Orri Vigfusson, the Icelandic angler who for 18 years has spearheaded a drive to conserve plummeting salmon stocks all around the North Atlantic, has been awarded the world’s biggest prize for environmental activism.

The Goldman Environmental Prize, established in the United States in 1990, is awarded to six individuals a year, one each from North America, Central and South America, Asia, Africa, Europe and what are called Islands and Island Nations. Each shares equally the $750,000 award. Vigfusson’s portion will be ploughed straight into the conservation fight to which he has dedicated his life.

The scale of Vigfusson’s achievement in persuading governments, conservation bodies, anglers and even commercial fishermen of the need for action is unprecedented, in not only protecting a species but also promoting social and economic welfare in remote and often struggling communities.

A portentous subject for an angling column? Well, maybe, except that without Vigfusson’s efforts, and those of the salmon anglers who have supported him, the fish, and therefore the most exotic branch of freshwater fishing, would be headed for oblivion.

None of this, astonishingly, will mean much to most anglers. Even in the face of grave environmental threats to their sport — pollution, habitat loss, abstraction — the reaction of most is to do nothing. It is a potentially terminal weakness paraded year in and year out in the membership figures for sea, coarse and trout fishing’s conservation bodies.

In salmon fishing, though, Vigfusson is a near-legendary figure and news of his award will be widely welcomed. Since he launched his campaign, and the North Atlantic Salmon Fund through which he runs it, in 1989, Vigfusson has galvanised salmon anglers all around Europe and North America to combat the biggest controllable threat to their sport: industrial-scale netting at sea.

It is largely through his efforts that, since the early 1990s, commercial netting has been cut by 75 per cent and more than five million salmon have been allowed to return to their home rivers to breed instead of ending up on the fishmonger’s slab.

At one point, stocks were estimated to be down by 80 per cent. The biggest hits followed the discovery in the 1950s of the salmon’s deep-sea feeding grounds off Greenland and the Faeroe Isles. Vast commercial fisheries sprang up to exploit these deep-sea retreats, while netsmen around the coasts on both sides of the Atlantic scooped up those fish that escaped. Catches soared briefly before the inevitable collapse came.

Vigfusson, a keen salmon angler, saw the results in rivers in Iceland and elsewhere. With few salmon to catch, angling collapsed. Communities dependent on angling tourism suffered. Hundreds of small businesses went to the wall, many of them in Scotland and Ireland.

“I’m from a herring family,” Vigfusson said. “My family had a part in the overfishing of herring stocks in the 1960s. We had to stop fishing for many years. I realised straight away what was going on.” Vigfusson’s solution was to pay the netsmen not to put to sea and to create alternative means of employment where possible. He used his formidable networking skills to get support for the idea in the US and Europe, and his fundraising skills to get salmon anglers, conservation bodies and governments to dig deep and often to find the sums needed. As of this year, $35 million (about £17.5 million) had been raised. “I knew anything we proposed had to be generous,” Vigfusson said. “The netsmen’s agreements had to be voluntary or they wouldn’t stick.” He struck five-year rolling agreements with the Faeroese and the Greenlanders, then promoted buyouts with netsmen in most of the salmon nations in Europe. He was a key figure behind the buyout of nets off England’s northeast coast and was active in the buyout off the west coast of Ireland, reported here last year.

Now, Vigfusson glimpses an end to the netting issue, at least. Salmon runs have begun to improve in England, Scotland, Canada and Norway. In Iceland, catches by salmon anglers are among the highest ever.

“I can see two or three years left in this,” he said. “The biggest challenge now is to ensure that the Faeroese and Greenland nets are off for good. We could only strike short-term, rolling agreements with these fisheries. They will be an ongoing cost. After that, we need to do something about rivers. Lots of rivers in Europe have obstructions in them. We have to make it easier for the fish that are now coming back to reach the best possible spawning grounds. That’s what I’m going to focus on next.”

While not all the salmon’s problems will be solved by the nets buyout — climate change could give anglers more than fish to worry about — the future of the Atlantic salmon looks better than at any time since the crisis began. Moreover, mindsets have been changed. Netsmen now accept that if they fish the salmon to extinction, they have no future, anyway.

Salmon anglers have learnt that if they want to keep their sport, they have to contribute to the solution, not least by putting back the fish they catch. It is a situation in which everyone benefits, and one remarkable man is behind much of it.

Brian Clarke’s fishing column appears on the first Monday of each month.

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