Yes, thank you very much. Thank you for coming. I appreciate that there are some people still interested in fish. As you said,

it's not a very sexy topic and it's hard to get people interested. But maybe I will manage to spread some fish love during these coming minutes. if I can change the slide.

Just to tell you, give you a brief introduction to Oceana. We are an international NGO. We are science-based. We carry our own exploration at sea, our own expeditions, and our work is targeted at changing policy. So making sure that fisheries can be more sustainable,

more transparent and eliminates pirates illegal fishing. So today I will try to tell you about the challenges and possible

technology solutions to some problems and challenges that we face in the oceans. First of the challenges is the research itself. And then we have like three key problems when we think about sustainable fisheries. This is overfishing, illegal fishing, and seafood traceability.

When you think about ocean research, the main challenge we have is that oceans are deep, great, and oceans are huge as Donald Trump would say. So this is the principal challenge. How to see what's happening on the seabed, how to monitor the the surface of the oceans.

We use underwater robots like this ROV, remotely operated vehicle. This is a solution for checking deep sea, for example, at depths bigger than let's say 50 meters, 100 meters.

Because the divers can only go as deep as 20, 30, maybe 40 meters deep. So these ROVs are designed to sustain pressure at very high depth, for example, like 1,000 meters, 2, 3, 5, even up to 7 kilometers in case of industrial robots.

This is the operation of launching an underwater robot. This is, as you can see here, this cable connecting the robot is fiber optic, so you can have data transmission of the images and footage that you can get from the seabed. It's quite

challenging because of underwater currents, basically. When you launch the ROV, it's crucial to get it in the right position and not to lose it. Because if you lose it at 5,000 or 2,000 or 1,000 meters deep, it's very hard to retrieve. The kind of images we got from the seabed were sometimes quite depressing because you can see basically marine litter everywhere.

There are signs of human activity, human impact, even at 500 meters, 800 meters depth. Starting with tires, litter, a lot of plastic bags, barrels, also ghost nets. Ghost nets are abundant fish nets that can keep on fishing while they float or just

go out to the seabed and stay there, sometimes forever. And this is a trap for marine organisms as well. So when you think about other ways to explore the oceans, there are also gliders. These are like small submarine autonomous

robots who move by means of buoyancy. So they go up and down. While they reach the surface, they can exchange the data via satellites. And the good thing about the gliders is that they're completely autonomous and they

once launch a glider, it can stay in the water for weeks or even months and has a range of hundreds of kilometers. Gliders are normally used to take measurements such as temperature, sea currents, chlorophyll fluorescence,

acoustics, bottom depth. So they're used for all kinds of measurements. There are also drones that you can use. There's like plenty of different applications of drones. You can follow whales, marine mammals and migratory species to check their migratory paths. You can use them for,

for example, for checking of any navigation hazards or pollution spills. You can use them also for monitoring of illegal activities or monitoring of marine protected areas. So there's a whole array of applications still to explore.

So these were like the basic technology devices we can use to explore the oceans. And when we think about problems and challenges in ocean conservation, one of them is overfishing. And this is a problem that in Europe maybe it's not very known because we think that we are at the, we are the leaders of sustainability and

environmental protection. In case of fishing, it's not entirely true. And you may not realize but the rate of overfishing in the Mediterranean Sea is very high. It's 93% of overfished stocks. Whereas in that landing, the tendency was good.

We're going down and now we are more like half-half. Half of the stocks are fished in a sustainable way and half of the fish are still over exploited. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of improvement to be done. When we think about European fisheries, it's not about science and it's not about technology.

I wish there was some technology solution, a silver bullet to resolve this problem. However, it's a political decision. The fishing quotas, fishing limits are set every December in Brussels where 28 ministers of fisheries, food and agriculture come and

basically, they negotiate the fishing quotas. The quotas, the fish agreements were supposed to be based on science. So scientists give advice on how much fish you can fish in order for the stocks to be sustainable so that they can reproduce. However, in practice, it's more about politics and horse trading. I would say rather fish trading.

So the ministers come and after long negotiations, they come with this and that amount of fish. The problem we are having is that they allow for overfishing. So the country number one, which has allowed for overfishing during the last 17 years was Spain.

They overfished by 38%, which makes almost 1 million tons of fish. As you can see, Germany is in the fifth place. So the rate of overfishing in case of German stocks was 22%, which makes almost half a million of tons of fish that should not be fished in order to be sustainable.

So this kind of question maybe you could ask to your minister, Mr. Christian Schmidt, who is the federal minister for food and agriculture and he goes to buses to negotiate fishing limits. So it is very important to hold your politicians accountable. You have to keep pressure on them and you have to show that you care because nobody cares about fish.

