Bottom trawling, UK

Problems

• Bottom trawling is often singled out by scientists and activists as one of the world’s most destructive fishing techniques. It’s prevalent in European waters. Nothing escapes the vast nets: fish, crustaceans, but also coral reefs and seagrass beds. Wherever trawlers go, the ocean floor turns into a desert.
  
  More than 90 percent of Britain’s offshore marine protected areas (MPAs) are still being bottom-trawled and dredged, two years after an analysis of the extent of destructive fishing exposed them as “paper parks,” according to data shared with the Guardian.
  
  The UK’s network of marine parks, set up to safeguard vulnerable areas of the seabed and marine life, is a cornerstone of the government’s target to protect 30 percent of ocean biodiversity by 2030.
  
  But an analysis of fishing vessel tracking data from Global Fishing Watch and Oceana, a conservation NGO, found that fishing with bottom-towed gear took place last year on 58 out of 64 offshore “benthic” MPAs, which aim to protect species that live on the seabed. A total of 1,604 vessels, including industrial boats, spent 132,267 fishing hours in these MPAs in the UK, it found.
  
  Vessels with bottom-towed gear — the most destructive type of fishing, involving dragging weighted nets across sea floor habitats — spent at least 31,854 hours in MPAs in 2021. This is likely to be an underestimate, Oceana said, as it could only identify gear type for 837 boats, just over half of those detected, due to a lack of publicly available data. The vast majority were industrial vessels, it said
  
  When vessels with bottom-towed gear fish operate in marine parks, it prevents the recovery of ecosystems already lost to decades of exploitation and limits the seabed’s ability to store carbon and combat the effects of the climate crisis. Greenpeace has described this type of fishing in MPAs as akin to “bulldozing national parks.”