Greece aims to be the ‘first in Europe’ to ban bottom trawling in marine protected areas as part of 21 initiatives worth 780 million euros. Greece has the longest Mediterranean coastline and plans to create two marine parks, one in the Ionian Sea and one in the Aegean Sea, along with efforts to tackle coastal […]
By Jan Geert Hiddink, in The Conversation: You might remember newspaper articles in 2021 claiming that towing nets over the seabed to catch fish (known as bottom trawling) releases as much carbon as all flights taken each year. It turns out that the assessment behind this claim overestimated how much CO₂ is released in the process of bottom trawling […]
A paper published in Nature refutes the findings of a paper by Sala et al, 2021 on the amount of CO2 released from the seabed by bottom trawling. The paper made significant headlines around the world as it equated the carbon released by bottom trawling to be of a similar magnitude to the CO2 created […]
Cabinet Secretary for Rural Economy and the Tourism, Mairi Gougeon has told Scottish Labour MSP for Central Scotland, Monica Lennon, that the government has no plans to introduce a three-nautical mile limit. When the Scottish Labour MSP for Central Scotland asked in a written question: “To ask the Scottish Government what its response is to […]
New research in the journal PLOS Climate has estimated that by eliminating mobile bottom fishing it could reduce seabed carbon disturbance by 27-67%. Below is an extract from the article abstract: ‘Mobile bottom fishing using trawls and dredges may cause significant reductions in seabed sediment organic carbon stores, limiting the oceanic carbon sink. […]
A new report published by Seas At Risk and Oceana shows that bottom trawling can be largely replaced in the EU by less aggressive fishing gears. The NGOs say that switching to readily available alternatives to bottom trawling offers multiple benefits, such as dramatically improving fisheries resources, protecting the seabed and marine habitats […]
Chris Grayling, MP, is introducing a Ten Minute Rule Motion entitled ‘Marine Protected Areas (Bottom Trawling)’. We covered previously that a study noted that Brexit may bring some benefits to the environment as it has enabled the UK to reclaim the autonomy to designate offshore marine protected areas. For example, this has enabled a proposal to […]
A global study of the impacts of bottom trawling reports undertaken by Bangor University with collaborating research institutes and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, builds on recent international collaboration. It brings together data from 24 large marine regions around the world to establish a relationship between distribution and intensity of trawling […]