North Sea Archives - Saving Seafood

Floating wind turbines could rise to great heights

July 30, 2021 — On July 16th Royal Dutch Shell, an oil and gas company, and Scottish Power, a subsidiary of Iberdrola, a Spanish electricity utility, made an announcement. They were, they said, jointly submitting proposals to the British authorities to build, off the coast of Scotland, the first large-scale set of floating wind farms in the world. At the moment, the largest floating farm is a six-turbine, 50mw array which is due for completion next month in the North Sea, 15km from Aberdeen. The consortium, by contrast, has said it is thinking in gigawatts (gw).

Offshore wind farms with foundations in the seabed are now part of the energy mix in several places. In the past four years their capacity has nearly doubled, from 19gw to 35gw, and amortised costs have dropped by a third, from $120 per mw-hour to $80. They are, however, of limited deployability, being restricted to waters shallower than about 60 metres.

Read the full story at The Economist

Atlantic, North Sea, Mediterranean, and Black Sea fishing opportunities agreed to for 2021

December 17, 2020 — Agreements on next year’s catch limits for more than 200 commercial fish stocks in the Atlantic, North Sea, Mediterranean, and the Black Sea have been reached by European Union fisheries ministers following two days of intense negotiation at the annual Agrifish Council meeting.

As more than 100 of the stocks in the Atlantic and North Sea have historically been co-managed with the United Kingdom, and given the ongoing E.U.-U.K. negotiations on their future relationship, ministers agreed to set provisional quotas for the fish stocks shared with Britain.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Without a Brexit fisheries deal, herring and other North Sea species face dire future

March 20, 2020 — Taking back control of fisheries became one of the totemic issues uniting supporters of the campaign for the UK to leave the EU. The issue will again be high on the agenda when the negotiations over the future relationship between the UK and EU are able to take place.

This will turn on the principles of freedom of access to territorial waters, and the rules governing how the EU’s total allowable catch is divided between member states. Both are enshrined in the EU Common Fisheries Policy, and the fishing quotas have been fixed since 1983. Referred to as “relative stability,” these permit a disproportionate amount of fishing in UK waters. Vessels from other EU member states are estimated to catch eight times as much fish from UK waters as the other way around.

The UK government has indicated that getting a better deal for British fishers will be a red line in the negotiations. In particular, it proposes that access to UK waters should be licensed and quota shares should be negotiated annually based on “zonal attachments,” which are the proportions of international fish stocks that reside the 200-mile area off the coast of a country, known as the exclusive economic zone.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

ICES recommends slashing North Sea cod quota, NGOs respond

July 1, 2019 — The 2020 North Sea cod catch should be no more than 10,457 metric tons (MT), which is 70 percent less than this year’s total allowable catch (TAC), the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) has recommended.

ICES latest scientific advice is also 63 percent less than its own recommendation for 2019.

The intergovernmental marine science organization said the change is due to a combination of a downward revision of the spawning stock biomass (SSB) in recent years, the recruitment estimates for 2019 being substantially below the value assumed last year, and the need for a large reduction in fishing mortality to recover the stock to its maximum sustainable yield by 2021.

The United Kingdom’s other cod stocks – in the Celtic Sea, Irish Sea, and West of Scotland – are also subject to similar warnings, with the advice for a zero catch for both the West of Scotland and Celtic Sea.

Following these latest recommendations, E.U. fishing ministers have again come under fire from the NGO community for failing to support the recovery of vulnerable stocks.

“This follows years of policy decisions that put short term political interests over long-term economic and environmental sustainability. Sadly, this was entirely predictable and preventable; failing to follow the scientific advice makes announcements like this inevitable,” Jonny Hughes, U.K. officer for The Pew Trusts’ Ending Overfishing in Northwestern Europe campaign, said.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Going fishing? Watch out for chemical weapons

May 15, 2019 — The US Army will destroy stockpiles of mustard gas and nerve agents this summer as part of its commitment to a 1997 treaty banning the production and use of chemical weapons. The undertaking will require specialized personnel—toxic-materials handlers, chemical-accountability managers, surety specialists, ammunition surveillance/quality assurance specialists, and a coterie of supervisors.

In the decades immediately following World War II, America’s military wasn’t quite so buttoned up about its chemical cast-offs. Until Congress outlawed dumping of munitions at sea in 1972, there were an estimated 74 offshore chemical weapons disposals through 1970, 32 of which took place in US waters and 42 abroad.

Oceanographers at Texas A&M University have estimated that at least 31 million pounds of munitions of all types were dumped in waters off 16 states and in the Gulf of Mexico, although “that could be a very conservative estimate.”

The problem is not limited to US waters. Sections of the Baltic and North Seas are known to contain large numbers of abandoned chemical weapons, and such munitions have turned up off the coasts of France, Sweden, and Germany.

Read the full story at Quartz

EU Commission proposes 2019 TACs for Atlantic, North Sea

November 9, 2018 — The European Commission has proposed new 2019 quotas for 89 separate stocks in the east Atlantic and North Sea.

