at worst, irrelevant.