When a new treaty to protect biodiversity in international waters, or the high seas, takes effect in January, there’s an open question about how it will interact with the regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs) that govern fishing there. Most RFMOs have been in place for decades; their mandate includes conserving fish stocks and broader ecosystems. A new paper suggests they haven’t done a very good job setting up systems to do so and questions their readiness for the coming new era of marine governance. The study, published Nov. 24 in the journal Environmental Research Letters, provides a wide-ranging analysis of RFMOs and concludes they have a “generally low overall performance.” It determined that on average more than half of RFMOs’ target stocks are overexploited or collapsed, reinforcing previous research. The paper’s main focus is how RFMOs operate. The authors rated 16 RFMOs based on 100 management-related questions, such as “Are there consequences for violations of conservation measures …?” and used the answers to help identify “leaders” and “laggards.” These 100 questions were the “core of this work,” Gabrielle Carmine, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University in the U.S. and lead author of the paper, told Mongabay. She completed this research as a Ph.D. candidate in the Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab at Duke University in the U.S. “RFMOs have been critiqued for years, and unlike official RFMO performance reviews, this review is truly independent,” Carmine said in a statement. Carmine told Mongabay she was genuinely “excited” about the high seas treaty,…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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