KATHOLIEKE
UNIVERSITEIT
LEUVEN
Laudatio for Professor Daniel Pauly
Delivered in Leuven on 4 February 2008 by Professor Jos Snoeks and Professor Filip Volckaert, promotors
Your Eminence,
Rector,
Your Excellencies,
Colleagues,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
There is a great sense of urgency in the air now it has become clear that global natural resources are
measurably and unsustainably affected by man. Agricultural production suffers from changing climates,
clean water becomes a premium, the supply of forest products slows down, and declining fish catches are a
reality. The latter observation is the merit of essentially one man, whom we have the honour to have among
us today.
The idea that something was going seriously wrong grew somewhere early on in his career, when working at
ICLARM (currently the World Fish Center) in the Philippines. At that time, the common idea, even among
fisheries scientists, was that for each fish caught a younger individual would take its place. Unfortunately,
this general wisdom turned out to be false. During his career, Daniel Pauly has systematically and with a
very high scientific standard fought for an objective interpretation of the data on marine natural resources.
Here we bring four points to your attention where the doctor honoris causa has made a significant mark for
society.
1. First of all, there can only be discussion about a sensitive issue when the facts are right. Therefore hard
scientific data have to be readily available. For a long time catch statistics, collected worldwide by national
agencies and compiled by the Food and Agricultural Organization, remained of dubious quality. By
groundproofing these numbers against other data, Daniel Pauly successfully demonstrated overreporting by
the PR of China and a clear decline in global fisheries. Certainly this ruffled some feathers worldwide. Now
people wonder why such obvious facts have never been brought to their attention much earlier.
2. The second point is that Daniel Pauly provided us with thought provoking concepts such as the ‘shifting
baselines’ concept, which refers to the loss of perception of change that occurs within each generation of
people. In fisheries management terms, this means that fisheries biologists sometimes fail to define the
correct population size before exploitation and thus are analysing data starting from a "shifted baseline”.
Based on hard scientific evidence, Daniel Pauly also launched the concept of “fishing down the food web”.
The wording might look unfamiliar, but the idea is rather straightforward. By catching the large-sized highprized predators in the ocean, we are quickly overfishing animals such as Atlantic cod and bluefin tuna.
While continuing to remove top-level predators, fishermen start to systematically target larger quantities of
smaller-sized fishes at lower levels of the food web, finally arriving at fishes that directly feed on tiny marine
organisms. Fish such as herring, sprat and anchovies, are some of the better known examples. With these
stocks also declining so rapidly, what’s then left? Daniel Pauly has termed this “fishing down the food web”. It
has the status of first principle in fisheries science, and by extension in biology and the economics of
sustainability. The idea of sustainability provides the “fil rouge” between the three doctores honoris causa
honoured at this very moment.
3. The third point that we want to bring to your attention is the importance for Daniel Pauly to provide tools
that are readily accessible to the whole scientific community. There is no ambition to provide science so
complex that only the happy few can gage it. It does not suffice to have reliable numbers or to have some
great unifying concepts, but it is crucial to grasp the vastness and dynamics of the aquatic ecosystems.
There are two kinds of scientific tools, which have been the target of his focus: databases and models.
Daniel Pauly had the vision, together with Rainer Froese, then at the Institut für Meereskunde in Kiel, that an
electronic database would be an ideal tool to spread the necessary information. While initially developed as
electronic fact sheets on 200 and later on 2500 economically important marine fishes, FishBase became of
global significance as the largest online fish encyclopaedia, with more than 20 million hits per month and
supported by a wide community of specialist collaborators. In addition, tools on stock assessment and
ecosystem modelling (who eats who?) such as ELEFAN, ECOPATH and more recently ECOSIM and
ECOSPACE bear Daniel Pauly’s quality label. Their vast usage all over the world testifies that they are what
one could call in a slightly discourteous way ‘by far the best value for data’.
4. The fourth point which characterises the scientist Daniel Pauly is his social and political activism, fuelled
by a great sense of social justice. Not only the rich northern countries have to set and determine the global
agenda, but equally so the southern and less advantaged nations. Overfishing will directly affect the
fisherman, his family and the fisheries-related economy. Here Daniel Pauly takes unambiguously the side of
the artisanal fishermen. To him, the high seas fishery, benefiting from huge subsidies, has completely
skewed the ecological and social balance. Daniel Pauly’s recent activities are organised very much in
synergy with the Pew Charitable Trust in Washington D.C., the main funder of the Sea Around Us project at
the Fisheries Centre at the University of British Columbia. The aim is to have the scientific and socioeconomic information translated into political action. This takes time as you know, but here stands a person
who has been “turning the tide”. One of his latest calls appeared in the scientific journal Nature in December
2007 and makes a plea to act on fisheries subsidies through the World Trade Organisation.
Undeniably, Daniel Pauly belongs to the top scientists of the world. He also belongs to the too small circle of
top scientists with a societal mission. With the help of high profile and dedicated collaborators, he has
managed successfully to raise the profile of the much neglected natural resources of the ocean, and has at
the same time involved rich and poor in the fight for a sustainable blue planet. There is indeed a sense of
urgency to better manage aquatic resources, both marine and freshwater.
Many centuries ago a wise Chinese man said “Give man a fish and feed him for a day. Teach man to fish
and feed him for a lifetime”. In a metaphorical sense, that lifetime is about to end pretty soon. If that Chinese
man would have lived today, he would have amended this proverb with a third part “heed Daniel Pauly’s
advice and feed humankind forever”.
Daniel Pauly is an inspired scientist, who engages in societal discussions in a rapidly changing environment.
Systematically he demonstrated the sad state of global fisheries, often in a provocative way, but always
backed up by sound science. His mission is to prevent humanity from making irreversible mistakes, so that
the coming generations, and not only in wealthy regions, still can benefit from a sufficiently large fish stock.
For all these reasons, we ask you, honoured Rector, on the recommendation of the Academic Council,
to grant the honorary doctorate of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven to Professor Daniel Pauly.