Ocean Outcomes just published "Advancing Electronic Monitoring in Taiwan's Distant Water Longline Fisheries", a report they commissioned Marine Change to research and write. Roderic Hodges led the technical work, and I joined as a contractor in October 2025 during a visit to Taiwan; I then provided the Zealand and Australian case studies, part of the cost analysis, and the section on whether insurance could ever be a reason for an owner to want cameras onboard.
Why Taiwan, and why now
Taiwan is one of the biggest distant-water fishing flag states on the planet. Around 900 tuna longliners across the WCPFC, IOTC, IATTC and ICCAT convention areas, fishing year-round, resupplying and transshipping at sea, with some trips documented as lasting up to three years. Nearly 700 of those are small-scale longliners in the WCPFC area alone.
That profile is brilliant for catching tuna and terrible for traditional MCS. Observers need berth space that small longliners don't have, schedules that align, and a port call at a convenient point. Add the safety and welfare issues on long trips, which the region has learned about the hard way, and you get the numbers: in 2023 Taiwan's observer coverage by days at sea was 11.5% for the large-scale fleet and 6% for the small-scale one. That is the gap EM is meant to fill.
Taiwan is not starting from zero, and that is underappreciated outside the country. They mandated CCTV on tuna longliners years ago, partly for human rights reasons. They have had e-logbooks since 2014 and 2015 with daily transmission and hourly VMS, a 24/7 Fisheries Monitoring Centre since 2017, and the Overseas Fisheries Development Council (OFDC) already integrated into the electronic reporting and verification architecture.
What they have is not EM, though, and the report is blunt about that. The CCTV records to an onboard drive physically pulled off the vessel, often long after the fishing happened, and the footage carries no timestamp, no position and no vessel identifier in the stream. Without that metadata, you cannot cross-check video against a logbook entry or a VMS track, which is the entire point. It is video, not evidence.
What can New Zealand and Australia show?
I got involved in those chapters because I know both systems reasonably well, and because they are the two jurisdictions that have taken EM furthest with fleets a Taiwanese official can look at without laughing.
New Zealand is instructive for its timeline rather than its technology. The legal basis, the Fisheries (Electronic Monitoring on Vessels) Regulations, was set in 2017. The decision to install electronic monitoring on up to 300 vessels came in 2021. Rollout began in August 2023; surface longliners became mandatory in January 2024, and bottom longliners in March 2025. Roughly eight years from the legal instrument to the coverage of a fleet segment, in a country with a small fleet, strong institutions, and a single centrally procured provider. By September 2025, the programme had monitored more than 64,000 fishing events, with in-house MPI analysts reviewing about 31% of them.
Australia's approach is different. AFMA first looked at EM in 2005, following sea lion interactions, and made it mandatory in 2015 for about 75 vessels, ten years and many pilots later. Phase 1 was a single vendor that handled the review and submitted compliance reports to the regulator. In 2022, AFMA announced Phase 2, a standards-based multi-vendor model in which the agency sets the specs, type-approves vendors, owns the national data repository, and brings the review in-house with CSIRO support on the AI side. To do that, they invested AUD 20.1 million over four years in data and IT capacity, plus another AUD 10 million in 2025.
Put those side by side, and the message for Taiwan is not "buy cameras". It is that EM at scale is an institutional build with a technology component, and the institutional part is what takes years. Even the EU's core EM requirement, set out in a Control Regulation in force since 2024, does not take effect until 2028.
There is one genuine difference for Taiwan that neither NZ nor Australia has had to address. Both those fleets come home often enough that data can be transferred via hard drives or cellular networks. Australian operators post the encrypted drive to AFMA within 24 hours of the first landing each month. You cannot do that with a vessel out for eighteen months. Taiwan has to transmit by satellite, which changes the cost structure entirely.
The money side
Everyone wants to talk about cameras. Cameras are the cheap part.
Across New Zealand, Australia, the US and Scotland, EM hardware costs roughly USD 8,000 to 10,000 per vessel, with a working life of three to five years in saltwater. Annualised, that is about 10% of total cost. Implementation, excluding hardware, runs USD 12,000 to 14,000 per vessel per year, and administration clusters tightly at USD 3,200 to 3,700 across all four countries.
