The Dogger Bank is the largest sandbank in the North Sea. It is home to harbour seals and harbour porpoises, and its German sector is a designated marine protected area.
Surprisingly, fishing permits for bottom trawling exist for this area without any prior scientific assessment of whether this technique is sustainable. The Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz has now filed a lawsuit, as the fishing permit is likely unlawful without a compatibility assessment.
Bottom trawling destroys the seabed, which is one of the reasons we work alongside ElasmOcean against this fishing technique: the massive nets are dragged across the seabed, crushing, displacing, or burying everything on the seafloor – benthic life stands no chance. It is obvious that this fishing technique is neither sustainable nor environmentally compatible, which is presumably why the compatibility assessment was omitted to avoid having the obvious documented in black and white.
The sustainability objectives defined with the designation of the marine protected area are undermined by bottom trawling, raising the question of which harmful influences the Dogger Bank is actually protected against in a "marine protected area"?
ElasmOcean explicitly supports the lawsuit and will report on further developments.
