The interactions—including conflict and competition—between coastal small-scale fishing (SSF) communities and large-scale, distant-water fishing (DWF) fleets have garnered increasing attention in recent decades. Coastal states, such as Liberia, employ a variety of access arrangements to license foreign fishing vessels to access fisheries resources within their exclusive economic zones. This paper contributes a case study that assesses the socioeconomic impacts of distant-water trawl vessels on Liberia’s SSF and fisheries-dependent coastal communities.

Building on lessons from the Illuminating Hidden Harvests initiative, the authors identify systemic changes and specific indicators needed to fill data gaps in women's contributions to small-scale fisheries .

Nature Portfolio has launched a new collection showcasing small-scale fisheries research conducted by the Illuminating Hidden Harvests (IHH) initiative.

Oceans@Duke Director Stephanie Rousso discusses her personal experience working with women fisherfolk to promote sea turtle conservation in an opinion for Frontiers in Ocean Sustainability. "Globally, women are blending traditional knowledge with modern science, taking on challenges head-on, and redefining what it means to work toward a sustainable ocean," she writes. "While these global initiatives are empowering women at a large scale, my personal journey has shown me how deeply transformative their contributions can be at the grassroots level."

Small-scale fisheries play a significant but overlooked role in global fisheries production and are key to addressing hunger and malnutrition while supporting livelihoods around the world, according to research featured on the cover of Nature. The data and methodology for this paper were produced within the framework of the Illuminating Hidden Harvests initiative conducted by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Duke University, and WorldFish.

We provide the first global assessment of the status of preferential access areas (PAAs), a relatively understudied policy tool to govern small-scale fisheries. We find 44 countries, most of them of low or low-middle income, have established a total of 63 PAAs encompassing 3% of continental shelf area worldwide.

Fishing fleets and effort have grown throughout the waters of lower-income coastal countries in recent decades, much of which is carried out by vessels registered in higher-income countries. Fisheries access arrangements underpin this key trend in ocean fisheries and have their origins in United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea's (UNCLOS’s) goal to establish resource ownership as a mechanism to increase benefits to newly independent coastal and island states.

This document has been adapted from the research protocol used to compile country case study data and to produce the results summarized in the 2023 report Illuminating Hidden Harvests: The Contributions of Small-Scale Fisheries to Sustainable Development, coproduced by FAO, Duke University, and WorldFish.

Fishing for subsistence constitutes a livelihood safety net for poverty, malnutrition, and gender inequality for populations dependent upon aquatic foods around the world. Here, the authors provide global estimates showing that almost the same amount of small-scale fishers (52.8 million people) engage in subsistence fishing at some point during the year as in commercial employment (60.2 million people). The authors also use subsistence estimates from 14 country cases studies conducted as part of the Illuminating Hidden Harvests study to measure small-scale fisheries’ livelihood safety net function.

The global Illuminating Hidden Harvests study contributes to a more holistic understanding of what small-scale fisheries are, their importance, and why they are essential to efforts to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. By using this knowledge wisely within a human rights-based approach in line with the Small-Scale Fisheries Guidelines, and by empowering small-scale fishers and fishworkers, a more inclusive, equitable, sustainable, and resilient small-scale scale fisheries subsector can be achieved.