Global marine fisheries: avoiding further collapses

Fishing is our last industrial activity exploiting a wild renewable resource. The oceans, long perceived as an environment preserved from human action, have not escaped the general pattern of resource depletion under human exploitation. Scientists help society understand our changing ocean ecosystems and to identify global drivers of impacts on marine life; scientists should also contribute their part to avoiding further collapses. Both authors focused, in their career, on contributing to global sustainability science, to assist in identifying and understanding key emerging patterns that can help fisheries management, and combat overexploitation. This required not only building global databases and ecosystem modelling tools, and developing scenarios for a desirable future, but also communicating to a wide range of stakeholders the reality of human impacts on the oceans. Today a committed science is required to avoid the looming collapse of marine fisheries.