October 7, 2025 — 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.”