The North Sea has been warming up so cod and other whitefish species are moving north to colder waters. As a result stock recovery is being held back and it is unlikely that EU, particularly British, fishermen will be able to go back to the glory days of the 1970s when supplies were plentiful for some considerable time, if ever.
This was the somber note struck at the 2nd Buckland Colloquium held at Fishmongers’ Hall in London at the beginning of the month. However, the message was not all gloom and doom. Numerous European fish stocks are recovering as a result of EU fishery management measures, although the rate of recovery is far slower than fishermen, and administrators, had hoped for.
The southern North Sea warms the quickest of all European waters and the temperature has risen by 1 to 2 degrees Celsius during the past 100 years, according to John Pinnegar from the Centre for the Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science, Lowestoft. Pinnegar, a specialist on ecosystem studies and the impact of climate change, told delegates there was a strong relationship between water temperature and stock recruitment. Warmer water disrupts the feed for juveniles of some species, he said.
As a result of the dramatic fall in U.K. supplies from the North Sea, the country is now importing more than 90 percent of the cod purchased by British consumers from northern countries such as Iceland and Norway. “Barents Sea cod is currently at its highest ever level,” Pinnegar said.
Another effect of the rise in temperature, of course, is that other species are now moving into the seas around the U.K. Squid, anchovy, red mullet, John Dory, sea bass and hake are now much more plentiful, said Pinnegar. Unfortunately Britons are very conservative in the fish that they eat and “most of what we catch we sell [abroad]. We need to stimulate demand for the ‘new’ species.”
Professor Colin Bannister, a current Buckland Professor and former government advisor on species management, who opened the day’s proceedings, told delegates that the recovery of cod stocks in the North Sea would take 10-20 years. The closure of the North Sea herring fishery in 1976 had led to a complete and swift recovery, he said, and the fishery was re-opened in 1981.
“Subsequent management [of the fishery] was tougher, tighter, and successful, but the closure destroyed the original herring industry, made many enemies, and the EU is unlikely ever to repeat it.”
Closure of the cod fishery, which went into crisis in 2001, therefore was not an option, but stringent measures were imposed to bring about a recovery. “These measures are having the right affect,” Bannister said. “Fishing mortality is moving very much in the right direction and is now 50 percent less than in 2001. The spawning rate is moving in the right direction too, albeit there is still a long way to go.
“This is as good as can be expected: who could have done better, especially given the environmental impacts [such as climate change] on juvenile recruitment.”
To get the best out of “the existing biological possibilities,” Bannister’s recommendation for future fishing in the North Sea is to keep the harvest rate low and use as large a net mesh size as mixed fishing will allow.
Giving the catchers’ perspective, Barry Deas, CEO of the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organizations, and a former Buckland Professor, told the audience that fish landings were at their lowest level since the Second World War. “Key challenges have to be faced,” he said. “The CFP [European Common Fisheries Policy] is top heavy and has been quite ineffectual for most of its life.”
The so-called gadoid outburst after the depletion of herring stocks had led to the over expansion of the fishing fleet with the government subsidizing the building of new fishing vessels. More recent government decommissioning had led to a reduction in the size of the fleet, more in line with the level of the fish stocks.
“If you don’t get fleet capacity aligned with the resource, then nothing [management measures] will work,” Deas said. “Bringing the resource holders into the design and implementation of management issues is crucial.”
It remains to be seen whether this will happen, but no one wants to see a repeat of the situation off the Grand Banks of Canada, where cod stocks still haven’t recovered to their pre-1992 levels after a moratorium on fishing was imposed.
