Overfishing and Fisheries Collapse
A third of global fish stocks are harvested beyond biological limits.
Severity score
49.3
Serious · default weighting
Trajectory
Worsening
What this is
Industrial fleets, subsidies and illegal unreported fishing have pushed a large share of assessed stocks past sustainable levels. Small-scale fishers in West Africa and Southeast Asia lose their livelihoods first, and bycatch destroys non-target species at scale.
Score breakdown
Each factor is a 0–100 relative severity index, not the raw figure or a specific time period. The actual counts and periods are listed under "Standardized Impact" on the right.
Loss of life
12Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.
Lives negatively impacted
66People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.
Financial cost
54Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.
Environmental impact
84Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.
Trajectory
58Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.
Audit trail
Everything this entry has been through — when it was first searched for, queued, reviewed and approved, and how its figures and rank have moved since.
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