Planet Tracker launches interactive tool to help investors reduce overfishing

Financial think tank Planet Tracker has launched an interactive dashboard to help investors identify how they could finance a recovery of fish stocks, generate higher returns for fishing companies and secure a significant return for themselves.

The Blue Recovery Bond Dashboard lets investors see in practice how such a blue bond could help achieve these goals by allowing users to input their own modelling assumptions.

This demonstrates how the interests of fishing companies and investors can be aligned with a recovery in fish stocks and the necessary temporary reduction in fishing.

The dashboard has been created on the back of the award-winning Planet Tracker research, “Can Blue Bonds Finance a Stock Recovery?”.

Planet Tracker say it is widely accepted that our oceans cannot sustain the ongoing imbalance driven by declining wild fish stocks and rising demand. 

Every year, a quantity of seafood equivalent to the weight of 1.5 billion people is taken from the sea, and 90% of fish stocks are either fully fished or overfished.

As fish becomes harder and costlier to find, wild-catch volumes are expected to decline, resulting in lower profits for the wild-catch seafood industry. A period of restraint – where wild-catch volumes are temporarily and significantly reduced – is needed to allow ecosystems to replenish. Yet few fishing companies are likely to be able or willing to bear the short-term financial consequences of such voluntary transition.

The Blue Bonds report proposes a Blue Recovery Bond and sets out a recommended framework whereby fishing companies accept a voluntary decrease in the quantity of fish caught for a set period of time.

You can find out more here.