I feel like I've been reading this same article again and again my entire life, from the collapse of the cod fishery in '93 until now, we continue to learn nothing and make the same mistakes.
It's really weird, science has pretty much figured out the maths of how to fish a stock sustainably, and doing so would give good yields for the forseeable future (climate change may have an impact).
However in most regions the industry and politics alwas keep setting quotas too high, with ever decreasing yields that end in a stock collapse. And this is not in developing nations with other problems, the latest example is the cod stock collapse in the Baltic Sea.
This mostly fixed the problem but demand keeps on increasing along with changes to water temperature, so local collapses in specific populations are becoming a big problem again.
There is a very long list of collapsed fish stocks. The industry is only saved by fishing down the food chain and exploiting new species, which are often harder to catch, helped by techonology.
From the wikipedia article, sounds like not great, although some signs it _could_ recover in the near future if left alone -- which we are unlikely to do, because every time it starts to look like it might recover, we just overfish it again.
> In 2015, two reports on cod fishery recovery suggested stocks may have recovered somewhat.[56][2][57]
> A Canadian scientist reported that, cod were increasing in numbers, health, normalizing in maturity and behavior, and offered a promising estimate of increased biomass in particular areas.[2]
> A US report suggested that a failure to consider reduced resilience of cod populations due to increased mortality in warming surface water of the Gulf of Maine had led to overfishing despite regulation. Thus, overestimates of stock biomass due to generalization of local estimates and ignorance of environmental factors in the growth or recovery potential of a cod fishery would lead to mismanagement and further collapse of stocks, through further unsustainable quotas, as in the past.[58][59]
> In June 2018, the federal government reduced the cod quota, finding that the cod stocks had fallen again after just two years of fair catches.
While people are clearly happy about the return of this fish, seems clear there's a lot of uncertainty around what to do next and whether fishing for it is a good idea.
It's tough to talk about North Atlantic fisheries in aggregate. Some are reasonably healthy, others are still collapsed. Cod is just starting to rebound.
Depressing.