This TED Talk features ocean conservationist and entrepreneur Alistaira Harris, recorded live at We the Future 2019, presented by TED, the Skoll Foundation and the United Nations Foundation.

I'm a marine biologist here to talk to you about the crisis in our oceans,

but this time perhaps not with a message you've heard before,

because I want to tell you that if the survival of the oceans depended only on people like me,

scientists trading in publications, we'd be in even worse trouble than we are.

Because as a scientist, the most important things that I've learned about keeping our oceans

healthy and productive have come not from academia, but from fishermen and women living in

some of the poorest countries on earth. I've learned that as a conservationist,

the most important question is not how do we keep people out, but rather, how do we make sure

that coastal people throughout the world have enough to eat? Our oceans are every bit as critical

to our own survival as our atmosphere, our forests or our soils.

Their staggering productivity ranks fisheries with farming as a mainstay of food production for humanity.

Yet something's gone badly wrong.

We're accelerating into an extinction emergency, one that my field has so far failed abysmally to tackle.

At its core is a very human and humanitarian crisis.

The most devastating blow we've so far dealt our oceans is through overfishing.

Every year we fish harder, deeper, further a field.

Every year we chase ever fewer fish.

Yet the crisis of overfishing is a great paradox,

unnecessary, avoidable, and entirely reversible.

Because fisheries are one of the most productive resources on the planet.

With the right strategies, we can reverse over fishing.

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