According to a plan presented on Tuesday by the European executive, a roadmap to achieve this must be put in place by each member state by March 2024.
“Green” the fishing sector. This is the objective set by the European Commission, by banning bottom trawling in marine protected areas by 2030, via an action plan presented on Tuesday 21 February. Criticized by professionals, he is considered too timid by environmental NGOs. According to this plan, Member States will have to adopt measures to “phasing out” this controversial fishery in marine protected areas (12% of European waters), regardless of their depth. Each country will have to establish a roadmap in this direction by March 2024.
The European Union has already banned trawling below 800 m since 2016, to help restore vulnerable ecosystems on the seabed, endowed with a rich biodiversity. The practice has also been banned since September below 400 m in a small part of the northeast Atlantic. But the use of mobile bottom gear (trawls, dredges, gillnets, longlines, traps, etc.) “remains widespread”in particular in 80% to 90% of the exploitable areas of the northeast Atlantic, “in many sites (…) and other protected areas”, deplores the European executive. What, according to him, compromise the objectives of the Twenty-Seven for the climate and biodiversity.
A plan “too slow” for environmental associations
Brussels denounces fishing that consumes a lot of fuel and emits a lot of CO2, which, by scraping the bottom, destroys ecosystems that themselves constitute carbon sinks, weakens the populations of fish that shelter and reproduce there, and promotes incidental catches “disproportionate” lack of selectivity.
The European Bottom Fisheries Alliance (EBFA), which represents 20,000 fishermen from 14 countries, believes that banning trawling in protected areas will “in danger 7,000 ships” corresponding to “25% of the volumes landed in the EU and 38% of the total revenues of the European fleet”. This measure is “unjustified” because “certain protected areas have been defined to preserve birds and turtles”, unrelated to the seabed, insists its president, Ivan Lopez.
“It’s too little, too slow (…) far from the urgent schedule that it would take”, protests, on the contrary, Rebecca Hubbard, of the coalition of environmental NGOs Our Fish. The EU will de facto tolerate bottom trawling for another seven years in protected areas and outside after 2030, agrees the NGO Oceana, denouncing “the marked discrepancy between the observation and the weakness of the actions proposed”.