If you tweet at the ministry, maybe they will change their mind and they'll see that there's somebody more than just fishing companies and fishing lobby and people care about this. Another problem we have is pirate fishing and this is, I will use my fancy

tentacle to point and to underline that this is not how pirates look anymore. When you think about pirate fishing these days, it looks like this. It's IUU fishing, illegal, unreported, unregulated fishing. So fishing where you have no permission to fish in places where you cannot fish, fishing for species that you cannot fish, fishing using gears that is illegal or basically

fishing more than you're supposed to. This is a big problem for the environments because you impact the marine life. It's a problem. It's a social problem because it can cause social impacts. There were also cases of slavery and

human rights abuses in such situation of illegal fishing and it's a problem for economy because it creates big loss. In order to better monitor fishing we may think of using satellite data and this data is

used for example by one of the tools which is called Global Fishing Watch and it's an interactive tool that basically visualizes the satellite data in order to give free access to everybody to information about where fishing activities is taking place. If you go to the website, you can check this tool and it gives you the map of

fishing grounds. You can check different layers. For example, you can check apply the filter for marine protected areas, for exclusive economic zones of each countries, high seas and basically, it will show you according to different layers and filters the type of activity you're looking for. All these yellow dots,

the light dots are potential fishing activities. So you can see how the fleet is concentrating in certain areas where there are very abundant fish stocks. You can also change the timeline so you can monitor the fishing that took place last week,

last month or even four years ago because this database covers four and a half years and over 36,000 fishing vessels. This is based on satellite technology called IIS, Automatic Identification System. It is a tracking system which is based to avoid marine collisions.

So most of the fishing vessels and all big vessels are equipped with this device. They send the signal to the land, to the controlling authorities, but also to surrounding ships to basically transmit information about them. The data that they transmit is

the name of the vessel, the signal name, the speeds, the direction and the type of vessel. So based on all this information, you can figure out what kind of vessel it is and where is it moving. The system basically

gathers all this data, processes it and based on algorithms and machine learning, it shows you which vessels are likely to be fishing because for example when a fishing activity occurs, the speed slows down and the vessel is moving in a certain way depending on the fishing gear that it's using. Whereas it used to be like straight course,

it may go all of a sudden zigzag at the lower speed so you can tell that this is actually there's some kind of activity that reminds fishing. As a case study, I will show you how we can apply this tool. This is a situation before declaring a no-take zone in Central Pacific Ocean and the Phoenix Islands protected areas.

So before January 2015, there was a lot of fishing activity going on. You can see all the light dots. After declaring the marine protected area, which is the red square, you set the timeline from January 1st and you see that there is hardly any activity going on. So that shows that

actually the marine protected area is working and the fishing vessels are avoiding this protected area. This tool may also serve to check how respected this in no-intake zone is.

For example, this is a case of one of the fishing vessels that entered the zone at the regular speed. You can see the straight line and then it started doing some kind of strange course, which was potentially fishing, and then it went out. So this kind of data, when the controlling authority sees it, something is happening there. They can send controlling vessels, a coast guard, and check what was the kind of activity. Was it legal? Was it illegal?

So this is a good indication. And actually this vessel was illegally fishing in a zone that was not supposed to. You can also check for different other filters in this tool, like choose the kind of fleet that you want to monitor.

In this example, we can see Spain in yellow color, Japan in red, and South Korea in violet. So you can see that there are certain zones where the fishing vessels goes, because basically there is a big biodiversity there and abundant fish stocks.

Another problem and another challenge that we have when it comes to fisheries is the seafood trade, which is one of the most globalized businesses. The markets are very complex here. As you can see, the trade flows are quite complicated, because some of the fish is fished in one state, then it can be sent to China to process,

then sent back to Europe to sell. So it's an extremely globalized market. Hence, the traceability of seafood is a big challenge. When it comes to Europe, we are one of the leading seafood markets. As you know, we have

500 million consumers, citizens and consumers, and the annual consumption is about 24 kilos of fish per year. Of course, it varies in southern countries, in Mediterranean countries, Nordic countries, the consumption is a bit higher.

However, we are very dependent on imports, so we import 60% of fish that we consume. This is because our stocks are overfished and because also we consume a lot. Another question when we think about seafood trade is the long supply chain. So from the moment that the fish is caught at the fishing vessel to the moment that it's

available at your local fishmonger or in the restaurant, when it goes to the final consumer, it takes a lot of different stages of processing, transport or selling. So at each of these stages, the middleman, something might go wrong in terms of traceability.

It is also known that when it comes to meat, it's easier to identify. We got four, maybe five basic types of meats, and more or less people can tell the difference between chicken, pork and beef. But in case of fish, it's a whole array of different types of fish.

Seafood, white fish. Can you really tell the difference between a cod, seit, Alaskan pollock, hake and pangasius? It's hard to tell. And we documented this problem in Brussels when we made a DNA testing in. Yeah, you can basically get something else that you wanted.

We tested 150 restaurants in Brussels and over 280 fish dishes. And the result was that one third of this fish was mislabeled. So you were not given what you ordered. They pretended to be selling bluefin tuna in practice.

That was something else. Yellowfin tuna, less expensive species, or in case of cod, it were like up to 10 different species that were pretending to be cod. So that's a potential problem in the restaurants to find out. And the reason is because the fish, as I said, looks quite the same.

