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Anticipating how spatial fishing restrictions in EU waters perform to protect marine species, habitats, and dependent fisheries

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) can be an effective means of safeguarding key ecological features, provided they are strategically located. Conversely, if important habitats lie outside the designated zones, MPAs may become counter‑productive, especially when fishing effort is high and displaced effort forces fishing fleets work harder to remain viable.

This underscores the necessity of evaluating each situation individually. Moreover, certain technological innovations can inadvertently exacerbate impacts by reducing efficiency, as highlighted in a 2024 EP STOA study.

Viable solutions therefore involve three complementary actions to accompany any spatial restrictions: reducing overall fishing effort (both in days at sea and the number of licences issued) while simultaneously rebuilding stocks through more selective, low‑impact fishing practices; and concentrating activity within clearly defined permissible zones, leaving other areas off‑limits.

Over time, such an approach is likely to make fishing techniques using passive gears more economically attractive, encouraging their adoption in place of mobile, bottom‑contact gear within MPAs* and thereby enhancing both ecological outcomes and social acceptance.

(*though, excluding any activity from vulnerable marine ecosystems, VMEs, is likely unavoidable).

See a paper investigating such issues with modelling tools (published in Frontiers): https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/marine-science/articles/10.3389/fmars.2025.1629180/full

Engage the virtuous spiral in fisheries

Acting with imperfect information, fisheries policymakers and managers must try to balance tradeoffs of fisheries short-term productivity against long-term environmental, economic and social sustainability.

Alternatively, both environmental and fisheries policy strategies could engage a virtuous circle by bridging the historical divide between fisheries and nature agencies.

Hence, a long-term win-win situation could better emerge, and by propagating the change induced by the reduction of fishing impacts to other supportive marine ecosystem components (habitats, non-commercial marine species), the fisheries management could contribute to secure future fishing opportunities for the fishing fleets along with fulfilling the market demand for seafood and ensuring coherence in meeting national environmental targets.

Building on previous scientific works, we contributed to making this point more apparent in:

Bastardie, F., & Brown, E. J. (2021). Reverse the declining course: A risk assessment for marine and fisheries policy strategies in Europe from current knowledge synthesis. Marine Policy, 126, [104409]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2021.104409

You are welcome to ask for a free copy of the published article to fba at aqua.dtu.dk or find a preprint version here:

BastardieBrown2021-MarinePolicy-OpenAccessVersionDownload

Testing to what extent EU fisheries can cope with a ban of discarding fish in presence of choke species

The ban on discarding unwanted fish overboard when fishing, which was decided during the last 2013 EU Common Fisheries Policy reform, requires that everything retained in a commercial fishing gear is recorded and counted against fish quotas when some exist like in Northern European waters. It is, however, difficult to reduce catches of a single fish species when a variety of fish is generally caught together. This creates a risk for early closures of fisheries when the quota of one fish (the “choke species”) is exhausted before the others. To cope with this and avoid an unnecessary low rate of quota utilization, fishermen can try to lease extra quotas, or modify their catches, either by switching to more selective fishing gear types or through changes in when, where and how to fish, by trying to avoid areas where there is a fair amount of possible choke species, and displace the fishery as soon as a large catch of choke species is encountered. This ability to displace will depend on the skills and choices of the skipper but also on how the fish stocks distribute in space and time (patchily vs. evenly distributed). We are developing here a platform to test such interlinked effects in a clear and detailed manner by accounting for varying skipper’s decision-making, such as for example the one described in the adjacent decision tree.