By helping European fishers avoid unwanted catch, expanding digital monitoring, and making enforcement more transparent, fisheries can tackle persistent discarding across the bloc without needing to readjust the E.U.’s Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), according to a new report from the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) and Oceana.
The joint analysis, “Making the Landing Obligation Work: Tackling Europe’s Bycatch Crisis through Fisheries Transparency,” comes as the E.U. considers the future direction of the CFP and prepares its Vision 2040 for fisheries and aquaculture.
Against that backdrop, EJF and Oceana argue the focus should be on making existing rules work in practice, rather than engaging in prolonged debate over reopening the policy.
“Scaling up the use of AI, real-time closures, incentives, investment in fishing technologies, and improving selectivity is necessary to make the E.U.’s restrictions on discarding work,” EJF CEO and Founder Steve Trent told SeafoodSource. “The [European] Parliament has now repeatedly called for the implementation of its Fisheries Control Regulation, which includes a mandate to roll out remote electronic monitoring (REM) on large, discard-prone vessels from January 2028. This will be a key way to close the enforcement gap that has been identified by the European Commission in its evaluation of the CFP.”
According to Trent, these actions “underscore” the stance that the bloc can achieve positive outcomes for fishers and fish populations immediately, without making any changes to core E.U. legislation.
“Nothing prevents the Commission, member states, and parliamentarians from acting together to scale up the solutions identified in our report right now. What the environment, the fishers, and coastal communities need is concrete and effective actions to deliver them. We cannot afford to lose more time reopening the CFP and years of negotiations,” he said.
The report from EJF and Oceana estimates that before the CFP’s last reform in 2013, discarding in European fisheries totaled around 1.7 million metric tons (MT) a year – equivalent to 23 percent of total catch. While the policy’s landing obligation, popularly referred to as a discard ban, was phased in from 2015 and has been fully in force since 2019, the organizations say illegal and unreported discarding, including of juvenile fish, remains widespread.
A 2025 study conducted by the European Commission also found continued discarding and no clear overall trend of decline across E.U. fisheries. Subsequently, the commission's 2026 CFP evaluation identified insufficient data on discards, numerous exemptions, insufficient incentives to comply, ineffective monitoring and enforcement, and limited industry buy-in among the main problems behind the landing obligation's poor enforcement.
Consequences extend beyond fish discarded at sea, EJF and Oceana said.
They said incomplete catch information means fishing mortality is not fully accounted for and can undermine the reliability of scientific assessments used to set management measures. The organizations also argue that persistent non-compliance can constrain fishing opportunities while putting operators that follow the rules at a competitive disadvantage.
Their report's central argument is that making the landing obligation work cannot focus solely on what happens after unwanted fish have been caught; instead, EJF and Oceana want greater emphasis to be placed on avoiding unwanted catch in the first place.
Oceana Policy Advisor Arielle Sutherland-Sherriff similarly stressed that to make the landing obligation work, unwanted catch needs to be prevented, not just managed after vessels catch fish.
“Avoidance is the simplest and most effective tool we have. That means supporting fishers with more selective gear and better information to help them decide when and where to fish, reducing unwanted catches before they occur,” she said. “Most unwanted catch that is discarded does not often survive, so preventing those catches from happening is far preferable to throwing valuable fish back dead.”
The report points to selective gear and fishing practices already in use in European fisheries, including SELTRA box cod-ends, square-mesh panels, larger mesh sizes, and sorting grids, as possible fixes.
For instance, the study cites evidence that sorting grids can reduce whiting bycatch by up to 87 percent and unwanted catch of haddock and cod by more than 90 percent in relevant fisheries.
It also highlights real-time information as an important tool for helping fishers adapt where and when they fish. Examples include the BATmap data-sharing system in use in Scotland and Norway's Reference Fleet approach, as well as catch-identification technologies and real-time temporary closures when concentrations of unwanted, or “choke,” species are detected.
To ensure wide adoption, EJF and Oceana said fishers need targeted public funding and incentives for verified selective practices. One proposal is preferential access to fishing opportunities for vessels demonstrating effective bycatch avoidance, with allocation decisions remaining transparent and subject to regular review.
The organizations also recommend developing interoperable digital catch-identification systems capable of providing timely information on catch composition and expanding collaboration between fishers, scientists, and fisheries managers over catch and discard data.
Trent said the biggest barrier to scaling up proven selective gears, real-time closures, and better catch information appears to be a lack of political recognition that “the status quo … is not sustainable,” adding there needs to be “political recognition” that the solutions already exist and are actively being applied in Europe today.
“From Norway, which has had restrictions on discards since 1987, we know that it cannot work alone. What makes it work are supportive measures that help fishers avoid bycatch in the first place, including temporary closures,” he said.
The report also calls for annual publication, by 30 June of each year, of comparable information on the implementation and enforcement of the landing obligation, in line with the revised Fisheries Control Regulation and its implementing acts. It also recommended systematically publishing final decisions in significant landing-obligation infringement cases, including vessel names where legally permissible and proportionate.
The organizations are also pressing for improved cross-border exchange of information on vessels receiving fisheries subsidies, with authorities assessing relevant final infringements before awarding or maintaining public support and suspending, recovering, or withdrawing grants where applicable legal conditions require it.
