If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that you’ve seen The Wildlife Trusts’ campaign for bottom trawling to be banned in seabed Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) – you may even have signed the petition. This campaign is for the blue, but it is very much not out of the blue. We’ve been advocating for better marine protection for years, but this week’s United Nation Ocean Conference (UNOC3) presents a huge opportunity to make urgently-needed progress. Water minister Emma Hardy will be in attendance along with the environment secretary Steve Reed, and the government is already under pressure from the Environmental Audit Committee to bring about a ban on bottom trawling. Sir David Attenborough’s new hard-hitting documentary Ocean has also lit a fire in this space: for many viewers, it will be the first—and perhaps only—meaningful contact with the practice of bottom trawling.      

I want to take a moment to explore what this national campaign is calling for in greater depth, and to explain how it translates to the marine conservation work we do at Cornwall Wildlife Trust. The details matter, because getting it right when we call for better marine protection is complicated. It is made all the more difficult in an information ecosystem characterised by polarisation, and simplified sound bites.

Sign the open letter to Minister Hardy 

At its core, the national campaign is pushing for a ban on bottom trawling in all MPAs that have been designated to protect seabed features. The bit in bold is important, because not all MPAs in the UK have been designated to protect seabed features. As a result—and unlike many other environmental organisations—The Wildlife Trusts are not calling for a ban on bottom trawling in all MPAs, and we support this position at Cornwall Wildlife Trust. That may be surprising, so let me explain. There are fundamentally three reasons I think this position is the right one:

1. A blanket ban of trawling in all existing MPAs is not a particularly effective way to protect the most important seabed habitats. Take the Bristol Channel Approaches MPA—a huge protected area crossing the Bristol Channel between Wales and Cornwall. This MPA was designated for harbour porpoise, with much (but by no means all) of the seabed being coarse mobile sediment. It’s not that many of the seabed habitats here are unimportant, but that they harbour less biomass and a lower diversity of life, particularly when compared to the astonishing maerl beds in the Fal and Helford MPA. (This is an MPA that, quite rightly, already benefits from a degree of protection from bottom trawling.) Keep in mind that the maximalist ask on the table here is a ban on trawling in all MPAs, not a ban on bottom trawling everywhere. Outside the MPA network we have, there are plenty of areas with important seabed habitats that don’t benefit from adequate protections, either in practice or in principle.  

2. Effective whole-sea management of all fisheries matters. Yes, bottom trawling in the wrong places can have devastating impacts, but no single method of fishing is impact free (nor any other method of food production, for that matter). Gillnets, for example, can ensnare huge quantities of non-target species, including cetaceans. And many of our local fishers are hugely supportive of rolling out “pinger” devices that can reduce cetacean bycatch in gillnets by an astonishing 94%. This is why The Wildlife Trusts are calling for an end to all damaging activities in MPAs this week at UNOC3. This can only come through investment in management. In Cornwall, much of this falls to our Inshore Fisheries Conservation Authority (CIFCA), which works to manage our fisheries out to the 6 nautical mile limit, albeit with limited resources. They have introduced trawling bans in a number of areas, are prosecuting illegal fishing activities, and have recently consulted on a bylaw on potting that has implications both inside and outside our Cornish MPAs. Still, across the UK, enforcement and prosecutions can be difficult to achieve. It is notable that this year we saw what I believe is the first ever prosecution for illegal trawling in an MPA. In sum, the sea is a big place—effective management and enforcement is hard and expensive work that requires proper investment.   

3. To deliver for our seas, we need to actively support local, sustainable fisheries and local communities. It is important to realise that the scale and methods of fishing portrayed in Ocean are not necessarily typical of what takes place in Cornwall. In fact, in the case of our traditional oyster fishery—which is a towed bottom gear fishery—the impacts are vanishingly small by comparison. The oyster fishery has been operating sustainably for over 150 years, and it is notable that the last best place to find oysters in Cornwall is the area in which they are fished. The key point is that there are many fishers in Cornwall who fish sustainably, and have done so for years. They often make an incredible contribution, both economically and socially, to the many coastal communities in Cornwall. And many of them are deeply unhappy about the new trade deal with the EU. There might be some benefits in terms of market access, but reciprocal access to territorial waters (between 6 and 12 nautical miles) has no upsides for the vast majority of Cornish fishers, because their smaller vessels aren’t set up to fish in an economically viable way long distances from our ports. In Mevagissey (Cornwall’s second largest fishing port) none of the fishers venture into French waters to fish and yet, under the new trade deal, larger EU vessels will be able to continue to fish right up to the 6 nautical mile limit for the next 12 years. To me, this does not look like a “just transition” to actively support small-scale sustainable fisheries, and, critically, that’s also bad news for nature in our seas, with high levels of fishing effort now likely baked in for 12 years. To then introduce blanket MPA trawling bans into this context would be the death knell for many of these smaller scale fishers, particularly in North Cornwall, where the Bristol Channel Approaches MPA covers the vast majority of our waters to 12 nautical miles.              

I am encouraged by this weekend’s announcement from Steve Reed that the government will look to introduce trawling bans in 41 MPAs in English waters. This set of 41 is in fact the third stage of the Marine Management Organisation’s four stage plan for managing fisheries in MPAs and mostly pertains to offshore MPAs. 

Please keep an eye out for the imminent consultation for these MPAs, because the details will matter. 

Broadly speaking, 41 MPAs is a long way from a blanket ban (it’s about half of all English MPAs) and thus in line with what The Wildlife Trusts are asking for. The government should also realise that this kind of commitment would need to be properly resourced. It is unacceptable, for example, that two of our large offshore MPAs in Cornwall are among the most heavily trawled anywhere. These areas are very much the realm of the industrial-scale trawlers that Ocean so effectively rails against. Proper protection of areas like this across England will be a substantial logistical challenge. 

I believe that effectively protecting our seabed MPAs is the right call, but I also want to be absolutely clear that we actively support our inshore fishers who are doing the right thing and fishing sustainably. Alongside this call, there are a number of other areas we urge Steve Reed and Emma Hardy to act on:

• Stop setting quotas above scientific advice.
• Action the use of proven mitigation and monitoring measures, e.g. acoustic pingers and remote electronic monitoring (REM).
• Manage fisheries sustainably by implementing catch limits and harvest control rules across all fisheries inside and outside out MPAs.
• Recognise the disproportionately large economic and social contribution small-scale inshore fishers make to coastal communities by ensuring the sustainability of their fisheries. This means prioritising their access to waters out to 12 nautical miles over industrial scale and international fishing corporations.

Things are moving fast this week at UNOC3, and I am hopeful that we are in a real moment of change, but we need to work hard on those tricky details to effectively deliver for people in coastal communities and our seas everywhere, but particularly in places like Cornwall.