Claims of bias fly in battle for fisheries science

As the furore over commercial fisheries grows under a pro-industry Government, both commercial and environmental groups are calling for a science-based approach – to very different ends.

The largest fisheries researcher in New Zealand is the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa), which carries out 80 percent of fisheries science (by value) commissioned by the government.

However, submitting to the body that regulates fishing in South Pacific international waters late last year, industry lobbyist High Seas Fishing Group seemingly questioned Fisheries New Zealand and Niwa’s ability to deliver unbiased science.

The statement said the bulk of data used in fisheries science was collected by active fishing vessels, and where concrete data didn’t exist, there was a huge reliance on predictive models.

It was these predictive models the group took issue with, saying it was, “Largely based or influenced by personal perspectives and ideologies, data and research predominantly conducted by Niwa.

“High Seas Fishing Group asserts that, in the international fisheries space, New Zealand has failed to commission science that reflects a balance between sustainability and ecological factors, and economic growth considerations; these both being part of Niwa’s statement of core purpose.”

Niwa chief fisheries scientist Dr Richard O’Driscoll said its role was to provide impartial scientific advice regardless of the stakeholder, and it was the role of fisheries managers to provide balance between ecological and environmental interests.

“Balancing fishing and environmental interests is tricky and it is the role of government to reflect society and to determine where that balance lies. The role of science is to provide advice and data to inform those decisions and trade-offs. For example, determining the ecological risk of different potential management actions.”

He said stakeholders often had competing priorities so perception of what provides an appropriate balance between exploitation and the environment may vary.

“If management decisions do not match those priorities and perceptions, then this may be perceived as ‘unfair’. It is important to note that Niwa provides the information and advice that help ensure evidence-based decision-making. Any policy decisions (and balance or otherwise) informed by Niwa’s advice are the responsibility of the management agency, not Niwa.”

Fisheries New Zealand science and information director Simon Lawrence said, “While there will always be a range of views across the various interests in New Zealand’s oceans and fisheries, what we all want is healthy fisheries that continue to provide for future generations.”

He said the agency’s focus was the long-term sustainability of our fisheries through the quota management system, with all decisions backed by the best possible science.

“The key measure is the sustainability of our fisheries and overall New Zealand’s fisheries are in good shape, as evidenced through our scientific stock assessments and sound science system. 

“However, there will always be challenges and opportunities to improve as we adapt to the continued impacts from climate change, which we know will place more pressure on the fisheries system.”

Lawrence said New Zealand was moving toward a more ecosystems-based approach to fisheries management, “Instead of only managing individual species, we’re looking at a more holistic view of marine environments that better account for the different ways fisheries systems are interconnected.

“It’s important that we strike the right balance between the sustainable use of fisheries and ensuring they remain healthy and productive and continue to provide food for our whānau and jobs in our communities.”

Impartial science

So what then does good science look like for industry?

High Seas Fishing Group Chair Andy Smith said it, and other industry bodies in New Zealand, relied on a wide range of scientific data and sources in informing their positions, pointing Newsroom to several peer-reviewed papers on the environmental impacts of bottom trawling and the effects of marine-protected areas on food security, among other things.

Particular weight was put on a paper published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science by Dr Ray Hilborn which found that well-managed bottom trawling was sustainable and that New Zealand trawled fish could have a lower carbon intensity than chicken or pork.

A summary of that report can be found here.

Smith said Hilborn had previously been sponsored by the industry, but that he had no doubt about his scientific integrity.

According to a 2015 resume on his website, Hilborn received funding from the New Zealand Fishing Industry Board of between $100,000 and $150,000 a year to analyse New Zealand quota policies between 1990 and 1996, and between 1996 and 2007 he received funding from the New Zealand Seafood Industry Council of between $67,000 and $125,000 a year to provide stock assessments.

Averaged out across the funding periods, this works out to funding $1.81 million over the nearly 20 years he received regular funding from the New Zealand industry, who he still produces work for.

He was also on the editorial board of the New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research between 2003 and 2010.

His global industry ties were dragged up in 2016 by Greenpeace USA, which labelled him an “overfishing denier” and said he had received at least $3.56 million from 69 fishing, seafood and other industry groups with his funding “rarely disclosed” in scientific publications, including in a 2006 paper on New Zealand’s orange roughy fisheries.

Responding to Greenpeace and saying the campaign was launched because he was about to receive the International Fisheries Science Prize at the World Fisheries Congress, Hilborn said, “Greenpeace is unable to attack the science I and my collaborators do; science that threatens their repeated assertions that overfishing is universal and that the oceans are being emptied.”

Environment and Conservation Organisations of New Zealand co-chair Barry Weeber told Newsroom the New Zealand industry first engaged Hilborn in the 1990s after scientists they engaged to review Niwa science on orange roughy “basically agreed” with Niwa’s findings.

“So they got Ray Hilborn, and he and his students have been involved on and off ever since in New Zealand fisheries being employed by the fishing industry,” Weeber said.

Last year Seafood New Zealand released research from AgResearch principal scientist Professor Stewart Ledgard claiming that wild-caught seafood has the lowest carbon footprint compared to other animal proteins.

