The global view of transshipment: revised preliminary findings

Transshipment at sea, the offloading of catch from a fishing vessel to a refrigerated cargo vessel far from port, obscures the actual source of the catch and is a significant pathway for illegally caught fish to enter the legitimate seafood market. Occurring out of sight and over the horizon, the practice enables other nefarious activity, ranging from smuggling to human trafficking. Increasing the transparency of transshipment could improve fisheries management and reduce human rights abuses. To address this gap in transparency, SkyTruth and Global Fishing Watch analyzed over 21 billion positional Automatic Identification System (AIS) messages from ocean-going vessels between 2012 and July 2017, and we identified and tracked 641 vessels with refrigerated cargo holds (“reefers”) capable of transshipping at sea and transporting fish. We mapped 71,468 instances where these vessels loitered at sea long enough to receive a transshipment, events that we call “potential rendezvous,” and 5,783 instances where we see a fishing vessel near a loitering transshipment vessel long enough to engage in transshipment. We call those “likely rendezvous.” We considered only events that occurred at sea, ignoring transshipments at port, which are generally less of a management challenge. Our key findings include:

1. AIS can be used to monitor transshipment behavior. Because almost all transshipment vessels are equipped with AIS and keep their devices turned on most of the time, we can create a map showing where and when these vessels exhibit behavior consistent with transshipment. Also, for a portion of these events, the fishing vessels meeting with transshipment vessels use AIS as well, and we can identify both vessels. The result is a first-ever global footprint of transshipments at sea. AIS also allows us to 1 track which ports these transshipment vessels visit following likely and potential rendezvous, adding another layer of transparency.

2. Transshipment behaviors are associated with patterns of illegal, unreported, or unregulated fishing (IUU). In many countries with comparatively high levels of fisheries management, such as in North America and Europe, we see relatively little transshipment behavior. In general, we find that transshipment is more common in regions with a high proportion of IUU fishing, and we find interesting patterns of rendezvous clustering along the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) boundaries of some countries. These correlations do not provide definitive proof of specific illegal behavior, but they raise important questions to be addressed by further investigation.