On Thursday 14 January, the European Parliament Committee on Fisheries recommended that biodiversity targets “should not be legally binding” and should be adapted to local specificities.
The Committee on Fisheries debated the draft opinion for the European Parliament Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety on the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, prepared by Gabriel Mato (EPP, Spain).
The draft opinion recommends that marine protected areas (MPAs) should be designated as areas “in which only fisheries and aquaculture activities can occur”. The rapporteur believes that setting a percentage objective “is irrelevant”. In its strategy, the European Commission proposes creating protected areas covering at least 30% of Europe’s seas.
Also on Thursday, at an online press conference, a number of NGOs called for the EU to implement an ambitious action plan to protect marine ecosystems.
Our Fish recommended measures to minimise by-catches in particular.
Seas At Risk also focused on measures to reduce dolphin by-catches and remove the subsidies that lead to overfishing at the earliest opportunity.
Oceana called for the 30% protection provided by the MPAs to be extended to cover areas on the high seas, and criticised deep-sea trawling.
Mato’s draft opinion strongly criticises the biodiversity strategy because it “accuses bottom trawling of being ‘the most damaging activity to the seabed’, without any in-depth analysis to back it up”.
The draft opinion of the European Parliament Committee on Fisheries can be found at: https://bit.ly/2LPaEey (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)