Purpose. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is used to quantify the use of land by human activities and its consequences on the environment (the ecosystem quality area of protection (AoP)). On the other hand, the impact of sea use on ecosystems appears poorly assessed by the LCA community. The purpose of this study is to address this situation by proposing operational characterization factors (CFs) for global fisheries, both regionally and globally. Methods. The ecosystem quality impact is commonly assessed using CF = FF × EF, with the fate (FF) and effect (EF) factors. In recent work, we define CFs for AoP natural resources for fisheries, based on the fraction of the stock that is depleted. We show that these CFs correspond to the EF for the ecosystem quality AoP. FF represents the duration of the impact by specifying how long the intervention has an effect and are then defined as the inverse of the growth rate of the fish species. This leads to CFs at the ecoregion level, assessing the losses of intrinsic ecosystem functions at the regional scale. The global (and irreversible) loss is defined from the regional loss using a vulnerability score at the species level. Results and discussion. The regional and global CFs have been calculated for 5 000 fish stocks from FAO data. CFs are provided both for ReCiPe (species.year) and LCI guideline (potential disappeared fraction of species for a year PDF.year) units. As illustration, four fisheries are presented and compared to livestock productions. Conclusions The use of the sea by fishing activities leads to a loss of marine biodiversity. The work presented here proposes operational CFs dedicated to this, for all the global fisheries, in accordance with LCI guidelines. It allows quantifying the impacts of fisheries in LCA.