If a fishing boat illegally scoops up a load of fish in the middle of the ocean and no one is there to see it, it’s still illegal — but until now there has not been much anyone could do about it.

 

It turns out that satellites a few hundred miles above earth are a lot better at surveying the high seas than a lone Coast Guard boat with a spyglass, especially in the most remote waters where fishermen may be used to acting with impunity. Thanks to new projects in high-powered satellite surveillance, it may be possible to put an end to pirate fishing once and for all.

 

Illegal fishing takes as much as 26 million metric tons of fish from the sea every year, and while illegal fishing has been getting a lot of press it’s hard to make a real dent in it without some serious international cooperation. Ships need to be traceable as they travel from one country’s maritime oversight into another’s, and enforcement needs to be stern enough that the risks of fishing illegally outweigh the rewards.

 

To this end, the Pew Charitable Trusts’ illegal fishing project teamed up with Oxford-based group Satellite Application Catapult to turn an all-seeing eye to the problem of piracy. By combining satellite-gathered signals from ship transponders with other data, whether crowdsourced or supplied by fishing enforcement agencies, Catapult can piece together a cheat sheet that identifies any vessel by name history, ID number, and the details of its fishing license.

 

Once the relevant authorities have access to that information, they will be able to spot illegal or unreported fishing in even the most remote areas, then zoom in to make the arrest.

 

This pilot project from Catapult is the latest in a string of tools Pew has thrown at the problem of illegal and unreported fishing.