Fortune magazine published an article claiming that declining sardine fisheries and increased prices are due to climate change and the war in Iran. This is false. While warmer waters can drive sardine schools into cooler areas, this has always been the case and sardine stocks naturally fluctuate from year to year. Recent ocean warming is also a multifaceted phenomena, and not just due to climate change. Also, overfishing, especially from countries that do not care about regulations and preservation of the fish stocks like China, is putting much greater pressure on fish stocks.
The article, “‘We’re facing a double whammy’: America’s hottest tinned fish snack is shrinking by nearly half thanks to climate change and war in Iran,” places climate change front and center to blame for the sardine fish catch dropping in recent years in places like Morocco.
An ocean fisheries researcher Fortune interviewed, Rashid Sumaila from the University of British Columbia, said that sardines “are very sensitive to climate change” and “follow the temperature.”
Blaming this on climate change is silly because of the way the media has primed the public to associate climate change with supposed human-caused long term global warming. “Climate change” does not impact ocean temperatures the same everywhere and hasn’t caused consistent yearly above-average sea temperatures either.
As explained in Climate at a Glance: Ocean Temperatures: It is true that global ocean temperature has, on average, increased since the early part of the 20th century, by just about 1.3°F, but multi-year patterns like ENSO drive ocean temperatures higher and lower depending on the phase, and even longer patterns like the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) can shift temperatures over several decades. These are not human-caused, but rather natural patterns. Other shorter-term natural factors that are contributing to higher ocean temperatures and possibly impacting sardine stocks and movements are recent large El Nino cycles. In addition, evidence strongly suggests that regulations limiting emissions from ships has also played a role in recent ocean warming by letting more sunlight through to warm sea water – a human impact but not one tied to the long-term increase in human greenhouse gas emissions.
That sardines move with changing water temperatures doesn’t mean the fish are dying out, but rather moving away from the fishing zones of some countries. This is normal for sardines. Like birds, they migrate seasonally to stay in the temperature range they prefer, going north for the summer and moving south again when temperatures cool.
The article acknowledges that the fish are moving, not dying out, when they explain higher prices for sardines are exacerbated by higher fuel costs due to the war with Iran, and since fisherman “now have to travel farther to find [sardines], exactly as fuel becomes more expensive and the yield becomes less guaranteed.”
Fortune also correctly points out that “Government fuel subsidies make the underlying problem worse,” because “if you pay for fuel, that just makes people fish more than they would.”
Despite Portugal, Spain, and Morocco placing catch limits on sardines in order to protect fish stocks, illegal fishermen do not care.
A study from 2015 found that “overfishing exacerbates natural boom-and-bust cycles of the fish,” making it impossible for them to recover as quickly as they otherwise would. The State of the World Fisheries and Aquaculture report from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization says that sardines, “which represented about 33 percent of the total landings, was classified as overfished in 2023.” It also explained that catches of Pacific sardines “are strongly influenced by interannual environmental variability, particularly El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events.”
Fortune’s article only briefly mentions illegal international overfishing, in the process failing to name the country most responsible: China.
China’s distant-water fishing fleet is the largest in the world, with more than 3,000 fishing vessels that fish aggressively just outside the territorial waters of other countries. The Chinese government subsidizes these fishing fleets. The Chinese Communist Party’s response to countries complaining about declining fish stocks and China’s role in it is to blame climate change.
A recent Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article reports that near Ghana, “Chinese ships have exhausted small, sardine-like fish vital to coastal communities, according to local officials and conservationists.” In the same article, the Chinese Foreign Ministry deflects blame for its overharvest of squid by saying “the Chinese fleet isn’t responsible for the decrease in squid catches, pointing out that Peru’s own government has attributed the decline to changing ocean temperatures.”
Articles like this one in Fortune give China more cover for their activities.
The market for canned sardines is growing, especially as health fads focusing on high protein and healthy fats have become more popular. Their populations are dictated by natural boom-and-bust cycles, as nearly all small fish species demonstrate. Also, like other oceangoing migrating fish stocks, they are subject to and often harmed by overfishing especially during those bust cycles. Water temperature impacts where the fish are, and unfortunately when shallow coastal waters warm, sardines may be driven into the international waters that are famously overfished by the Chinese deep ocean commercial fishing fleet.
There is no justification for Fortune to attribute the up and down cycles and recent declines in sardine stocks to climate change, downplaying natural cycles, and more importantly, giving China’s illicit and uncontrolled fishing activity a pass in the process.
