Illuminating Hidden Harvests

Small-scale fisheries produce at least 40% of the world’s fish catch and contribute to livelihoods for nearly 500 million people, yet most policies governing food systems and fisheries focus on large-scale, industrial, and commercial operations. A global initiative called Illuminating Hidden Harvests (IHH) aims to highlight the diverse and dispersed nature of small-scale fisheries and their critical role in supporting the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

In 2025, the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and Michigan State University joined the Illuminating Hidden Harvests initiative, working alongside the initiative’s leads: the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Duke University, and WorldFish. Nicole Franz, now a research scholar at the Center for Ocean Solutions, founded the initiative in 2017 while working at the FAO. The interdisciplinary team draws on researchers from academia and FAO policy experts to identify and highlight the impacts of small-scale fishers, particularly women, on nutrition, food security, livelihoods, and the environment. Over the past decade, the initiative’s researchers have built the most robust global baseline to date of the many benefits small-scale fisheries provide – such as jobs, livelihoods, and nutrition – rather than focusing solely on the revenue and catch they generate. The initiative’s flagship publication, a 2023 FAO report, summarizes these findings.

Illuminating Hidden Harvests also examines how small-scale fishing communities interact with ocean and coastal ecosystems, and how policies could be better designed to ensure fishers shape decisions affecting their local waters. In 2025, the initiative team used data from 58 countries to determine that annual catch harvested by small-scale fishers could provide about one-fifth of the essential micronutrients and fatty acids needed by roughly 2 billion people living in coastal areas. These findings highlight the importance of reconceptualizing and prioritizing small-scale fisheries in policy to advance sustainable development. Another central aim of Illuminating Hidden Harvests is to develop policy recommendations for working with small-scale fisheries at various governance levels, in line with the FAO's 2015 voluntary policy guidelines. 

Currently, Illuminating Hidden Harvests is working to engage more early-career researchers across Africa, Latin America, and Asia. A workshop hosted at Stanford in 2026 identified promising research avenues, potential collaborators, and existing databases to expand the scope of future research. Future priorities include assessing the production capacity of different habitats and ecosystems, such as coral reefs, on which small-scale fishers depend.

Explore peer-reviewed papers, podcasts, and more from the Illuminating Hidden Harvests Nature collection.