{"id":34788,"date":"2026-09-28T12:27:37","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T16:27:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/?p=34788"},"modified":"2026-09-28T08:43:48","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T12:43:48","slug":"historic-fishery-collapse-holds-lessons-for-the-present","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/2026\/09\/historic-fishery-collapse-holds-lessons-for-the-present\/","title":{"rendered":"Historic fishery collapse holds lessons for the present"},"content":{"rendered":"
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From the 13th to the 16th century, herring from the Sound \u2013 the strait in the Baltic Sea between Denmark and Sweden \u2013 was one of northern Europe\u2019s most important trade goods. Salted herring from the so-called Skan\u00f6r-Falsterbo fishery fed large parts of Europe.<\/p>\n

Around 1570, however, this fishery collapsed within a short period of time \u2013 with far-reaching consequences for trade, politics, and society. It took almost 400 years, until the 1950s, before comparable catch volumes were reached again. An international team of fisheries economists, ecologists, and historians led by Kiel University (CAU) and the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) has now investigated why this fishery, stable for centuries, collapsed so suddenly<\/strong>. The results show that the collapse of the fishery cannot be explained by a simple stock collapse alone. The herring stock itself did shrink markedly in the 16th century, but it did not collapse completely. It was only the combined effect of several factors \u2013 environmental change, overfishing and social change \u2013 that brought the profitable fishery to a sudden end. The new study was published in Nature Sustainability<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cOnly when you look at climate, ecology and socio-economic conditions together does a coherent picture of this historic collapse<\/strong> emerge”, says first author Dr Rudi Voss, fisheries economist at iDiv and CAU. \u201cNone of these factors alone would have brought the fishery down. It is their interplay that explains the dynamics.\u201d<\/p>\n

An extraordinary time series: 450 years of fishery history<\/strong><\/p>\n

The study is based on a unique dataset: a 450-year time series of herring catches in the Sound from 1200 to 1650. It was reconstructed using fragmentary historical sources, including customs records, royal pre-emption rights (\u201ckongek\u00f8b\u201d), and other archival material documenting trade volumes for individual years and locations. Gaps in the data were filled using economic and ecological indicators such as the availability of salt \u2013 the most important production factor for the herring industry at the time \u2013 and reconstructed climate data. This gives the researchers a fishery dataset that extends far beyond the usual modern stock time series, which typically span only a few decades. It allowed them to study how climate change, economic crises, and overexploitation played out over decades and centuries, and to determine how these factors reinforced one another.<\/p>\n

Interplay rather than a single cause<\/strong><\/p>\n

To reconstruct the dynamics of the fishery, the team combined two methodological approaches<\/strong>: a newly developed bio-economic stock assessment method (BESA), which uses historical catch and price data to estimate both sustainable catch levels and the state of the herring stock over time. In addition they used a so-called loop analysis \u2013 a method from ecology that can map complex interactions between ecological, economic and social factors within a single model, without requiring every variable to be precisely quantified. In detail: overfishing had already weakened the stock and increased fishing costs. At the same time, the onset of the \u201cLittle Ice Age\u201d brought a period of cooling to the Baltic region, which affected the stock\u2019s productivity and reduced it further. In parallel, social and economic conditions deteriorated: shifting dunes destroyed the infrastructure of the fishing sites, a newly imposed system of serfdom tying peasants to the land deprived the fishery of workers, and cheaper herring from the rising North Sea fishery pushed Baltic herring out of the market.<\/p>\n

A lesson for fisheries management today <\/strong><\/p>\n

Herring in the western Baltic Sea currently lies outside safe biological limits and on the brink of collapse; a zero-catch<\/strong> recommendation is already in place for it. According to the authors, an interdisciplinary approach \u2013 closely combining fisheries economics, climate research, ecology, and economic history \u2013 yields more than new historical insights: these findings can also be applied directly to today\u2019s fisheries policy. Anyone who assesses the current state of a fishery on the basis of biological stock data alone may overlook crucial risk factors. Although the focus today is on a different biological stock, what both cases share is that environmental conditions in addition to fishing pressure are hindering their recovery. Whereas a period of cooling during the \u201cLittle Ice Age\u201d affected the stock in the past, today the warming of the Baltic Sea caused by climate change represents an additional stressor.<\/p>\n

The study therefore supports the approach of Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Management, which takes ecological and socio-economic factors into account together \u2013 for example infrastructure, economic diversification and the social situation of fishing communities. \u201cLooking back at history makes it clear: sustainable fisheries only succeed if we take social and economic conditions just as seriously as the state of the stock itself. That is the lesson from 450 years of herring fishing in the Sound \u2013 and it is just as relevant today as it was then,\u201d concludes first author Voss.<\/p>\n

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JOURNAL<\/h4>\n

Nature Sustainability<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the 13th to the 16th century, herring from the Sound \u2013 the strait in the Baltic Sea between Denmark and Sweden \u2013 was one of northern Europe\u2019s most important trade goods. Salted herring from the so-called Skan\u00f6r-Falsterbo fishery fed large parts of Europe. Around 1570, however, this fishery collapsed within a short period of… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":34619,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"no","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"off","neve_meta_content_width":70,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[798,1100,808,1013,915,1074],"tags":[586,949,1118,810],"class_list":["post-34788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ecology","category-economy","category-food","category-history","category-nature","category-water","tag-climate","tag-fish","tag-herring","tag-stocks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34788"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34788\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34789,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34788\/revisions\/34789"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}