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Daniel Pauly, winner of the 2024 Meeting of the Seas Award
Marine biologist Daniel Pauly has become a key international figure in the fight against overfishing, one of the main scourges of our oceans.
The son of a French woman and an Afro-American soldier, and raised by a Swiss family that did not treat him well, Daniel Pauly overcame a difficult childhood with the determination to help when he grew up. He did so through science. He studied biology in Germany, and while other colleagues literally dove head first into the waters of marine biology, Pauly found his niche in a more theoretical field, looking for patterns and the why of what happens in the oceans. This led him to work on global fish populations.
At the time, scientists were not interested in global fisheries. Daniel Pauy was the first to study global fisheries and their impacts. He has worked on fisheries research in Ghana, Indonesia and the Philippines, and since 1994 has been a professor at the Fisheries Centre at the University of British Columbia, Canada, where he is the founder and principal investigator of Sea Around Us, an initiative to study the impact of fisheries on marine ecosystems.
Pauly's major scientific contributions to the fight against the impact of human activity on our oceans include the creation of the world's largest fish database (FishBase) and the study in which he and his team showed that the fish catches reported by countries to the FAO between 1950 and 2010 did not include figures for illegal fishing, artisanal methods and discards on the high seas. The data showed that many countries were overfishing, a system that was unsustainable and taking its toll on certain fish stocks. Overfishing became Daniel Pauly's cause.
The scientist has repeatedly denounced the use of overly aggressive methods such as trawling and the unscrupulousness of the fleets of major fishing nations. Pauly warns that "the demand for fish is increasing, but the supply is not. And the oceans cannot afford to pay the price. The professor backs up every one of his statements with figures and fights for the seas to be treated with greater respect. For his tireless scientific work to protect the oceans, the Meeting of the Seas has awarded him the Congress Prize for this sixth edition.
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