Feed aggregator

Many of the iconic coastal villages of Australia have a close association with professional fishing. In New South Wales, towns up and down the coast historically supported fishing fleets which supplied the seafood needs of locals, Sydney and the broader state community.

But the NSW fishing industry has changed significantly in the past 30 years, in response to a range of environmental and community concerns. People are more worried about the number of fish, habitat impacts, and how access to fish should be allocated.

There have been changes and restrictions on licences and fishing gear, quotas for some species and fisheries, and a substantial reduction in fishing areas through the expansion of marine parks and the creation of recreational fishing havens (where all professional fishing is banned). The number of current fishing licences in NSW is just a quarter of what it was during the industry’s peak in the 1970s and ‘80s.

Estimated NSW fishing licence holders 1881-2016 Wilkinson, 2013, Wilkinson, 1997 and NSW Department of Primary Industries

The industry is currently going through more management changes and an expansion of existing marine reserves into Commonwealth waters.

There will be more challenges in the future. As populations grow, there will be more competition for resources, and pressure from recreational fishers to close more of the ocean to professional fishing. Similar campaigns in Queensland and Victoria have prompted changes to the professional fishing industry, with unknown impacts on local communities. This has led to serious concerns about the ongoing viability of the industry in some regional centres.

How much is fishing worth?

We recently carried out a two-year assessment of the ways professional fishing contributes to the social and economic lives of NSW coastal communities. We assessed how the industry contributes to seven key dimensions of community well-being.

We traversed the NSW coast speaking to the breadth of the community, through interviews and surveys. We found that the industry remains a vital ingredient for maintaining the economic, social and cultural richness of coastal communities.

In particular our approach highlighted the importance of considering both social and economic factors, and the interdependence between sectors, when judging the value of professional fishing to communities.

The economic assessment revealed that the industry contributes more than A$436 million in revenue annually to the NSW economy and accounts for about 3,290 full-time jobs. This includes the fishers, service industries, sales and marketing.

This is a significant increase over previous estimates of the industry’s value, which did not include the “flow on” economic impacts to other businesses that rely on the fishing industry. These contributions are especially valued in smaller, regional communities where fishing still plays a central role in local economies.

For instance, Kari Esplin, secretary of the Eden Chamber of Commerce and a local business owner, told us:

Economically I see the fishing industry as a baseline in our community … it’s something that’s been there for a hundred years providing a steady economic benefit to the town and the region … It also has the benefit of being a sustainable fishery, not only from the point of view of its fishing practices, but also from a family point of view. So it’s the type of business that can be handed down through families if they choose, which builds a sense of tradition in the town, and also gives those families a feeling of self-worth that they’re a second, third or even fifth generation family business.

Looking beyond economic data gave us an insight into role the industry plays in other areas of community life. Professional fishers, for example, regularly participate in search and rescue.

Seafood is central to many cultural celebrations such as Christmas and the Lunar New Year. And fishing and long standing fishing families are part of the cultural heritage of many communities.

Seafood tourism

The research also revealed sometimes hidden or unrecognised relationships between different sectors. In particular, professional fishing and tourism support and sustain each other in NSW coastal communities.

We found that 89% of NSW residents expect to eat local seafood when they visit the coast and 64% indicated they would be interested in watching professional fishers at work while on holidays.

Grahame Lewis, the Nelson Bay Co-Op manager, told us:

People love watching – they come down and watch the boats unload, they see what sort of fish are coming in, they see it getting wheeled over to the shops and they know there’s stuff going in there from the local fishermen. It’s a drawcard really. People love going to seaside ports and just watching – not only here but everywhere along the coast.

Recreational fishers were much more likely to be interested in both buying fish from local professional fishers and watching professional fishing. This seems at odds with the messages of conflict between recreational and professional fishers commonly seen in public debate. Likewise 78% of recreational fishers across the state prefer bait caught by NSW professional fishers.

Professional fishing is also economically and culturally important in many coastal Indigenous communities. Indigenous fishers have a long history in the industry. Fishing still plays an important role in providing income, employment, a nutritious food source, independence and pride. This extends into the broader Indigenous community with fishers sharing a proportion of the catch and important cultural knowledge with kin.

Efforts to improve the environmental sustainability of the industry have been largely successful, and this is continuing to improve. Studies like ours give us an insight into how we can also ensure the economic and social sustainability of the industry, given its integral role in many coastal communities.

