08 Jul 2024

Nearly 9 in 10 citizens (86%) surveyed across seven EU countries expect their political leaders to prioritise the protection of marine biodiversity, according to the results of national polls conducted by Sapience. The study further identifies that, to protect the ocean, citizens consider safeguarding endangered marine species, marine habitats, and stopping overfishing to be essential or important […]

02 Jul 2024

In a debate on nature conservation on Thursday (28 June), Labour MP and Shadow Environment Minister Toby Perkins announced that he “will stop destructive bottom trawling that is destroying our ocean ecosystem”. This would be “one of our first measures” he said, if his party comes to power after the parliamentary elections. The Liberal Democrats […]

06 May 2024

To coincide with the Our Ocean conference, a new report, co-authored by Marine Conservation Society, Seas At Risk and Oceana, shows that in the seven countries analysed, 4.4 million hours of apparent bottom trawling was allowed in MPAs between 2015-2023 – equivalent to more than 500 years’ worth of trawling. Using data compiled by Global Fishing Watch, the breadth and […]

08 Jul 2023

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 […]

15 May 2023

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 […]

06 Mar 2023

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 […]