ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT OF FISHERIES

NEAFC’s request to ICES for scientific advice reads in part as follows:

“The recurring advice shall include information on the state of marine ecosystems and human impacts including historical developments in main parameters and information on the present state and recent development of stocks. The recurrent advice shall provide information on state of stocks and fisheries including - when available - historical developments in spawning stock biomass, total stock biomass, fishing mortality as well as landings and discards in the NEAFC regulatory area and within EEZs.”

“When providing its advice regarding fisheries ICES shall take account of all available information and the context of fisheries management including information from the fishing industry, ecosystem considerations, environment and hydrographical conditions, regulations in force that affect fisheries, factors affecting fishing operations and information about the fisheries, development of fisheries technology and relevant performance changes and other relevant factors that affect fishing or fish stocks.”

“If no management plan/strategy has been agreed by all relevant management parties or the agreed plan/strategy has been evaluated by ICES not to be consistent with the precautionary approach, ICES will provide advice applying the ICES MSY advice rule if possible or the precautionary approach if the information on the stocks is insufficient to support the MSY rule.”

“The advice shall be based on an ecosystem approach. This will be implemented incrementally so that any information on the interactions between fisheries, the fish stocks and the marine ecosystem is considered and incorporated in the advice as it becomes available; specifically, taking ecosystem and environmental considerations into account when providing the recurring advice mentioned above, ICES will develop a process to incorporate the following advice into overviews:

1. Assess the extent to which fishing disturbs the marine ecosystems and, where reference levels have been established, compare the impact to the reference level chosen.
2. Provide any new information regarding the impact of fisheries on other components of the ecosystem including small cetaceans and other marine mammals, sea birds and sensitive habitats.
3. Inform NEAFC of any notable impact of other factors on and imbalances in ecosystem structure that may prejudice the stocks of commercially valuable species and its long term exploitation.
4. Propose reference points as guidance for management purposes in an ecosystem context.

ICES will in addition give warnings of any serious threats from fishing activities alone or in conjunction with any other relevant activity to local ecosystems or species as soon as ICES is aware of such threats.”

The full request for advice for 2021 is available on the NEAFC website (https://www.neafc.org/system/files/AM_2020-94_Request-to-ICES-for-advice-2021%28PECMAS_2020-02-10-Rev1%29.pdf). Bottom fisheries in the NEAFC Regulatory Area (i.e. the high seas of the North East Atlantic) are limited by the legally binding measures for the protection of vulnerable marine ecosystems (VMEs). These measures (https://www.neafc.org/system/files/Recommendation-10-Amending-Rec-19-2014-VME-protection%28reduced%29.pdf) limit bottom fishing to areas where bottom fisheries took place in a specific reference period, and which have not been closed due to VMEs occurring or being likely to occur. This limits the areas where bottom fishing is authorised to a small proportion of the NEAFC Regulatory Area. Areas where VMEs occur or are likely to occur are closed to bottom fishing, but as a precautionary measure encounters with VME indicator species above a specific threshold result in a temporary bottom fishing closure for all vessels. Outside the areas where bottom fisheries took place in a specific reference period, only strictly regulated exploratory bottom fishing can be authorised. These need to undergo an environmental impact assessment and be explicitly agreed to by NEAFC before being authorised, and in practice no such exploratory bottom fishing has taken place.

The fishery is regulated under NEAFC jurisdictional framework / management regime.

Fisheries for deep-sea fisheries are subject to a series of legally binding conservation and management measures adopted by NEAFC. There are general measures that limit the effort in fisheries for all deep-sea species, Recommendation7/2018 (https://www.neafc.org/system/files/Rec_07_AM-2017-25-Rev1_Joint_Proposal-by-Iceland-Norway-on-DSS.pdf).

There are measures that prohibit fisheries targeting respectively deep-sea sharks (Recommendation 9/2020, https://www.neafc.org/system/files/Recommendation-09_Deep-Sea-Sharks.pdf), deep-sea rays (Recommendation 10/2020, https://www.neafc.org/system/files/Recommendation-10_Deep-Sea-Rays_Chondrichtyans.pdf) and deep-sea chimaeras (Recommendation 11/2020, https://www.neafc.org/system/files/Recommendation-11_Deep-Sea_Chimaeras.pdf). There are also stock-specific conservation and management measures that establish total allowable catches for two separate stocks of grenadiers (Recommendation 5/2021, https://www.neafc.org/system/files/Recommendation-05-Grenadiers_midatlanticridge%202021.pdf and Recommendation 6/2021, https://www.neafc.org/system/files/Recommendation-06-Grenadiers-HattonRockall-2021.pdf).

In addition, there is a seasonal closure to protect spawning aggregations of blue ling (Recommendation 7/2021, https://www.neafc.org/system/files/Recommendation-07-blue-ling_PECMAS-2020.pdf).

In addition to these measures, NEAFC also has a legally binding Recommendation that prohibits deploying gillnets, entangling nets or trammel nets at any position where the charted depth is greater than 200 metres (Recommendation 3/2006, http://www.neafc.org/system/files/rec-3_deep-water-gillnet-.pdf).

Consultations on formulating conservation and management measures for deep-sea species take place within the Permanent Committee on Management and Science, and directly among the NEAFC Contracting Parties.

The management takes account of the scientific advice from ICES. The ICES advice on which the latest NEAFC conservation and management measures are based can be found on the ICES website (https://www.ices.dk/advice/Pages/default.aspx).

In recent years, ICES developed a new approach for providing quantitative catch advice for data limited stocks. This has resulted in a move from one very general qualitative advice that applied jointly to all deep-sea species to separate quantitative advice for tens of different deep-sea stocks and species.

NEAFC has subsequently adopted the NEAFC approach to conservation and management of deep-sea species and categorisation of deep-sea species/stocks (http://www.neafc.org/system/files/NEAFC_approach_to_DSS_conservation-and-management_Nov16.pdf) on which the legally binding conservation and management measures are based. The current NEAFC conservation and management measures for deep-sea species are based on this approach, including applying the classification of the various fish stocks into the four categories that the approach establishes.

Bottom fisheries in the NEAFC Regulatory Area (i.e. the high seas of the North East Atlantic) are limited by the legally binding measures for the protection of vulnerable marine ecosystems (VMEs). These measures (https://www.neafc.org/system/files/Recommendation-10-Amending-Rec-19-2014-VME-protection%28reduced%29.pdf) limit bottom fishing to areas where bottom fisheries took place in a specific reference period, and which have not been closed due to VMEs occurring or being likely to occur. This limits the areas where bottom fishing is authorised to a small proportion of the NEAFC Regulatory Area. Areas where VMEs occur or are likely to occur are closed to bottom fishing, but as a precautionary measure encounters with VME indicator species above a specific threshold result in a temporary bottom fishing closure for all vessels. Outside the areas where bottom fisheries took place in a specific reference period, the restricted bottom fishing areas, only strictly regulated exploratory bottom fishing can be authorised. These need to undergo an environmental impact assessment and be explicitly agreed to by NEAFC before being authorised, and in practice no such exploratory bottom fishing has taken place.

NEAFC’s Permanent Committee on Monitoring and Compliance reports annually to the NEAFC Commission on compliance by the Contracting Parties with Recommendations adopted by NEAFC. The latest such compliance report, relating to the year 2019, is accessible on the NEAFC website (https://www.neafc.org/compliance).

Information provided by the NEAFC Secretariat.

Sources referred to in this fact sheet are (in the order they are referred to):