July 20, 2023 — The following is an excerpt from an article published by Sustainable Fisheries UW:
Seafood produced by bottom trawling can have a lower environmental impact than chicken or pork, according to a new review paper published yesterday. Writing in the ICES Journal of Marine Science, Hilborn et al. 2023 argues that banning bottom trawling would increase negative environmental impacts by increasing terrestrial protein production.
Hilborn et al. 2023, reviewed dozens of papers about bottom trawling impact, including stock sustainability, bycatch, ecosystem impact, and carbon footprint. Though bottom trawling is generally the most impactful kind of fishing, well-managed bottom trawl fisheries produce food with a much lower environmental impact than any terrestrial animal protein.
A review paper summarizes the current knowledge on a particular topic by combing through and presenting conclusions from recent publications. In this case, Hilborn et al. 2023 reviewed the existing literature on the environmental impacts of bottom trawling and summarized four major impacts: Sustainability of target species, impact on benthic ecosystems, bycatch and discard, carbon emissions.
The key to reducing impacts and sustaining fisheries is management. Bottom trawling can be a low-impact form of food production in places with effective management. Bottom trawling can be highly destructive in areas with little capacity for environmental management (like many developing nations in Asia).
In this post, we summarize the findings from the four major impacts, discuss what effective bottom trawling management looks like, and compare the environmental impact of bottom trawling to other forms of food production.