Nearly all (94%) of NSW coastal residents believe the fishing industry should be maintained in NSW. Our research gives us insights into how we can achieve this. And what we stand to lose if we don’t get it right.

This article was also co-authored by Nicole Mazur, visiting fellow in the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University.

Michelle Voyer has been involved in a number of projects that have received funding from the Commonwealth Fisheries Research and Development Corporation, the NSW Recreational Fishing Trust and the NSW Department of Primary Industries. This project was funded by the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation.

Alistair McIlgorm has received funding from The Commonwealth Fisheries Research and Development Corporation and The Department of Primary Industries, NSW for commercial and recreational fishing research. He is Director of Dominion Consulting Pty Ltd.

Kate Barclay receives funding from the Australian Commonwealth Fisheries Research and Development Corporation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. She has previously received research funding from a range of organizations including Greenpeace, TRAFFIC, the World Bank, the European Parliament Committee on Fisheries and the United Nations Development Programme. She is affiliated with the International Pole and Line Foundation.

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Do you ever feel that the weather is worse on the weekend? Well you might be right!

Our research, published in Environmental Research Letters, shows that in Australia’s biggest cites, the temperature is on average up to 0.3℃ cooler on Sundays compared to Thursdays and Fridays.

Not only are humans affecting the temperature on a global scale, we’re also doing it in our own backyards.

There is nothing in nature that occurs on a weekly cycle. Therefore any weekly pattern seen in weather (such as temperature and rainfall) must result from human activity, such as generating electricity, powering motor vehicles and using air-conditioners.

Most of these activities deposit waste heat and pollution into the atmosphere, and weekly cycles in temperature provide valuable insights into the consequences of such activities on the urban environment.

Our study shows that weekly cycles in daytime temperature occur in almost all Australian major cities. Sundays are often the coolest and Thursday or Friday the hottest due to human activity. This differs according to the time of day, with early mornings showing a much stronger signal than the afternoon.

Rush hour weekly cycle

Early mornings are often associated with cooler air temperatures, which can trap any waste heat near the surface. By contrast, in the afternoon the temperature has warmed and the local surface heat can be carried away to higher levels. So we see less of a strong relationship between human activity and temperature.

Hence the 9am temperature is higher during the week (coinciding with the morning rush hour) and much cooler on the weekend (when the traffic volume is quieter).

Melbourne 1955-2013 average midnight and morning (9am) temperature

Melbourne and other major Australian cities are cooler at the weekend during the day, because they’re less busy. But what about night life?

In western cultures, with Saturdays and Sundays being days off work for a large proportion of the population, Friday and Saturday evenings have become popular with people going to restaurants, pubs, and theatres. This means there is more traffic and human activities in the city centres on these evenings through to the early hours of the following day.

Melbourne’s midnight temperature is warmest on Saturday (Friday night) and Sunday (Saturday night), which is the opposite to what we see for 9am.

Islands of heat

Cities are also generally warmer than their surroundings, a phenomena known as the “urban heat island” effect. Don’t rush off to the beach though – it’s only hotter in the city. We can see this in weekly temperatures by comparing city centres to surrounding suburbs.

When we compare Melbourne city temperature to the airport temperatures at Tullamarine, Laverton and Moorabbin, the city is a lot warmer than the airports, especially at night time. This difference is largest on Saturdays and Sundays, showing that Melbourne’s active night-life is increasing the urban heat island effect.

1972-2013 average difference between Melbourne city temperature airport temperatures at midnight and 9am.

The difference is less in the morning, especially on Saturdays and Sundays. There is even a small urban cool island on Sunday mornings compared to some suburbs.

Temperatures are closely linked to traffic volumes within cities. These can be used as a good indicator of the overall level of human activity.

Traffic volume at a typical Melbourne CBD junction during October 2014.

Consistent with traffic volumes (at a typical busy inner-city intersection), temperatures on Sunday mornings are much less than weekday mornings. It’s this difference in morning traffic that allows us to measure the difference of the city without cars (Sunday) and with cars (Monday to Friday) at the same time of day.

Figures show that traffic congestion costs about A$4.6 billion in Melbourne each year. Reducing this is high on the agenda for Infrastructure Victoria and the state government, putting forward numerous traffic reducing strategies including peak-time penalties for motorists and a London-style congestion charge for central Melbourne.

Beyond Victoria, the Australian government is concerned with the need to create cooler, greener and more liveable cities in the face of climate change.

