November 23, 2022 — The Mediterranean Sea isn’t the source of plenty it once was. It now contains some of the most ecologically degraded marine areas in the world, and has been the site of dead zones and fish stock collapses in recent decades. Populations of countless species are in decline, including sharks, seagrasses and marine mammals. The sea is “on the verge of ‘burn out,’” WWF has declared.
Overfishing and destructive fishing practices, including bottom trawling, are part of the problem. Bottom trawlers drag fishing nets weighted down with heavy “doors,” and they often damage the seabed, destroying coral and sponge habitats, and catch unintended species at a high rate. Conservationists have pushed the creation of marine protected areas (MPAs) and no-trawl zones, but these are only effective if managed and regulated well, and reports in recent years have indicated that, in the Mediterranean, this isn’t the case.
Now the Med Sea Alliance (MSA), an umbrella group of NGOs and environmental advocates, has launched an “atlas” showing widespread illegal bottom trawling in the Mediterranean. The atlas, an interactive online map, shows thousands of days of apparent bottom-trawling activity in areas where it is banned, in 2020 and 2021. The atlas uses data from transponders that fishing vessels carry, as well as 169 confirmed infractions based on coast guard records and media reports.
“It’s the first time such an atlas [has been] released,” Anne Rémy, MSA’s movement coordinator, told Mongabay. “It can appear like a very scientific map, but behind this map, you have a very interesting story about the lack of enforcement and transparency in the Med, which is the most overfished sea in the world.”
Rémy stressed that the marine areas in question were especially ecologically sensitive.
“We are seeing the worst cases that could happen. Because it’s not bottom trawling [just] anywhere, it’s bottom trawling in areas which should really be protected,” she said.