The Marine Conservation Society (MCS) recently downgraded Northeast Atlantic mackerel caught by midwater trawlers from a 3 to a 4 rating in the 2025 spring update to its Good Fish Guide, which measures the environmental impact of harvesting seafood species.
In tandem with the downgrade, the U.K.-based environmental charity recommended that businesses not source the species and has reignited calls to end the political impasse surrounding the species’ management and quota shares that has led to long-term overfishing of the stock.
MCS’s Good Fish Guide uses a 1 to 5 rating system, where fish rated 1 and 2 are considered "best choices” for consumers to eat, 3 can be eaten but not too often, and 4 and 5 are not recommended. The latest update also had mackerel caught in the Northeast Atlantic by hook-and-line fishing moving from a 2 to a 3 rating.
Explaining the mackerel downgrade, MCS said that while some management measures are in place, enforcement remains insufficient, and though countries like Norway, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and the U.K. all fish this stock, there’s no unified management plan to prevent overfishing across the entire fishery.
The organization said that catch limits set by all nations fishing the stock have “consistently exceeded scientifically recommended levels” by between 5 percent and 80 percent since 2009, and in the period between 2020 and 2024, total allowable catches (TACs) were, on average, 39 percent higher than scientific advice.
Although actual catches have typically fallen below these TACs, they have still exceeded recommended levels by an average of 23 percent, MSC said, insisting that all parties must now work together to develop an appropriate strategy that leads to stock recovery...
