This goal measures whether people who need to fish on a small, local scale have the opportunity to do so.
The current score indicates that many regions are addressing and meeting the needs that people and communities have to fish artisanally by implementing government policies that permit or encourage them to do so and providing appropriate access to near-shore areas.
Artisanal Opportunities has a relatively good global score, which was pretty stagnant until 2021, when it jumped up by 2 points, further increasing by one more point this year. Certain regions improved their score in 2022 through a higher score on access to artisanal fishing opportunity through law and regulation as reported by the UN sustainable development goal 14.b.1 which measure the progress by countries in the degree of application of a legal, regulatory, policy, or institutional framework which recognizes and protects access rights for small-scale fisheries.
Another factor that may have contributed to the latest increase in Artisanal Opportunities scores was a decrease in need, indicated by an increase in per capita GDP (standardized by purchasing power), in 2021 due to the beginning of the rebound from the global economic slowdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.