There is growing political consensus that we face an ecological and climate emergency. This is the lens through which we should assess every decision governments make. Below, my colleague Dr Euan Dunn (who leads our work on fisheries) puts the spotlight on one action that runs counter to ambitions to restore nature in a generation and what is being done about it.
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The EU legislation obliges the UK and other Member States alike to ensure that fishing activities do not adversely affect the marine environment, especially where Natura 2000 sites are concerned. However, the measures newly proposed jointly by the UK, Netherlands and Germany for the protection of the iconic Dogger Bank give a green light to damaging fishing activity.
Lying some 100km off our North Sea coast and almost as big as Wales, the Dogger Dank is a submerged plateau of sand, historically famous as the bread basket of the fishing industry of England and the Low Countries. For millennia, however, it’s also been a biodiversity hotspot supporting a wide range of marine wildlife, including seabirds, harbour porpoises and other marine mammals. So rich is the Dogger Bank in sandeels that kittiwakes will fly there from the Yorkshire coast to feed, a round trip of 300km or more. The sandbank is also home to the longest-lived animal known on the planet called the ocean quahog (capable of living for over 500 years), a key feature of the fisheries-degraded seabed community the Natura 2000 measures were meant to restore.
Ocean quahog (Paul Kay)
Three Member States – the UK, Netherlands and Germany – having designated a mosaic of adjoining Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) on the Dogger Bank, have now – after over seven years of wrangling – proposed fisheries management measures for the area to the European Commission.
Although the RSPB and other NGOs considered it was the bare minimum, extensive stakeholder discussion initially resulted in making about one-third of the whole sandbank off limits to beam trawls and other destructive mobile bottom fishing gear. However, pressure from NGOs failed to prevent another bottom gear – seine fishing – being admitted to most of the proposed closed areas, shrinking the total area protected to a derisory 4.7% which will be subject to a 3-year experiment to test whether seining is hindering achievement of the conservation objectives.
A review of all the scientific evidence to date commissioned by WWF Netherlands has shown that adverse effects of seine gear on the protected sites are ‘highly likely’ including contact with the seabed resulting in bycatch of not just the typical species associated with the submerged plateau of sand but also of endangered sharks, rays and cold-water corals. In effect, the restoration of the Dogger Bank’s marine protected areas is being traded off against economic fishing interests, making a mockery of the so-called conservation measures and creating a ‘paper park’.