Ledgard and his colleague Andre Mazzetto previously made headlines in 2021, with research finding that the New Zealand dairy industry was the most efficient milk producer in the world, at 0.74 kg CO2-equivalent gases per kilogram of milk. 

However, Greenpeace said Ledgard’s research left out the carbon impact of bottom-trawling the seafloor, which Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Simon Upton has since identified as needing protection, estimating that 240 million tonnes of organic carbon is stored in marine sediments within New Zealand’s waters.

Friend and foe

In a weekly update to subscribers earlier this month, Seafood NZ said science could be seen as both friend and foe, referencing “misinterpretations” of Upton’s report on carbon storage in sediment and links made to bottom-trawling by environmental groups.

Upton’s report, based on Niwa science, found bottom trawling “was likely to have an impact on carbon stocks”.

“Here’s the important word to understand – likely,” said an article on Seafood New Zealand’s website at the time.

“Why can’t Niwa say for sure? Because in Niwa’s own words, “the vulnerability of these [marine sediment] stocks to human perturbation is unknown.” In other words, we don’t know how much organic carbon is actually disturbed by trawling.”

However, Seafood New Zealand said it welcomed the extra transparency good science could bring as there was always room for improvement.

“What we do want people to know is that science shows us that things are much better out there in our fisheries than they’re often made out to be.”

Trawling uncertainty

Just as environmental groups pour cold water on the industry’s favoured scientists for perceived conflicts of interest and other omissions, a series of papers that found high levels of carbon dioxide emissions and ocean acidification has been shut down by industry and Hilborn himself.

A 2020 scientific paper ‘Cabral et al., A global network of marine protected areas for food’ was retracted due to a conflict of interest in the peer review stage and an error in the database used in the paper.

Similar problems have been raised about a related 2021 paper titled ‘Protecting the global ocean for biodiversity, food and climate’, commonly referred to as Sala Et Al, which found that greater numbers of fishing-free areas would lead to greater biodiversity, improved harvests and a smaller carbon footprint.

The paper included a figure that bottom trawling released more carbon than all airline travel combined, naturally leading to hundreds of news articles around the world.

According to a critique by Hilborn hosted on his website ‘Sustainable Fisheries’ there are significant issues around conflict of interest in the peer review stage and inconsistent accounting of fishing effort leading to a higher stated emissions profiles than reality.

Another paper, ‘Atmospheric CO2 emissions and ocean acidification from bottom-trawling’ authored by a similar cast of scientists published earlier this year in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, found that management of bottom-trawling efforts could be an important climate solution.

It identified bottom-trawling, which involves dragging a heavy net over the seafloor, potentially releasing 370 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide annually.

Environment and Conservation Organisations of NZ’s Barry Weeber said the original paper had basically overestimated it by about a third.

A link to this article was attached to Newsroom’s questions to industry bodies, and in an initial conversation with a communication staff member, it was quickly pointed out this paper was related to Cabral et al.

Complicated dispute

Weeber said there were multiple disputes over science in the fishing space.

“There is a broader disagreement amongst some of the fishery scientists and the ecologists as to how fisheries management is done and whether it’s ecologically appropriate or not.

“But there’s also a debate about the base information and certainly my experience over the years has been that the fishing industry in various guises has tried to undermine science that’s been undertaken by fisheries scientists.

“And I’ve seen them do things that to undermine Niwa’s research over the years and employ their own scientists to try to undermine that science as well.”

He said most of the time there was a delaying motive to the work, but by the time the complete verdict was in on a species it could be too late.

“It’s basically to say, oh, we need to have 100 percent certainty about the information before we make decisions.”

Weeber said a science that fairly balanced ecological and economic factors had to be conducted independently from industry, but there was a real funding issue.

“New Zealand is effectively spending about half of what it spent in the 1990s on fisheries research, so we’re managing a hell of a lot more stocks in the Quota Management System, we’re doing more work on the environmental impacts, but the dollar value basically hasn’t changed in nearly 27 years.”

‘For every article’

Asked about the credibility of the string of studies into carbon emissions from bottom-trawling, High Seas Fishing Group’s Andy Smith said it wasn’t to say that any given article is not credible, but rather that scientific literature goes through numerous phases of publication, review, criticism, and reassessment.

“This is not unique in the fisheries context, but the HSFG would emphasise that for every article cited by environmental non-government organisations purporting the destructive and unsustainable nature of bottom-trawling, there is another article that demonstrates that with proper management, such as New Zealand fishing operators are subject to, long-term sustainability can be maintained while continuing to bottom-trawl.

Smith said the group didn’t accept broad statements about the destructiveness and unsustainability of bottom fishing when there was a significant amount of rigorously peer-reviewed literature that promoted the sustainability of well-managed bottom fisheries, which was what New Zealand operators were doing.

“It is important to recognise that, with the regulations currently in place, bottom-fishing in the South Pacific high seas and New Zealand’s economic zone has very low impacts in its footprint when compared to both overseas operators and certainly terrestrial food sources.”