Sponsored By:
The Barbara Delano Foundation
The Homeland Foundation
The David & Lucile Packard Foundation
The AVINA Foundation

Presented By:
WildAid
Hawaii Audubon Society
Pacific Fisheries Coalition

Michael Sutton
Conservation Program
The David & Lucile Packard Foundation
Email: [email protected]

Abstract

A variety of legal mechanisms exist that could help protect and conserve shark populations worldwide. These include local, state/provincial, regional, national, and international laws, agreements, and regulations adopted to manage fisheries and conserve natural resources and marine biological diversity. New legal authorities will soon be available that could help protect shark populations as well.

Despite existing legal mechanisms, however, most shark fisheries remain unregulated and many shark populations are in decline as a result. This is primarily because most sharks are captured and killed incidentally-as bycatch-in fisheries for other species such as tunas. While the target fishery is sometimes regulated, the shark bycatch is frequently neither limited nor even well documented. An estimated 100 million sharks per year are killed in fisheries, but only a small fraction of that number are subject to any form of management.

To make matters worse, legal protection for sharks is frequently inconsistent, even within one country. For example, the United States bans the wasteful practice of shark "finning"-slicing off the fins and discarding the live carcass-in Atlantic waters but not in the Pacific. Moreover, domestic and international trade in shark products such as skin, fins, meat, and cartilage is largely unregulated and poorly monitored.

That most shark fisheries remain unrestricted today is mainly due to a lack of political will rather than deficient legal authority. Fishery managers have simply failed to implement the precautionary approach and set catch limits for sharks. They usually cite a lack of scientific information on which to base a management regime. But plenty of authority exists in international law to justify precautionary catch limits, even where population or fisheries data are totally lacking. The biology and life histories of most sharks suggest that they are the fishes most in need of precautionary management. Thus, if sharks continue to decline worldwide, it will not be the result of inadequate legal authority but rather a distinct lack of political impetus to put existing laws to work.