World fishing

World's fishing fleets mapped

It's another demonstration of the power of Big Data - of mining a huge batch of statistics to see patterns of behaviour that were simply not apparent before. Computers have crunched 22 billion identification messages transmitted by sea-going vessels to map fishing activity around the globe. The analysis reveals that more than 55% of the world's oceans are subject to industrial exploitation. By area, fishing's footprint is now over four times that of agriculture.

That's an astonishing observation given that fisheries provide only 1.2% of global caloric production for human food consumption. The investigation shows clearly that the biggest influences on this activity are not environmental - whether it is summer or winter.