Pauly became a Professor at Fisheries Centre in 1994, after many years at the International Centre for Living Aquatic Resource Management (ICLARM), then in Manila, Philippines.

Dr. Dirk Zeller is a Senior Research Fellow in the Sea Around Us project at the Fisheries Centre, UBC. As part of this project, Zeller leads international collaborations on fisheries data reconstruction, is responsible for global coral reef fisheries and global marine pollution modeling, engages in ocean governance and fisheries policy research, and contributes to ecosystem modeling efforts.

Humans have been exploiting marine coastlines for millennia. At first, people may have been gathering invertebrates, and harpooned or otherwise caught larger vertebrates — fishes, turtles, marine mammals — only as they swam inshore. Of these larger vertebrates, only those that had narrow coastal ranges were affected by such exploitation, and incurred the risk of being overfished.

The development of better fishing vessels, with greater ranges, subsequently enabled people to exploit resources further offshore. However, for a very long time, distance offshore, and storms (or the likelihood of storms) continued to prevent the exploitation, and hence the overexploitation of most marine species. This is the reason for the perception that fisheries were sustainable in the past, and by extension, that contemporary artisanal fisheries, and fisheries conducted by aboriginal peoples, are sustainable, whatever gear they may deploy (Pauly et al. 2002). The growth and expansion of European fishing fleets in the 17th and 18th century did not affect this perception, even when their exploitation, e.g., of cod in the North Atlantic, affected the stocks so much that localized depletions occurred (Rosenberg et al. 2005).

The Industrial Revolution saw the advent of steam trawlers, which began operating along the coasts of Britain, gradually expanding their operating radius, and depleting one coastal stock after the other (Pitcher 2001), then moving on to offshore stocks. Subsequent technical developments — diesel engines, hydraulic winches, inboard refrigeration, echo-sounders and access to real-time oceanographic data — allowed fishing boats to rapidly locate, catch and process large quantities of fish, and to land them in better condition from longer distances, thus making the entire North Atlantic, then the world ocean, accessible to European-based fishing fleets (Cushing 1988; Pauly et al. 2002).

The same transformation of fisheries occurred in other industrialized parts of the world, e.g., in North America, North Asia, and Australia. There also, it occurred mainly in the wake of the two World Wars, both of which encouraged technological developments that were subsequently transferred onto fishing vessels.

These trends became intensified after World War II, when industrial fleets began a global expansion whose effects were magnified by another major wave of fisheries expansion emanating from Latin America, and from newly independent and other countries of Southeast Asia and Africa. Global catches increased rapidly from the late 1940s to the late 1960s, grew more slowly in the 1970s and peaked in the late 1980s, when for the first time, catches from new fishing grounds failed to compensate for depleted areas (Watson and Pauly 2001; Figure 1). Global catches have been declining since, despite continuing high fishing pressure everywhere.
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