UK must step up its game to protect marine mammals, fish and birds from bycatch
The UK and devolved governments must do more to prevent the fisheries bycatch of dolphins, porpoises, seals, seabirds and protected fish such as salmon and sharks.
That’s the message EIA delivered to Parliament with colleagues from conservation and welfare groups, led by Wildlife and Countryside Link.
Together we produced the report Hidden in the Haul: The true scale of bycatch, revealing the true, shocking extent of bycatch in UK waters where every year thousands of animals are bycaught and die.
UK fishing gear is annually catching more than 10,000 seabirds, more than 1,000 cetaceans, including harbour porpoises, common dolphins, humpback and minke whales, about 500 seals, more than 120 tonnes of protected sharks, skates and rays and more than 1,000 endangered Atlantic salmon.
Inadequate monitoring, reporting and recording mean that these figures are likely just the tip of the iceberg. Nonetheless, there is clear evidence that bycatch is causing the suffering of individual animals and depleting UK populations of these precious species, threatening their survival.
The UK and devolved administrations have known about the impacts of bycatch for decades and although the UK has bycatch monitoring and small-scale mitigation trials in place to prevent bycatch for some species, these do not match the scale of the problem.
The power of the law is on our side. Inadequacies in the governments’ bycatch policy implementation are clear, with domestic and international pressure mounting.
The Office of Environmental Protection has identified potential failures to comply with environmental law by Defra in relation to plans for achieving Good Environmental Status (GES) of marine waters. In addition, US legal bycatch experts have filed a legal case challenging the comparability findings for fisheries in eight different nations, including two fisheries in the UK, as inconsistent with the requirements of the US Marine Mammal Protection Act, with high levels of marine mammal bycatch associated with fish products imported into the US.
Above all, the UK Government needs to deliver promised Bycatch Action Plans for protected species, with quantitative, time-bound bycatch reduction targets with a clear commitment to fisheries management measures to meet these targets.
More specifically, species-focused measures are identified in the report, including applying effective mitigation measures to the entire fleet of boats fishing with high-risk gears, including static nets, which should be phased out in favour of lower impact fishing gears, improving bycatch reporting for sharks, skates and rays by enforcing compliance with existing fisheries discard reporting regulations and taking bycatch of protected species as a material consideration in all relevant Fisheries Management Plans.
Fisheries bycatch is avoidable. With a clear plan, thousands of deaths can be prevented to enable recovery of the populations of these protected, important and much-loved species.
