North Sea cod Archives - Saving Seafood

MSC urges countries to adapt to climate change as it suspends North Sea cod certification

September 24, 2019 — The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) has announced the suspension of the North Sea cod fishery certification due to stocks of the fishery dropping below safe biological levels.

The suspension comes after the latest scientific advice revealed that the stock – once thought in good health – appears to be in decline despite industry initiatives, such as avoiding catching juvenile fish that are critical to the reproduction cycle. The root cause of the decline is unclear, but scientists suggest that climate change could be an overarching cause.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

ICES recommends slashing North Sea cod quota, NGOs respond

July 1, 2019 — The 2020 North Sea cod catch should be no more than 10,457 metric tons (MT), which is 70 percent less than this year’s total allowable catch (TAC), the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) has recommended.

ICES latest scientific advice is also 63 percent less than its own recommendation for 2019.

The intergovernmental marine science organization said the change is due to a combination of a downward revision of the spawning stock biomass (SSB) in recent years, the recruitment estimates for 2019 being substantially below the value assumed last year, and the need for a large reduction in fishing mortality to recover the stock to its maximum sustainable yield by 2021.

The United Kingdom’s other cod stocks – in the Celtic Sea, Irish Sea, and West of Scotland – are also subject to similar warnings, with the advice for a zero catch for both the West of Scotland and Celtic Sea.

Following these latest recommendations, E.U. fishing ministers have again come under fire from the NGO community for failing to support the recovery of vulnerable stocks.

“This follows years of policy decisions that put short term political interests over long-term economic and environmental sustainability. Sadly, this was entirely predictable and preventable; failing to follow the scientific advice makes announcements like this inevitable,” Jonny Hughes, U.K. officer for The Pew Trusts’ Ending Overfishing in Northwestern Europe campaign, said.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

MSC certifies North Sea cod, signaling fishery’s recovery

July 19, 2017 — The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) announced its certification of cod caught by Scottish and English boats in the North Sea on Tuesday, 18 July, saying shoppers and diners “can finally buy the popular fish with a clear conscience.”

Cod stocks in the North Sea cratered around 10 years ago, with the annual catch dropping from historical highs around 270,000 metric tons (MT) in the 1970s to 44,000 MT in 2006. However, MSC said in its announcement that the fishery was brought back from the brink of collapse with the creation and implementation of a recovery plan formed between industry and the Scottish and E.U. governments.

“This is a huge accomplishment and the perfect example of what the MSC aims to achieve,” MSC Nort East Program Director Toby Middleton said in the release. “Thanks to a collaborative, cross-industry effort, one of our most iconic fish has been brought back from the brink. Modified fishing gear, catch controls, well-managed fishing practices – all these steps have come together to revive a species that was in severe decline.”

The “Cod Recovery Plan” closed spawning areas to fishing and introduced a system of fishing limits, with the goal of decreasing cod catches by 25 percent in 2009 and 10 percent every year thereafter, according to MSC. It also encouraged the development of better nets and the introduction of remote electronic monitoring using CCTV cameras onboard fishing boats. As a result, cod populations in the North Sea have risen fourfold since 2006.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

North Sea cod could be back on menu as numbers improve

September 25, 2015 — The eco-conscious fish and chips lover may soon be able to enjoy guilt-free battered cod caught in the North Sea after the Marine Conservation Society (MCS) removed it from their red list of fish to avoid eating.

Stringent catch controls were imposed on the species in 2006 after two decades of overfishing pushed cod populations to the brink of collapse. But a recovery of North Atlantic stocks has led the MCS to nudge cod into their amber category for fish that can be occasionally eaten.

This month, the Marine Stewardship Council, which sets standards for sustainable fishing, began an assessment of the health of North Sea populations. This could lead to the cod gaining certification for sale in British high streets, as has happened with Scottish haddock and Cornish hake.

Almost all cod sold in the UK’s fish and chip shops – 50,000 tonnes-worth – comes from the Arctic Sea. “It is encouraging to see this change in scoring from the MCS,” the council’s North Atlantic director, Toby Middleton, said. “The signs of improvement are there.”

Read the full story at The Guardian

SCOTLAND: Media’s Fish Tales and Codology

July 22, 2015 — Back in 2012, the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times famously screamed that there were, “just 100 cod left in the North Sea”. Even at the time, it ranked as one of the greatest howlers ever published – as the BBC pointed out a fortnight later, they were only about half a billion wrong. It would have been funny but for the impact it had on the Scottish fishing industry. Having slimmed down dramatically over the preceding decade, and after the voluntary adoption of serious practical measures to aid recovery of a depleted stock, the last thing it needed or deserved was a bunch of irresponsible journalists destroying the market for locally caught fish.

It’s a shame that you can’t catch cod in London, Edinburgh or the grim, grey streets where environmental activists come from. Unfortunately for the fishing industry, a very large proportion of the UK’s fish comes from the northern part of the North Sea, and particularly the waters around Shetland. From a part of the world that doesn’t even appear on some newspapers’ weather maps, in other words. More fish are landed in Shetland than in England, Wales and Northern Ireland combined, and to journalists in London it barely exists. Out of sight, out of mind … and from where tales of plentiful cod, not to mention a couple of dozen other commercial fish species, can be safely ignored.

And such tales! Cod everywhere, cod impossible to get away from, cod recovering too fast for vastly shrunken quotas to cope, cod of a size not seen for decades. Grinning anglers mooring up in Scalloway claiming that after a great day out the 100 cod were down to 90 or whatever.

It certainly made for a contrast with annual quota talks in Brussels, where UK and Scottish ministers had to fight year after year just to prevent already inadequate cod quotas being cut further. Whatever the scientists were doing, it didn’t tally with what fishermen were seeing every day, haul after haul, and needless to say the anti-fishing brigade were delighted with the whole process. Good news on wildlife is very bad news for environmental groups; doom, gloom and ecological catastrophe are what they need to suck in donations. From that point of view, the disappearing cod story was extremely opportune.

Read the full story at The Scotsman

North Sea cod make a comeback and Canada’s are on their tail

July 8, 2015 — FISH and chips for all! The International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) in Copenhagen, Denmark, has recommended the first major catch increase for North Sea cod since 2000, as it says the stock has climbed back above danger levels.

Also, figures to be released later this year by Canada’s fisheries ministry show cod stocks on the Grand Banks are up for the third year in a row – although they aren’t out of danger yet.

There’s no mystery to it, say fisheries experts on both sides of the Atlantic: fishers stopped killing so many cod, and the population recovered, although it took its time.

Read the full story at New Scientist