The new quotas will see total allowable catch (TAC) increased or maintained for 62 stocks, while 22 stocks have seen a decrease in TAC — five of which have a proposed TAC of zero, indicating that the reduced stocks should no longer be targeted at all.

Some of the biggest quota gains belonged to North Atlantic haddock, which had a proposed TAC of 10,469 metric tons, up 103% from 2018; horse mackerel off the west coast of Spain, with a proposed quota of 94,017t, up 69%; and Norwegian lobster west of Sweden, up 65% to a new TAC of 19,424t.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Dutch fishermen to sail fleet into Amsterdam in wind turbine protest

June 5, 2018 — The Netherlands may be the land of the windmill, but fishermen are planning a major protest on Saturday against the Dutch government’s latest wind turbine construction in the North Sea, with an armada of fishing boats sailing into Amsterdam.

After alighting from at least 15 boats at the back of Amsterdam’s central station, it is understood that hundreds of fishermen will march to the capital’s Damrak canal, where they will upend bags of small fish deemed too small for sale by the EU, and cover them with red dye.

Fishing community leaders say they are being crowded out of their waters and that the towering turbines damage fish stocks and deafen and displace the local porpoise populations.

The Dutch government has announced plans to build three more windfarms off the Noord-Holland coast and north of the Wadden Islands, in addition to five new windfarms already agreed upon, at a cost of €20 billion (£17.5bn).

It is claimed by local fishermen that 25% of Dutch fishing waters will be covered with turbines by 2025 and made out of bounds for larger fishing vessels.

A Dutch energy network is additionally drawing up plans for an island of wind turbines on Dogger bank, a patch of shallow fishing waters 78 miles off the east Yorkshire coast frequented by Dutch, Danish and UK fishermen.

Read the full story at The Guardian

NGOs rail against EU’s confirmed North Sea fishing plan

May 30, 2018 — Multiple environmental NGOs have railed against the EU’s North Sea fishing plan, which it has now voted in, claiming it does not implement the common fisheries policy (CFP) and allows overfishing.

On May 29 the European Parliament adopted in its final vote the North Sea Multi-Annual Plan (NSMAP). The plan covers nearly one-third of all fish catches in EU waters, and includes demersal species, such as: cod, haddock, whiting, sole, plaice and Norway lobster. According to Oceana, the final deal is not acceptable, as it does not fully implement the objectives of the CFP and still allows for overfishing of certain stocks in the region.

“The EU lawmakers have completely failed to meet the legally binding requirements set by the CFP and the parliament missed an opportunity to defend its own position adopted at the plenary vote in September 2017. The parliament also ceded to the [EU] council’s pressure and low ambitions on the matter,” wrote Oceana.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

Warming world will affect fish size and fisheries

March 26, 2018 — Current fishery targets may become unachievable as the planet warms.

A new study, led by Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML), has found that the proportion of large fish in the North Sea may decrease as climate change unfolds, by as much as 60% in some areas. The effects of warmer waters and ocean acidification may mean proposed fisheries management targets based on fish size could be unachievable if the effects of environmental change on fish size are not considered.

Using state-of-the-art modelling and comparison with real-life surveys, the researchers demonstrated they can simulate how fish size is changing in our marine environment, under the pressures of fishing and environmental factors. This form of modelling, combining important indicators and environmental change, can help with sustainable exploitation of fished stocks by helping policy makers consider how wild populations are impacted by changing, warmer and more acidic oceans into the future.

Indicators based on fish size are widely used in the study and management of wild populations exploited by commercial fishing. The Large Fish Indicator (LFI) is one such example, determining the biomass of fish above a certain size in a community, and used to inform policy and guide the fishing industry.

While widely used, however, these types of indicators have not previously been used alongside predictions of future conditions in line with expected climate change. Fish size closely reflects the environment, and a warming world will change the conditions in which fish live. It has been suggested that rising water temperatures in the North Sea, for example, are driving down fish size in key species. By modelling North Sea fish populations alongside predicted climate change scenarios for LFI, scientists have shown how climate change may affect fish communities, and what it may mean for fisheries.

Read the full story at PHYS

New England fishermen worry that wind turbines could impact their catch

December 26, 2017 — NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — East Coast fishermen are turning a wary eye toward an emerging upstart: the offshore wind industry.

In New Bedford, fishermen dread the possibility of navigating a forest of turbines as they make their way to the fishing grounds that have made it the nation’s most lucrative fishing port for 17 years running.

The state envisions hundreds of wind turbines spinning off the city’s shores in about a decade, enough to power more than 1 million homes.

‘‘You ever see a radar picture of a wind farm? It’s just one big blob, basically,’’ said Eric Hansen, 56, a New Bedford scallop boat owner whose family has been in the business for generations. ‘‘Transit through it will be next to impossible, especially in heavy wind and fog.’’

Off New York’s Long Island, an organization representing East Coast scallopers has sued the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to try to halt a proposal for a nearly 200-turbine wind farm. Commercial fishermen in Maryland’s Ocean City and North Carolina’s Outer Banks have also sounded the alarm about losing access to fishing grounds.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Boston Globe