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
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.