East Asia plays a critical role in global fisheries.

China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are among the world’s top fishing economies in terms of harvest volume and vessel numbers.

They serve as a home base for distant-water fleets that fish on the high seas and supply important seafood commodities such as tuna and squid to Asian, North American, and European seafood markets. These economies are not only seafood powerhouses—they also shape the global direction of fisheries governance, technology, and innovation.

Electronic monitoring (EM) — a suite of cameras, sensors, and Global Positioning System (GPS) technologies installed on fishing vessels to track fishing activities — is gaining traction across the region. Governments, fishing companies, and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) are investing in EM to improve transparency, ensure compliance with domestic and international rules, address illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing concerns, and meet growing market demands for traceable, sustainable seafood. EM holds promise as a scalable fisheries management tool that enhances supply chain transparency—especially in distant-water and high-seas fleets, where human observers are costly or infeasible.

One area where this traction is particularly visible is in global tuna fisheries, where East Asian fleets play a large role.

In 2024, The Nature Conservancy introduced the Tuna Transparency Pledge, an initiative designed to unite retailers, suppliers, and governments in achieving 100% on-the-water monitoring coverage by 2027. This objective applies to all industrial tuna fishing vessels within signatory supply chains and is facilitated through either EM or human observers. Major signatories such as Walmart, Albertsons, Thai Union, and several Pacific Island governments have amplified momentum around EM adoption, underscoring market and governance expectations for greater transparency.

While NGOs are calling for international pledges, regulatory momentum is also accelerating. All five of the major Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs) have now adopted minimum EM standards for tuna fisheries, with the most recent to do so in February 2025. Formal requirements such as these are setting a global baseline for EM use and will be especially significant for the East Asian fleets, which play a prominent role in RFMO-managed tuna fisheries.

Despite this growing interest, EM adoption is not uniform globally, and uptake in many regions has been slow.

Jurisdictions across East Asia are pursuing EM through their own blend of pilot programs, policy experiments, and market incentives shaped by differing legal systems, economic priorities, and technical capacities.

To address these systemic gaps, Ocean Outcomes (O2) and Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) convened a regional workshop in Busan, South Korea, in April 2025, adjacent to the Our Ocean Conference. The workshop aimed to facilitate cross-border learning on electronic monitoring among experts, fishery managers, and NGO representatives from the four jurisdictions.

This report — authored by Ocean Outcomes with contributions from Qingdao Marine Conservation Society and Environmental Defense Fund — synthesizes the resulting developments and stakeholder perspectives, providing an analysis of the current EM landscape and the advancement of monitoring technology across these major fishing economies.