Fancy buying South Australian snapper for a Christmas barbecue, or casting a line for wild barramundi in Queensland, but worried about the pressure on fish stocks?
There's comfort in new data showing most fish in Australia are caught in sustainable numbers.
The first snapshot of Australia's wild fish populations, released this week, shows more than 90 per cent of the nation's catch is harvested sustainably from well-managed fisheries.
Less than two per cent comes from depleting or recovering stocks, while 3.5 per cent comes from overfished species.
Speaking at the launch of the report in Mackay, Queensland, Federal Fisheries Minister Joe Ludwig said fishing was a big part of Australian culture and a key industry for coastal towns and communities.
"Consumers can be confident that locally caught seafood comes from fisheries that effectively manage the sustainability of the wild fish stock," he said.
It's the first time Australia's wild fish stocks have been studied, using a single reporting method, from the tropical north to the temperate south and the high seas.
It took 80 full-time scientists more than 18 months to analyze information on the 150 stock fish which make up the report.
"It is quite a complicated thing, 'you just can't do a stock assessment on the back of an envelope in one day," says Dr Julian Pepperell an Australian fisheries expert and author of the book Fishes of the Open Ocean. "Each individual state is usually responsible for its own patch and this report has pieced a lot of this information together."
The reports were prepared by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES) in collaboration with more than 80 leading fisheries researchers.
The aim is to address a growing awareness among Australians of the need to conserve fish stocks and maintain biodiversity in marine ecosystems. Seafood consumption is on the rise, and preferences are changing and diversifying, the reports found.
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