Reducing traffic has obvious benefits for travel time and sanity, but our study shows that Melbourne is significantly cooler when traffic levels (and general human activity) are low, based on the weekly cycles of urban temperatures.

Nick Earl receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Don't write it off just yet. american_rugbier/Flickr, CC BY-SA

A recently published obituary for the Great Barrier Reef has drawn ire from reef scientists. While obituaries, even satirical ones, are undoubtedly premature, they are part of a long and complicated history of death on the reef.

The obituary comes after this year’s record bleaching event in the northern section of the reef, where more than 50% of coral has died on some reefs.

Since settlement, dead reefs along the Great Barrier Reef have been celebrated as an economic resource, criticised as a scientific misnomer, and now seemingly embraced by conservationists as a shock tactic.

A coral reef flat near Port Denison. William Saville-Kent, The Great Barrier Reef of Australia: Its Products and Potentialities (London: W.H. Allen, 1893). A dead reef is a good reef

In the 19th and 20th centuries, settler Australians did not grieve the abundance of dead coral they found; they celebrated it. Live coral was praised for its aesthetic beauty and natural charms but dead coral could be crushed, burned down, and turned into building materials or fertiliser. Dead coral had a use and potential for economic development.

When the colonial government was considering a site for settlement in Cape York, one of the appeals of Somerset was the abundance of coral lime on nearby Albany Island.

In 1872, the sub-collector of customs and police magistrate at Cardwell, Charles Eden, wrote that Cardwell’s bay was “one mass of dead coral”, lying loose and easily collected in minutes. The use of coral lime as building materials or fertiliser continued into the 20th century.

Historical geographer Ben Daley claims that between 1900 and 1940 licensed coral mining took place at at least 12 different locations, largely between Townsville and Cairns.

Despite the odd protest the reef’s endless supply of dead coral continued to be viewed as an economic asset. In 1951, marine zoologist Frank McNeill wrote that the reef was a “wealth in coral gravel”.

He compared the reef’s coral with “a dead reef” in Moreton Bay, Brisbane. There a company had been milling the dead coral for cement manufacturing but the coral was “not nearly the quality of that from the Great Barrier Reef deposits”. He wondered when the reef’s limitless supply would be “turned to account”.

Frank McNeill’s article on the Reef’s coral debris drew attention to a latent economic resource awaiting mass development. Dead, or just rocky?

In the postwar era, as the impacts of western economic development on the environment became more clear, the idea of exploiting an environment such the Great Barrier Reef for minerals became less socially acceptable.

The issue came to a head in 1967 when a Cairns cane grower, Donald Forbes, lodged an application to mine Ellison Reef (35km northeast of Dunk Island) for limestone. Forbes believed the area he wanted to mine was “dead”.

He told reporter Patricia Clare, author of the 1971 book The Struggle for the Great Barrier Reef, that “the lime he wanted to take was not living coral but coral … that was lying all over the place out there, just waiting to be gathered up”.

Forbes’ application prompted one of longest environmental campaigns in Australian history, which ended with the establishment of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.

The conservationists’ main objection to Forbes’ application was the idea that Ellison Reef was dead. To prove that it was alive, members of the Queensland Littoral Society (the original name for the Australian Marine Conservation Society) completed surveys of the reef.

Their survey constructed an image of Ellison Reef which contrasted sharply with its supposed demise. While to outward appearances it seemed dead, it was in fact a complex living community.

The Innisfail mining warden, who recommended that the lease be rejected, announced that “the term ‘dead reef’ is a misnomer … the reef is in fact not ‘dead’ but very much alive”.

Wanted: alive

In the 1960s the idea of the reef being dead was anathema to conservationists and scientists alike. Conservationists foresaw a future in which dead reefs would be plundered for their remaining useful qualities. Scientists saw a misunderstanding that needed to be rectified.

Today, claims of a dead reef are still criticised by scientists. In contrast, conservationists are more willing to embrace the notion both to draw attention to their cause and to shock the public into activism.

The Great Barrier Reef’s future is clearly uncertain, but we can learn many things from its past. I wonder if conservationists should stay on the message established in 1967: that the Great Barrier Reef is very much alive. That in itself might be enough to shock folks into action.

A living reef offers hope and opportunity for change. As tourist operators lamented earlier this year, dead reefs could deter visitors who have no interest in visiting a coral graveyard. It is unlikely that concerned citizens would organise to save a dead Great Barrier Reef.

Rohan Lloyd is a member of the Australian Labor Party.