An illegal fishing boat. Photo: Wikimedia commons

MDA is providing Global Fishing Watch access to the company’s Radarsat-2 satellite radar archive to fight illegal fishing practices. MDA announced the agreement on June 28 as part of the 2022 UN Ocean Conference.

Global Fishing Watch is an international non-governmental organization committed to advancing ocean sustainability. The organization encourages transparency to combat illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing activities, which involves about 20% of the over 90 million tons of fish caught globally each year, the UN reports. 

The Radarsat-2 archive goes back 14 years and includes more than 970,000 images, including over 26 billion square kilometers of oceanic synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. GFW intends to utilize the archive to map IUU fishing patterns using science-based analytics, helping policymakers and researchers fight these practices. 

“Global Fishing Watch is revealing human activity in the ocean and making it freely available to the world. MDA’s RADARSAT-2 satellite imagery, combined with our AI and datasets, has the potential to revolutionize understanding of the marine environment by shining a light on hidden and suspicious fishing activity,” said Tony Long, CEO of Global Fishing Watch.