As marine fisheries face growing pressure to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, understanding what drives carbon performance across fishing strategies is increasingly important for climate-oriented management. Spanish tuna fleets offer a natural setting to examine these dynamics, with tropical purse-seine and Canarian pole-and-line vessels targeting similar resources within a shared regulatory context. This study compares the carbon footprints of these fleets in the Atlantic Ocean over two decades.
Purse-seine vessels generated total CO₂ emissions approximately one order of magnitude higher and operated across a broad tropical Atlantic footprint, whereas pole-and-line activity remained concentrated around the Canary Islands. Despite strong contrasts in scale and spatial range, carbon intensity per tonne landed overlapped between fleets, with no statistically significant difference in mean intensity once vessel-level variability was accounted for. Within-fleet variability consistently equalled or exceeded differences between fleet means, while seasonal patterns in carbon intensity coincided with shifts in target species composition.
These findings challenge the prevailing expectation that purse-seine fishing is necessarily more carbon-efficient per unit catch than alternative gears. Carbon performance in tuna fisheries appears to be shaped by interacting ecological, operational and behavioural factors, suggesting that emissions reductions are more likely to be achieved through fleet-specific strategies than broad sector-based distinctions.
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