Ten years ago hundreds of thousands of people stood in support of fishing reforms to end the wasteful practice of discarding fish at sea. Now, new proposals, wrongly branded as ‘world-leading’, would see the Scottish Government backsliding on these environmental standards.
Scotland’s seas have suffered from many years of decline – the Scottish Government found in 2020 that they had failed its commitment to halt the loss of biogenic reefs, to achieve a healthy marine environment and recent publications from government scientists show that overfishing is still prevalent.
The cause of this bad environmental health is pressure from human activities, and fishing, particularly the widespread practice of bottom-trawling, sadly ranks as the most impactful throughout Scotland’s seas.
In recent decades, fishing in Scotland has been ruled by the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy. After we left the EU the Scottish Government has had to replace these rules with something new – initially they intended to bring forward a Scottish Fisheries Act, something which Open Seas supports, and that is needed for the Scottish Parliament to have fully-devolved power over Scotland’s seas. However, in 2020 the Scottish Government instead sought to [Read more…]