Three in eight fish stocks are now overfished

In 2023, 37.6% of the world’s assessed marine fish stocks were overfished, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)¹. When FAO’s records begin, in 1974, the figure was 10%: one stock in ten then, closer to four in ten now².

Scientists don’t count the sea’s fish as one pile. They split them into separately managed populations called stocks: the cod off Norway is a different stock from the cod off Newfoundland. FAO now tracks 2,665 of them, covering 998 species¹.

A stock counts as overfished when so few fish are left that it can no longer give the biggest catch the sea could sustain year after year. FAO’s figures stop in 2023. The number at the top of this page carries the fifty-year trend forward, about half a percentage point a year², so it is an estimate rather than a measurement.

The 1974 starting point wasn’t a pristine ocean, either. Fishing fleets had been growing since 1950¹³. Numbers like these are why a single date, 2048, still circulates as the year seafood runs out.

Where the 2048 deadline came from

No scientific body forecasts that the oceans will run out of seafood by 2048. The date comes from a 2006 paper in Science by Boris Worm and colleagues. They found that 29% of fished species had collapsed by 2003, which they defined as catches falling below a tenth of their recorded peak. One sentence in the body of the paper then extended that trend line until it reached 100%, in the year 2048⁷.

So even taken at face value, 2048 described a sea where every fished species yields less than a tenth of its best catch, not an empty ocean. And stretching a line fitted to past data all the way to 100% assumes nothing changes along the way, which makes it a warning rather than a forecast.

The press release put the date in a subheading, “Current trend projects collapse of all currently fished seafoods before 2050”⁸, and it travelled around the world. The paper’s own abstract was more careful: it said the trends were “still reversible”⁷.

The projection drew 10 published rebuttals. Worm then led a joint project with the fisheries scientist Ray Hilborn⁸, and their 2009 paper found that fishing pressure had fallen in 5 of 10 well-studied ecosystems, even though 63% of assessed stocks still needed rebuilding⁹. In their 55 later papers, the original authors mentioned 2048 exactly once⁸.

What “overfished” does and doesn’t mean

Measured by weight, 72.6% of the fish landed from assessed stocks comes from sustainable ones¹. This covers wild-caught fish; farmed fish are outside FAO’s stock figures.

That’s a smaller share than the share of stocks, which suggests the biggest fisheries tend to be in better shape than the small ones.

Another 46.9% of stocks are “maximally sustainably fished”¹. That sounds alarming, but it is the level fisheries managers aim for: fishing as hard as a stock can bear, indefinitely. Add it to the overfished share and you get the claim, still in circulation, that more than 80% of fisheries are “fully exploited or worse”, when most of that 80% is fished at exactly the level managers intend.

Two more cautions. FAO’s figure covers assessed stocks only, and fisheries nobody assesses usually have little management and stocks in poor shape¹¹. And in 2025 FAO rebuilt its method, moving from 531 grouped stocks to more than 2,500 individual ones³, so part of the recent rise reflects revised assessments rather than more fishing¹.

Sharks, West Africa and the Mediterranean: where overfishing is worst

Oceanic sharks and rays have fared worst: their numbers have fallen 71% since 1970, as fishing pressure on them rose eighteen-fold¹². By region, overfishing is worst in the Mediterranean and Black Sea, where 54.3% of assessed stocks were overfished in 2023, followed by the Eastern Central Atlantic off West Africa at 52.9% and the Southeast Pacific at 48.0%. In the Antarctic, not one of the 15 assessed stocks was overfished¹. Tuna, as the next section shows, are the counter-example.

Overfishing gathers where management is weakest. Regions with less-developed fisheries management fish about three times harder than well-managed ones and have about half as many fish¹¹.

Money keeps the pressure on. Governments spent $35.4 billion on fisheries subsidies in 2018, and $22.2 billion of it went on support that expands fleets and fishing power¹⁴. Support like that tends to keep boats at sea after the fish have stopped paying for the trip.

So does fishing nobody records. Illegal and unreported fishing takes an estimated 11 to 26 million tonnes a year, and it was highest in the Eastern Central Atlantic¹⁵, the same waters with the second-worst stock status. Catch nobody reports can’t be counted in an assessment or held to a limit, which suggests the two go together.

And there are simply more boats. The world’s fishing fleet has more than doubled since 1950, yet in most countries the same fishing effort now brings in less than a fifth of what it did then¹³.

Where fisheries came back

Globally, overfishing is still getting worse. The share of sustainable stocks fell from 64.5% in 2021 to 62.4% in 2023, partly because of revised assessments¹. Where fisheries are managed, though, many have turned. The stocks that scientists assess, about half the world’s catch, are on average growing and at target levels¹¹.

The United States has rebuilt 51 fish stocks since 2000¹⁶. Worm credits the US laws that made overfishing illegal and required rebuilding with “the recovery of dozens of species”¹⁰. In the Northeast Atlantic, the share of stocks fished too hard fell from about 65% in 2003 to 29% in 2023, before ticking back up to 31% in 2024¹⁷.

The most striking comeback is a tuna. Atlantic bluefin tuna moved from Endangered to Least Concern in 2021 on the IUCN Red List, the global register of threatened species, a recovery credited to enforced quotas and a crackdown on illegal fishing¹⁹. By 2023, 91.3% of tuna stocks were sustainable, and more than 99% of the tuna catch came from them¹.

Even the Mediterranean, the worst region, improved the most: its sustainable share rose 11 points in two years¹. The region’s own fisheries commission reports that overfished stocks fell from 87% a decade ago to 52% on its list of stocks, slightly different from FAO’s, with fishing pressure cut in half⁵. EU scientists add a caution: part of the drop in fishing came from market changes, and the amount of fish in the water isn’t rising yet¹⁸.

What these recoveries seem to share is a catch limit that was actually enforced, whether by law, by quota or by policing illegal boats.

Two futures for the sea

The world promised to end overfishing by 2020⁶, and it missed. If FAO’s fifty-year trend simply continued, a straight-line extension rather than a forecast, about 52% of assessed stocks would be overfished by 2050², more than half of them.

The research on reform points the other way. A study of 4,713 fisheries, covering 78% of the reported catch, found that with better management the median fishery would reach recovery targets in under ten years, and the world would land 16 million more tonnes a year²⁰. A 2020 review found that substantial recovery of marine life is possible by 2050, if the major pressures on it, climate change included, are brought under control²².

Warming is already working against that. The sustainable catch of 235 studied fish populations fell by 4.1% between 1930 and 2010²¹.

One development worth watching goes after the subsidies. The World Trade Organization’s agreement banning government support “to illegal fishing activities and overexploitation of stocks” came into force in September 2025²³. Whether it reaches the fleets that do the most damage will show in this number over the next decade.

So, the end of seafood? Not on any date science can name. Where fishing is managed, the stocks come back. The overfished share keeps rising anyway, and the likeliest reason is the half of the world’s catch that nobody assesses, where management tends to be thin and stocks in poor shape¹¹.