Activists on the Greenpeace ship Esperanza have started to place granite blocks on the seabed inside the Dogger Bank protected area in the North Sea to prevent bottom trawling. This follows on from their investigation which found industrial bottom trawlers systematically breaking the law by switching of their Automatic Information System (AIS) while fishing on the Dogger Bank.
Chris Thorne, a Greenpeace UK oceans campaigner commented that
“Allowing bottom trawling in a protected area established to protect the seabed is equivalent to allowing bulldozers to plough through a protected forest. This must stop. Our Government won’t act, and we can’t sit idly by while they allow supposedly protected parts of our oceans to be destroyed.
“We have carefully and precisely placed these inert natural boulders in this new properly protected area, which when complete will be permanently off limits to all bottom trawling. We will remove them only when our Government takes the necessary action to properly protect the Dogger Bank.”
Greenpeace activists have informed the relevant marine authorities to ensure navigational safety for mariners in the area.
WWF, Client Earth and other NGOs lodged an official legal complaint against the UK, Dutch and German Governments in 2019 over their failure to properly protect the Dogger Bank from bottom trawling Click here
At its last review (2018) the sandbanks of the Dogger Bank were assessed as being in unfavourable condition. Click here