Fishing catches in the seasonally ice-free Arctic Sea were a whopping 75 times greater than reported from 1950 to 2006, estimates published last week say (D. Zeller et al. Polar Biol., doi: 10.1007/s00300-010-0952-3; 2011).

“Ineffective reporting, due to governance issues and a lack of credible data on small-scale fisheries, has given us a false sense of comfort that the Arctic is still a pristine frontier when it comes to fisheries,” said Dirk Zeller, of the University of British Columbia, part of a team that pieced together more accurate catch records [press release, Reuters].

The agency to whom countries record catch levels, the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), says it’s concerned about the mis-reporting – but points out that the total catch is still very small.

The United States and Canada both told the FAO they caught nothing in Area 18 – which encompasses the North Pole – but in fact, the British Columbia researchers say, the countries caught some 90,000 tonnes of fish each over half a century. As for Russia, it reported 12,700 tonnes, but Zeller’s team, using data extrapolated from state fishery institutes, put the true total at 770,000 tonnes.

That all adds up to over 950,000 tonnes. “Even though these figures look quite substantial, they have been aggregated over some 57 years, so in annual terms the quantities compared to other major fishing areas of the world are really fairly small,” says Richard Grainger, editor of the FAO’s ‘State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture’ report.

By the 2000s, the annual Area 18 catch was probably around 10,000 tonnes – which against a global backdrop of 142 million tonnes in 2008, is not much. (Three Antarctic fishing areas yield 100,000 tonnes of fish per year, while in commercial fishing hotspots the annual catches are in the tens of millions of tonnes).

Much of the catch in the Arctic was subsistence fishing by local communities. Sometimes – as in Alaska – this was recorded at a state level, but never made it to the federal level, and hence not to the FAO. Russia, meanwhile, did not join the FAO until 2006, which may have contributed to the country’s reporting of catches “too low to be credible”, as the research paper puts it.

Grainger says the FAO is going to look into the problem, and recognizes that the organization doesn’t always receive records of the activities of small-scale subsistence fisheries. An FAO “Strategy for Improving Information on Status and Trends of Capture Fisheries” was adopted by the UN in 2003, and has resulted in field projects in Africa, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific – but not the Arctic.

As climate change makes the Arctic increasingly available for fishing and affects communities living there, collecting accurate fisheries data should be a priority, the research paper notes. “In the FAO’s defense, it does not have the mandate to collect data,” adds Zeller. “They can suggest to countries that something is not right, but cannot demand anything. It is up to individual countries to fix or improve their data”.