A third assessment of global marine fisheries discards

This third update of FAO’s global discard estimate adopted the fishery-by-fishery approach employed in the second discards assessment published in 2005. The update includes publicly available discard data for the last 20 years to establish a baseline for a time series of global marine fisheries discards. This is essential for monitoring the status and trends of discard management, the first step of the ecosystem approach to the fisheries management cycle. In addition, this study has developed a new fisheries data table incorporating landings data from the FAO Global Capture Production dataset (FishStat J) for the period 2010-2014.