Photo by Torsten Dederichs
Norway and China are mounting an organised push to significantly expand Antarctic krill fishing in the Southern Ocean ahead of a critical management meeting this October, drawing escalating opposition from conservation groups who warn that krill – the keystone species at the heart of Antarctica’s food web – is already under growing pressure from climate change and cannot absorb further industrial exploitation.
The campaign is being led by Aker QRILL, the Norwegian company that harvested 52% of the entire Southern Ocean krill catch in 2025 and 63% in 2024. Its CEO, Matts Johansen, told Mongabay he has been travelling to China, South America and Europe to build political support. “We hope we will be able to get the decisions we need now in October 2026,” he said.
The proposal and the impasse
At the October 2025 meeting of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) in Hobart, Norway proposed moving away from the current fixed annual catch limit of 620,000 metric tonnes and nearly doubling it to 1.1 million metric tonnes. The 27 CCAMLR members failed to reach the required consensus. According to Johansen, China then withheld support for a long-sought marine protected area (MPA) around the western Antarctic Peninsula and South Orkney Islands, a proposal known as Domain 1 that Chile and Argentina first put forward in 2017, and which China and Russia have blocked ever since. “Where it stopped last year is that some nations didn’t want to accept the new quota numbers,” Johansen said. “And then China said, ‘Then we won’t accept the MPA.'”
The stalemate has deeper roots. A study published in PNAS in 2025 found that CCAMLR’s failure in 2024 to renew its spatial catch limits, which allocated catches across different areas, had already created a management vacuum, allowing the entire annual catch to be taken from anywhere and at any time. “Allowing catches to aggregate in space and time is something CCAMLR has long sought to avoid,” the authors wrote. Holly Parker Curry of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition (ASOC) warned after the 2025 meeting that “if CCAMLR is to live up to its founding mandate, it must find the will to move past political deadlocks and act decisively for the Southern Ocean, before it’s too late.”
According to Aker’s own policy documents, if the proposal were approved, fishing effort would increase by 30–50%. This year, catches are on track to again reach the current 620,000-tonne limit, which was hit for the first time in 2025, triggering an early closure of the fishery in August.
Where fishing happens matters
Scientists warn that headline percentage figures obscure the localised nature of the impact. Matthew Savoca, a research associate at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station, returned in April from a Southern Ocean expedition and observed fishing vessels concentrated near the South Orkney Islands. “The industry says it only takes 1% of the krill biomass,” he told Mongabay. “But at what scale is that percentage being calculated? The scale is the entire southwest Atlantic Ocean, which is an area roughly the size of Europe. Yet fishing is concentrated on two pinheads. It would be like affecting just the populations of London and Paris.”
These same areas, the Antarctic Peninsula and South Orkney Islands, are the primary feeding grounds for whales, penguins, seals and seabirds that depend on krill to survive, and are precisely the zone the proposed Domain 1 MPA would protect. The proposed MPA covers approximately 670,000 km², with over 60% designated as a General Protection Zone and the remainder as a managed Krill Fishery Zone.
An ecosystem already under severe stress
The push to increase catches comes as the species krill predators depend on for survival are already in sharp decline. In April, the IUCN upgraded both the emperor penguin and the Antarctic fur seal to Endangered on its Red List – the first penguin and pinniped to receive that status in the Southern Ocean. Both listings are linked directly to krill availability.
The Antarctic fur seal population has fallen by more than 50%, from an estimated 2,187,000 mature individuals in 1999 to 944,000 in 2025, as rising ocean temperatures push krill deeper and farther offshore. Dr Jaume Forcada of the British Antarctic Survey said that the krill distribution shifts are “unlikely to be reversible” without swift action on greenhouse gas emissions. IUCN Director General Dr Grethel Aguilar called the dual listings “a wake-up call on the realities of climate change”, adding: “Antarctica’s role as our planet’s ‘frozen guardian’ is irreplaceable.”
WWF has called for a moratorium on krill fishing until a highly precautionary, ecosystem-based management framework is agreed. The organisation warns that CCAMLR’s “failure in the last two years to reach consensus on even an interim measure to safeguard the ecosystem is a real concern and one that does not seem to be easily resolved within the now highly politicised CCAMLR decision-making process.”
Fleet expansion and state subsidies
Both fleets are growing regardless. Norway’s Aker QRILL announced plans for a fourth vessel in 2026, while China increased its fleet from four to five vessels in 2025 and licensed a sixth for 2026. A 2025 study in Frontiers in Ocean Sustainability found Aker BioMarine had received “millions of dollars in subsidies from several government agencies and banking institutions”, while finding China “stands out as the largest contributor to fuel subsidies” for Southern Ocean fisheries. Lead author Vasco Chavez-Molina of the University of Colorado Boulder told Mongabay that Chinese vessels are “heavily subsidized in terms of fuel, in terms of tax incentives, in terms of infrastructure.” Both Norway and China publicly support the WTO initiative against harmful fisheries subsidies, but analysts say reform efforts focus more on domestic fleets than distant-water operations.
High-profile diplomacy and a conservation counteroffensive
To build political support, Aker launched the Ocean Stewardship Initiative in January with the UK’s Sustainable Markets Initiative, founded by King Charles III. Former US Secretary of State John Kerry has since joined as a spokesperson. Johansen said the royal connection matters: “When he invites different parties to come and discuss at Buckingham Palace, people will show up much more than if we, as a little company in Norway, try to do the same.”
The conservation response has been forceful. In March, a vessel operated by the Captain Paul Watson Foundation deliberately collided with Aker’s Antarctic Sea. ASOC filed an objection to the recertification of Aker’s fishery as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council. Some retailers have already removed krill products from their shelves voluntarily following pressure from environmental groups. On 28 April, the European Parliament approved a request urging the European Commission to support a five-year moratorium on Southern Ocean krill fishing.
The stakes for October’s CCAMLR meeting could scarcely be higher. Krill sustains virtually the entire Antarctic marine food web – yet the two nations most active in harvesting it are also those whose cooperation is essential to establishing the very protected areas designed to safeguard it.