Then you add the satellite bill, which Taiwan alone has to pay. A camera at 1080p and 5 to 10 fps generates around 40 GB of compressed video per day when running continuously. Strip out dead time with activity detection, and you cut that by 60%. Drop to 720p and file sizes fall another 70%. That lands at about 5 GB per camera per day, roughly 20 GB for a four-camera array. Transmit only the 20% you intend to review, and you are at about 120 GB a month, which fits a 250 GB plan at USD 600 to 1,000 a month at today's indicative OneWeb tariffs, before bulk discounts.
Add it up, and you get total operating costs of roughly USD 20,000 to 29,300 per vessel per year, with review and transmission as the dominant drivers. For a 900-vessel fleet, that is real money, and it is far better to have that argument now, with numbers on the table, than halfway through a rollout.
The 20% review rate matters here, and I pushed for framing it as a baseline rather than a ceiling. MSC “scientists” have settled on 20% as a workable minimum for high seas fisheries. AFMA audits 10%; the US Western Central Pacific programme targets 25%; New Zealand reports 31%. It is high enough to be taken seriously and low enough to be affordable at fleet scale. Because the full record stays on the vessel's drive, you can always escalate on a risk signal.
Insurance, a generally hard-to-cost incentive
The insurance idea is one that I’ve been going on for a while, and I went into it hoping for a stronger answer than I found.
These vessels carry three broad layers of cover: crew, hull, and third-party liability. For crew cover, EM could improve the evidence available for an injury, a medical evacuation, a wage dispute, or an allegation of abuse, which would help with claims handling. But crew premiums are driven by injury incidence, medical costs, fatigue and the operator's labour practices, not by whether there is a camera on deck. For hull, the TFA subsidy is NTD 6,000 (USD 190) for 20 to 50 GT vessels and NTD 8,000 (USD 250) for 50 to 100 GT vessels, so for a small-scale longliner, there is almost nothing left to save.
Third-party liability, the P&I layer, is where video has the greatest potential. P&I covers crew injury or death, pollution, collisions and wreck removal, and footage can establish causation, show whether procedures were followed, and refute false claims. Commercial trucking has already gone there, with insurers offering around 5% discounts for video telematics.
The honest conclusion, though, is that the first benefit is insurability, not price. EM helps a vessel demonstrate it is monitored, documented and less exposed to undisclosed IUU, casualty or labour risk, which improves access to cover in supply chains where buyers are nervous. Premium reductions only follow once insurers accumulate claims experience linking EM to lower loss frequency. That will take years, and I would rather say so than sell a saving that does not yet exist.
Where this leaves Taiwan
The report is deliberately not advocacy. It does not tell TFA what to do. It lays out the decisions, the trade-offs in each, and the cost of the choices.
My own view is that Taiwan is in a better starting position than most assume. The e-logbook and VMS architecture are already in place for EM to be indexed against, and OFDC already handles the technical plumbing. Over half the fleet has voluntarily wired its CCTV to satellite because owners find it useful for running their vessels, which shows the fleet management incentive is real, not theoretical. NTOU has a domestic EM unit priced at around USD 6,000, which is being piloted on 10 vessels, and TFA started a small subsidy in July 2025.
The pieces are on the table. What is missing is the multi-year decision on how they fit together, and everyone who has done this well started that conversation earlier than they felt comfortable.
If you are interested not only in EM but also in Taiwan as the small giant in world fishing, the Ocean Outcomes (O2) report is a critical read, and I’m very thankful to Marine Change for the opportunity to be involved, and to O2 not only for the funding but, most importantly, for the unique work they have been doing there.
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Ho-Tu Chiang
The best part of this job had nothing to do with bandwidth or levies. People who know me know I like people’s stories
Back in 2023 I got a message from Ho-Tu Chiang, a former Taiwan coastguard officer doing postgraduate work on IUU fishing. He had found my blog and told me my writing and general attitude to life had nudged him towards fisheries sustainability, working with Ocean Outcomes to help industry improve compliance. I was moved by it, and told him I hoped we would work together one day.
Two years later, I was in Taiwan working with him on this study. He turned out to be exactly what I suspected from that first message: a top professional and a good man, and the person who made the local access, the industry conversations and the translation of all this into a Taiwanese policy context actually work. Taiwan is a hard place to build trust with industry on regulatory issues, and from day 1 I could see he had done that.
It reinforces the thing I keep saying and will keep saying. Good fisheries are more about good people than about fish, or cameras, or satellites.