Reply to: The environmental footprint of fisheries

<p><br></p><p dir="ltr">Hilborn raises concerns about how we calculated the disturbance pressure for fisheries, one of four measures in our metric of cumulative environmental pressure assessed across all food types, arguing that it overestimates the footprint of wild-caught fishing and cannot be compared with agriculture </p><p dir="ltr">1 . We agree there is inherent uncertainty and room for improvement in any method, including ours. However, we feel that Hilborn oversimplified what we did to the point of misrepresenting the work. As we detail in our Methods, fishing disturbance was measured through two components, benthic disturbance, which is relevant only to bottom trawling, and biomass removal. Each component is scaled from 0 to 1 and then averaged to obtain the overall disturbance value. For six of the seven classes of gear type that do not disturb the benthos, the maximum overall disturbance score is thus 0.5 (biomass removal only), and for bottom-trawl fisheries, only a small fraction of area is assessed with overall disturbance score close to 1.0, a comparison with agriculture that we feel is accurate. Indeed, most of the ocean area had essentially no overall disturbance, with 77% of the ocean having a pressure score of ≤0.001, and nearly all of the ocean had very low disturbance, with 97% less than 0.10 (ref. 2). Only 0.05% of the ocean had a disturbance value of ≥0.99. As such, our results are consistent with Hilborn’s assertion that disturbance from fisheries should be low for most fisheries.</p><p>.</p>