Emma Desrochers

Contributing editor reporting from Hawaii, U.S.A.

Emma Desrochers is a freelance journalist based in Waialua, Hawaii, who writes about fisheries and sustainability. She graduated from Yale University in June 2021 with an undergraduate degree in environmental studies and mechanical engineering. She has contributed to the environmental conservation field through internships located in Ecuador, Thailand, and Hawaii.


Author Archive

Published on
August 18, 2023

Small-scale fisheries in Africa and Asia, where accurate stock predictions are often too expensive to conduct, are underperforming relative to their maximum sustained yields due to undue strain from overfishing, a new study published in Marine Policy has found.

African countries, in particular, are becoming net importers rather than exporters as fishery yields are declining at an estimated 1 million metric tons (MT) per year. Human,

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Published on
August 2, 2023

The second of five planned meetings hosted by the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) to discuss global plastic pollution ended with greater emphasis and discussion on marine debris, including abandoned, lost, or discarded fishing gear (ALDFG) – also known as ghost gear.

The INC sessions aim to negotiate an international, legally binding plastics treaty, as global plastics

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Published on
July 28, 2023

A group of 130 carrier vessels, overwhelmingly flagged to a small list of countries, are responsible for over 70 percent of transshipments around the world, according to recent Pew Charitable Trusts-funded research.

The report, published 19 April by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, studied 12,322 regional fisheries management organization (RFMO)-recorded transshipments, finding that 130 out of around

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Published on
July 7, 2023

The Sustainable Fisheries Partnership (SFP) and Purina Europe have recently partnered to launch the Bycatch Solutions Hub, a web-based platform that aims to connect seafood retailers and businesses with organizations capable of in-the-water solutions to reduce bycatch.

The goal of the collaboration, which the two organizations launched at Seafood Expo Global (SEG) in April 2023, is to decrease barriers preventing business and seafood retailers

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Published on
July 5, 2023

By 2050, there will be a 50-million-metric-ton supply deficit unless an additional USD 55 billion (EUR 51 billion) is invested in technology, according to Planet Tracker.

The London, U.K.-based nonprofit, which provides analytics on the role capital markets play in environmental degradation, released its “Avoiding Aquafailure” report on 11 May.

“Aquafailure is the inability of aquaculture to produce enough seafood –

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Published on
June 16, 2023

Three crab landing sites in the province of Lampung in Sumatra, Indonesia, have implemented new technology to better monitor the activities of small-scale fisheries in the area.

The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), with local partners in Indonesia and technological help from U.S. firms  CVision AI, Teem Fish Monitoring, and Snap IT, developed a smart camera system in 2020 called SmartPass, an electronic monitoring approach focused on

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Published on
June 9, 2023

Social media is an effective data-collection tool when studying the activities of recreational fisheries, reducing the limitations of cost and timeliness associated with traditional research methods, according to a new study.

University of Hawai’i at Hilo Adjunct Associate Professor and Hawai'i Cooperative Fishery Research Unit Leader Tim Grabowski was the lead author of the paper, which was published in March 2023 in Aquatic Biology.

The

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Published on
June 8, 2023

Por la Pesca, a joint project established in 2022 between the Walton Family Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), is on a mission to decrease illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing in Ecuador and Peru.

Por la Pesca has set a goal of decreasing IUU fishing in the two South American nations – an issue that has risen in prevalence and profile in South America – by up to 30 percent over the

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Published on
May 26, 2023

Recent research from NOAA found 67 percent of 64 federally managed species in the California Current large marine ecosystem, extending from the U.S.-Canadian border to the southern tip of the Baja California peninsula in Mexico, to be at least moderately vulnerable to climate change, with 23 percent considered highly or very highly vulnerable.

Scientists from NOAA and the U.S. Geological Survey, in partnership with the University of California,

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Published on
May 19, 2023

The Sustainable Fisheries Partnership’s 2022 reduction fisheries assessment has raised concerns over the continued stagnation of movement on sustainability in the sector since 2018.

Published on 19 April, the report is the 13th edition of SFP’s assessment of the world’s reduction fisheries, which are fisheries that focus on stocks used mainly for fishmeal and fish oil. SFP released the 2022 report in two parts to better

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