The U.K. government has rejected calls to fully ban bottom trawling in its offshore marine protected areas, despite evidence that the fishing practice tears up seabed habitats and releases large amounts of carbon.
Bottom trawling involves dragging weighted nets across the seafloor, often crushing coral reefs and sponges while stirring up sediments. The huge nets catch almost everything in their path, including unwanted species that are later discarded as bycatch. The practice remains legal in roughly 90% of the U.K.’s 377 marine protected areas (MPAs), according to marine conservation nonprofit Oceana UK.
“The government are being quite sneaky with this. They’re kind of trying to play it both ways,” Alec Taylor, Oceana UK’s director of policy and research, told Mongabay in a video interview. “You cannot call these areas protected on paper and still allow this type of fishing to take place.”
In a Sept. 9 response to the nation’s Environmental Audit Committee, a parliamentary body that oversees environmental policy, the government said “blanket bans” on bottom-towed gear are “disproportionate.”
“The Government’s policy is not to introduce whole-site bans on bottom-towed fishing gear in MPAs,” they wrote in the response. “Our approach is to only restrict fishing which is assessed as damaging to the specific protected features in each MPA.”
Instead of a blanket ban, the government is considering restrictions covering about 30,000 square kilometers (11,580 square miles) of offshore waters in some of the country’s 42 MPAs. If approved, bottom trawling would still be allowed in more than 75% of the nation’s MPAs.
Many marine protected areas in the U.K. have been criticized as “paper parks,” given that the protection they offer is often very minimal or indistinguishable from nonprotected areas. According to a report by Oceana UK, trawlers spent a suspected 20,000 hours operating inside MPAs in 2024.
The National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations opposes the bans on bottom trawling even in the 42 MPAs and contests the government estimates of short-term losses. It says its own estimates show 400% higher losses of revenue. Its sample of 55 vessels estimated a gross profit loss of 2.3 million pounds ($3.1 million) per year.
“The proposed bans will cause significant economic harm to many fishermen,” the federation wrote in a blog post.
But in coastal communities such as the southeastern county of West Sussex, where bottom trawling was banned almost five years ago, fishing groups and divers report that marine wildlife has thrived.
“You’re already starting to see stingrays and kelp forests and seahorses coming back, even within two or three years,” Taylor said. “[The bans] also support sustainable fisheries, because you end up with fish stocks recovering inside those sites and spilling out over the boundaries.
“Bans to bottom trawling in protected areas should be the start of government’s action, not just the end of it,” Taylor added.
Banner image: Seabed after bottom trawling. Image courtesy of Howard Wood/Oceana UK.
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