Can a fishery that is proven to release extreme amounts of CO₂, permanently destroy the seabed, and produce up to 90% unwanted bycatch, which is mostly discarded dead overboard, be sustainable? In our view, the answer is no.
Currently, the debate centres on how this form of fishing should be permitted in the future within the marine protected areas of the North Sea. Designating protected areas and consistently banning fishing there would be a step in the right direction. However, this initiative is also meeting fierce resistance from the fishing industry.
Currently, there are virtually no binding regulations for bottom trawling in the marine protected areas of the North Sea. This is intended to change fundamentally. Firstly, there is the declared 30x30 target of the UN, which has been adopted by the EU. It stipulates that 30 per cent of the marine area should be protected. Ten per cent of these protected areas are to be subject to strict protection – excluding fishing, construction activities, resource extraction, and commercial shipping.
Admittedly, this project is difficult to implement in the highly trafficked and intensively fished North Sea. Consequently, the highly conflicting interests of the fishing industry and environmental organisations clash directly. In the middle is the state government of Lower Saxony, which must find a viable compromise.
One side wants to continue fishing – after all, this has been a tradition for generations. The other side represents the interests of nature and wishes to significantly restrict or completely ban fishing in ecologically critical areas.
The fact remains: the North Sea is currently a "Mordsee" (sea of death) – originally the title of a film from the 1970s, but today a highly accurate description of its condition. Where bottom trawling occurs, literally no blade of grass grows anymore. Seagrass meadows and many benthic organisms and animals are disappearing. Fish stocks are declining, and habitats are shrinking.
Consequently, in future, extensive areas off Borkum, in the Wadden Sea around the Blaue Jade off Wangerooge, and parts of the Jade Bight are to be strictly protected. The state government of Lower Saxony has selected these and other areas in the Wadden Sea National Park as future protected zones.
According to the Bundesnaturschutzgesetz, approximately half of the Wadden Sea National Park must be protected and thus kept free from fishing.
It is a stalemate: fisheries versus protected areas. One thing is certain: marine conservation will also create losers – in this case, some of the shrimp fishers. But what would the cost be if everything remained as it is and the fishing industry prevailed?
This is exactly what we are already witnessing today: a "sea of death" – an ocean without ecological balance, additionally littered with net fragments; a sea not only devoid of fish and shrimp, but in the long term also devoid of charismatic species such as the harbour porpoise (Phocoena phocoena), grey seal (Halichoerus grypus), and harbour seal (Phoca vitulina).
Is this what we want?
Even if it might cost the livelihood of some, or perhaps even a large proportion of the "traditional" shrimp fishers, historical shrimp trawlers also serve well as museum ships or maritime witnesses in harbours such as Greetsiel and elsewhere. Not every tradition must be continued, and not everything that has existed for centuries should remain unchanged.
Therefore, we fully support the demands of the major conservation organisations and believe that the North Sea must finally be consistently protected – even if this temporarily entails economic losses for the fishing industry.
Further information can be found here:
Fishery-free zones in the North Sea: Too little sea for nature | taz.de
Fisheries dialogue: Wadden Sea to get a protection zone | tagesschau.de
Planned exclusion zones alarm North Sea fishers | ndr.de
