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Yes. Both commercial fishing and fish farming can impose environmental costs, but they do so in different ways, and the scale of harm depends on the species, gear, location, and management. Capture fisheries can put pressure on target stocks and unintentionally catch other species; finfish farms can add feed and waste to surrounding water and seabeds. Neither system has one environmental footprint that applies everywhere, and the evidence does not support a universal ranking of which is better.
What counts as fishing—and how large is the industry?
Here, “fishing industries” includes wild capture fisheries and aquaculture. The distinction matters: capture fisheries remove animals from wild populations, while aquaculture raises aquatic animals in farms. Their impacts are different, and an assessment that treats them as one activity can obscure the main costs.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimated that total fisheries and aquaculture production reached 235 million tonnes in 2024, including 195 million tonnes of aquatic animals. Of those animals, aquaculture produced 103 million tonnes and capture fisheries about 92 million tonnes, including 80 million tonnes from marine fisheries. The figures do not include the same scope when algae are added: aquaculture produced 141 million tonnes valued at $391 billion in 2024 when algae are included.
| System | Main impact pathway | What affects the level of impact |
|---|---|---|
| Capture fisheries | Removal of wild animals, incidental catch, and possible damage to habitat | Target stock, gear selectivity, fishing practices, and local conditions |
| Finfish aquaculture | Feed and fish waste entering the water and accumulating on the seabed | Farm location, water movement, seabed type, and management |
These are different pathways, not a scorecard: the available evidence does not establish a universal footprint comparison across seafood types, fishing gear, and farms.
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What environmental costs can come from capture fishing?
Bycatch affects more than unwanted fish
NOAA defines bycatch as catch fishers do not want, cannot sell, or are not allowed to keep. NOAA’s 2016 bycatch strategy explains that some degree of bycatch is inherent in certain fishing operations because species share productive ocean areas. Its consequences vary by fishery.
Unintentionally caught animals can be injured or killed, including protected species. Bycatch can slow species recovery, add pressure to fish stocks, alter the availability of predators and prey, and affect communities that depend on fisheries. Fishing can also damage habitat when corals or sponges are caught. Gear selectivity and fishing practices can reduce incidental catch, but do not necessarily eliminate it. NOAA identifies monitoring and estimation, research, management, enforcement, and communication as parts of reducing bycatch.
Stock pressure is local, not captured by a single global average
FAO reports that capture fisheries production has stayed within a range of 86–94 million tonnes a year since the late 1980s, while nearly all growth in aquatic production since then has come from aquaculture. That production trend does not, by itself, show whether a particular stock is being fished sustainably.
FAO estimated that 72.6 percent of all landings in 2023 originated from biologically sustainable stocks. This is a landings-weighted aggregate: it is not the share of individual fish stocks that are sustainable, nor evidence that every seafood product has a low environmental impact.
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1Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute2Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems3Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesWhat environmental costs can come from fish farms?
NOAA’s aquaculture guidance, last updated in 2024, describes potential water-quality effects from finfish farms, including changes in dissolved nitrogen and phosphorus, turbidity, lipids, and dissolved oxygen. Uneaten feed and fish waste can add nutrients to the water and accumulate on the seabed when the amount supplied exceeds what can decompose.
Farm location helps determine how much waste remains nearby. NOAA says water-column enrichment is generally not detectable at well-flushed sites, where currents disperse material more readily. Seabeds where material tends to settle—called depositional sites—are more prone to waste accumulation than erosional sites, where material is more readily moved away.
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Management can reduce these pressures without making every farm impact-free. NOAA describes careful site selection, monitoring under U.S. Clean Water Act requirements, fallowing a site to allow sediment to recover, and integrated multitrophic aquaculture, in which species such as seaweeds, oysters, and mussels can assimilate some waste. These examples describe approaches in NOAA’s guidance; they are not proof that all farms use them or that all impacts are addressed.
How does climate change affect the environmental picture?
Climate change is a pressure on fisheries and aquaculture as well as a risk to future wild-fish availability. FAO projects that under high-emissions scenarios, exploitable fish biomass could decline by more than 10 percent by 2050 in several regions. This is a conditional projection for several regions, not a forecast of the same decline in every fishery or a statement about all seafood production.
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Repair common Windows errors and clear accumulated junk for a smoother, more stable PC - no reinstall needed.Free scan · no reinstallThe sources cited here do not establish a global share of greenhouse-gas emissions for the fishing sector or comparable lifecycle footprints by fishing gear and seafood type. It would therefore be misleading to label seafood as uniformly high- or low-carbon on this evidence.
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Why do these environmental costs matter economically?
Environmental harm can have economic consequences when it weakens stocks, affects protected species or habitats, or reduces the resilience of fishing-dependent communities. But reducing impacts is not socially cost-free: FAO says more than 600 million livelihoods worldwide depend on fisheries and aquaculture, and aquatic animal foods supply at least one-fifth of animal protein consumption for 3.1 billion people. FAO also reports that 89 percent of aquatic-animal production goes to human consumption.
Access to this food and its benefits is uneven. FAO reported average per-capita availability in 2023 of 26.3 kg in Asia and 9.1 kg in Africa. Those are regional availability figures, not measures of what each person eats or proof that products and income are equitably distributed.
For a U.S.-specific illustration of the sector’s economic scale, NOAA Fisheries’ 2026 report page estimates $319 billion in sales impacts and 1.7 million jobs supported nationally in 2023 across recreational fishing, commercial fishing, and the seafood industry. NOAA revised the commercial-fishing and seafood-industry jobs estimate downward from an earlier 1.4 million to 1 million after correcting a code issue. These are U.S. economic-impact estimates, not global totals or a calculation of net social benefit.
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What can—and can’t—be concluded about sustainability?
The figures show a large, economically and nutritionally important sector alongside real environmental pressures. They do not justify treating all fishing or farming as equally damaging, or assuming that a production total or a global sustainability percentage answers the question for a particular seafood source.
- For capture fisheries, relevant questions include which stock is targeted, what gear is used, and how incidental catch and habitat effects are managed.
- For finfish farms, relevant questions include site conditions, water exchange, seabed characteristics, and how feed, waste, monitoring, and recovery are managed.
- Climate projections add regional and scenario-specific risk, but are not a universal forecast for every fishery.
The cited material does not provide a complete global accounting of aquaculture disease transfer, escapes, habitat conversion, feed sourcing, or labor conditions. It also does not quantify global abandoned-gear impacts. Those topics should not be treated as settled by the figures above.
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