[5] In 2011, he received the Ecological Society of America's Sustainability Science Award for a 2009 paper with Boris Worm and others[6] entitled Rebuilding global fisheries.

The award recognized his 40-year career of “highly diversified research and publication in support of global fisheries science and conservation,” according to a news release.

"[1] In their research, Hilborn and Walters investigated the ways that dynamic models can be used to manage fisheries in order to maintain states of optimum equilibrium.

This involves a combination of building data bases on how fisheries are managed and measures of their performance.”[10] He has contributed extensively to The Ram Legacy database[11] which “provides estimates of status indicators such as biomass, fishing mortality rates, and associated reference points, and is the most quantitatively robust source of fishery status available.”[12] Hilborn's efforts attempt to strike a balance between resource sustainability for the environment and food and nutrition security for human beings.

[15] In October 2017 the NOAA Assistant Administrator for Fisheries wrote an open letter to the journal Marine Policy [16] about a published paper co-authored by Tony J. Pitcher which suggested the U.S. exports to Japan a significant amount of seafood products from illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing (IUU).

[21] Pitcher et al. countered by saying that instead of relying solely on public information supplied by the fishery, they had used "necessarily confidential sources (over 120 interviews) [which described] the procedures being used in laundering 27 IUU fish products".