It's hard to really tell what's the difference between bluefin tuna, which is very expensive, exquisite and not really in the best condition fish, and yellowfin tuna, which is more popular, it's cheaper, it's easier to get. So in over 80% of the cases that the sellers were claiming to sell this kind of fish,

it was different type of tuna, especially in sushi restaurants. So it's really hard to get, especially when you think that it's so rare. So whenever the fish is cheap, looks very cheap, it's something fishy about it. And you should be concerned. So all this type of fish might look like a very complicated word for people who have

no idea about fisheries. I can tell you as an anecdote that while we were testing the fish, it took us three months of eating fish every day. We would go to restaurants to get very small samples under cover and then give

it to the University of Leuven to test for genetics. We had one sample that was very problematic because they couldn't match it with any fish that they had in their database. And they had about 11,000 different DNA for fish. So they told us that probably it's not the fish. So we still don't know what we ate.

Maybe it was a rat or something else, but it was not fish. So solution to improve traceability of seafood, you may think about different technologies, you may think about different use of big data, you may think about blockchain, which is becoming more and more popular as a solution to

traceability problems in supply chains. You can think about transparency apps that help the customers and the consumers to tell one fish of another and also spur awareness about the sustainability status of a given fish and different sets of database websites that try to

help in this challenge. However, if we think about technology, as I said, there's no silver bullets and it all depends on human factors. So whenever you order fish, my recommendation would be to get to know its status. If there's any particular fish that you like, try to check out.

Is it sustainable? How is it fished? Ask questions, ask questions in the restaurants, ask questions at the fishmonger, because if you're concerned, the seafood providers will be also concerned. So ask them, is it imported? Is it domestic? How is it caught? Is it sustainable? Are you sure this is this kind of fish? How do you know? Just ask questions, be inquisitive.

And also, as I said, fishing quotas are a political problem. So contact your representatives, members of European Parliament, contact the Ministry and tell them basically to stop overfishing. Dan Kishin, thank you very much. Please follow us and help us to stop overfishing and spread the word.

Thank you. And there is some time for some questions and hopefully some answers. If you have some questions, just raise your hand, I will come to you. Oh, sorry.

Hello. I have a question. I stopped eating fish because of this reason, like a while back, but I always thought about like fish that was unstuck or they just like have their own fishing pools where they breed the fish.

What about these kind of fish? Aquaculture? Aquaculture? Yes. Just what's your opinion on it or something? What's your opinion on these kind of fish? Yes. So I was talking about wild fish only because we mainly work on wild fish and then fisheries. We want the fisheries to be sustainable because fisheries can be sustainable. If you take out the amounts that it's not, it's small

enough to make the stock population recover, it can be sustainable. And it's less impactful than the agriculture, for example. When you think about aquaculture, so fish farming, it's more, it's also challenging because you have to think about the way you impact the

environment. What do you do with the waste? What do you do with antibiotics? How do you keep your fish healthy? So it can be tricky. Also another consumer perspective question, like there's a bunch of, you

know, seals and audits and then there's MCE, MSC, sustainability, etc. I never know which of those I can trust. Like I stopped eating fish because I felt so bad about overfishing and I

was so worried about making the wrong choice that I've just decided not to eat any, which is probably the wrong approach too because you want to give your money to support those who are doing it right to keep them in business and continue doing the right thing and changing the minds of everyone else. So is there a certification that you say, well, they're actually doing a

really good job in tracking the fish that these products or these suppliers or sellers are using? There are many types of labeling and certification. However, the problem is there's no one consistent and globalized standard. So the question is, what do you really consider a

sustainable? Some certificates they consider only sustainability environmentally. There are also questions of social sustainability. Is it sourced in a way that respects, for example, human rights? So there is no one good label, I would say. On the other hand, a label is better than no label at all.

So we have to make your own choice. It's not easy. I wanted to ask, besides those protected areas, what else is being done or what else could be done to avoid these pirates?

To avoid pirate fishing. There are many ways. One of the ways is cut them off the market. That would be market incentive, basically. Make sure that these companies, they don't get insurance coverage, that they're not allowed to fish.

And for example, they are not allowed to take credit from the banks, for example. They will be addressing the illegal fishing from a completely different side. Of course, there is control and monitoring surveillance by Coast Guard, but it's not always possible at high seas. So the challenge is to identify and those companies are often very untransparent.

You cannot really see who is benefiting from selling this fish, because there are many middle companies in between. So you have to find out and cut them off from the market so that they cannot sell the fish that they catch in an illegal way.

And one last question. Hello, one question is, is there a point of no return? So when is the date when we have overfished, when it's over with fish?

When is the moment that we overfish? How do we know this? Yeah, you think the moment will come when we do? Yeah, for some stocks the moment has come. For example, there is a case in a coat in Newfoundland, in the Canadian coast there was complete coat, fisheries collapsed in the early 90s. And only now, after 25 years, it's slowly recovering.

So normally, the rough awaken is when you see that there's no more fish, but now today with the statistical methods we have, we can assess the state of the biomass. So you just check how much fish, how much small fish there is, what's the reproduction rate, what's the mortality,

and you can assess this by sampling. And there are institutes that deal with this question. And they provide the scientific advice to the ministers. And it should be respected, but it's not always the case, and that's the problem. But there are scientific methods in biology that deals with it. Thank you for coming by, Agnes Lisik.

Thank you.