After several years of overfishing, Northeast Atlantic pelagic stocks are reaching a critical point.
Overfishing over the past decade has largely been due to coastal states such as Norway, the U.K., the Faroe Islands, and the E.U. being unable to come to a quota-sharing agreement with every player involved, resulting in unilateral quotas that exceed recommended catch totals from the International Council on Exploration of the Sea (ICES).
Last year, for example, mackerel and herring catch in the area exceeded ICES advice by 35 percent and 33 percent, respectively. Catch totals for blue whiting, another pelagic stock in the region, exceeded advice by 28 percent.
“What’s needed is a comprehensive agreement that includes all parties [at] the table,” Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) Northern Europe Regional Director Erin Priddle said.
Despite the difficult politics at play making its recommendations moot, ICES continues to recommend catch well below actual totals. After recommending a 44 percent reduction in herring quota in 2023, ICES has now advised mackerel quotas be reduced by 22 percent in 2025.
With the new advice, the MSC is urging coastal states once again to reach an agreement.
“With mackerel, what we understand from the scientists is that it’s reduced down quite quickly and faster than they expected,” Priddle said. “At the same time, the narrative from industry that I've been hearing when I’m out and about is that it’s not been a good year for mackerel.”
One factor discouraging change is that coastal states’ fishing operations targeting lucrative pelagic species have largely been unaffected over the past decade.
Even though the stock has been overfished, it has largely been resilient, according to Jan Arge Jacobsen, a marine biologist in charge of pelagic stock advice for the Faroe Marine Institute. Recruitment, or the influx of new fish into the stock each year, was above the historical average from 2003 to 2014. However, recruitment has been trending in the opposite direction since, which could continue to create issues the more the stock is overfished.
“The stock has been declining since 2014, partly because recruitment has been worse than before and partly because the coastal states have continued to overfish the stock. It would be too simple to say that the stock's decline is only because of overfishing because it has been overfished for so many years. But, because the recruitment has gone down now, the stocks can't sustain the overfishing anymore,” Jacobsen said.
Leif Nøttestad, the principal scientist at Norway’s Institute of Marine Research agreed with his Faroese colleague.
“Due to good recruitment of new strong classes for several years, particularly the 2010 and 2011 classes, the stock has coped quite well with such historically high catches,” he said. “Nevertheless, in most recent years, recruitment has been lower with weaker classes, leading to a situation where international catch levels around 1 million metric tons is not sustainable any more.”
Another sign that the stock is in danger is that pelagic fish are less spread across the Northeast Atlantic. ICES advice is based on scientific surveys conducted by scientists from all the coastal states involved. One of the results that has come from 2024 surveys is that there are fewer mackerel in Icelandic waters and none in Greenland, indicating that the stock is retracting to spawning grounds in U.K. and E.U. waters.
It's not only mackerel that has been subject to overfishing.
Another commercially valuable fish in the area is Atlanto-Scandian herring. Last year, ICES advice put the fish below the “critical threshold” and recommended a quota reduction of 24 percent. This year, the advice was adjusted upward 3 percent again – a small percentage considering the drastic reduction last year.
Earlier this year, Norway, the U.K., and the Faroe Islands signed an agreement for mackerel fisheries, allocating themselves a quota of 31 percent, 27.48 percent, and 13.35 percent respectively, with Norway and the Faroe Islands giving some of their quota back to the U.K. in return for access to fishing mackerel in their waters.
The agreement between the three coastal states leaves 6.36 percent for Iceland, Greenland, and Russia to share – far less than those nations actually fish.
Priddle said this type of agreement is not good enough to ensure the stock’s future.
“It's what they call a building block and ambition to get this comprehensive agreement, but it's not sufficient to protect the stocks into the future,” Priddle said. “This is kind of a conundrum: the fact we have these heavily resourced, rich, wealthy, data-rich nations that should be able to find a way through this.”
