Perspective: Territorial waters Drone Rangers and GPS for Fish: The Tech Weapons U.K. Could Deploy to Stop European Rivals Plundering U.K. Seas Post-Brexit

Figures from the Pew Research Centre, a U.S. think tank, suggest that one in five fish are caught by breaking the law and the illegal fishing industry is now worth $23.5 billion. As the U.K. prepares to leave the EU’s fishing regime, illegal trawling in British territorial waters is expected to increase.

Hasan Chowdhury writes in the Telegraph that a no-deal scenario would see the U.K. become an independent coastal state under a United Nations sea treaty, putting the full responsibility on the Government to ensure fisheries are managed in a sustainable way.

Some think technology can solve the problem of illegal activity, with new solutions in the form of satellites, drones, facial recognition and autonomous boats emerging to tackle the issue of illegal fishing head on.

These technologies will need to be deployed quickly.

But can a post-Brexit Britain police its shores effectively with technology?

Global Fishing Watch seems to think so. The website launched in 2016 by Google and non-profit firms Oceana and SkyTruth “to provide the world’s first global view of commercial fishing activities”.

It found life after researchers realized that signals emitted from transponders on ships can be picked up by satellites to identify where trawlermen are working. It is standard practice for ships to carry transponders, as part of what’s known as the Automatic Identification System (AIS), to allow vessels to know where they are in relation to one another. Funded in part by the Leonardo DiCaprio foundation, the website gives anyone with internet connectivity the chance to track the fishing activity of approximately 65,000 commercial fishing vessels in close to real time.