OCEAN CRISIS: The Battle Against Bottom Trawling and the Fight for Marine Conservation with Dr Jean-Luc Solandt

95 percent of fish stocks in the North Sea have been depleted due to over-fishing and bottom trawling. Bottom trawling is a destructive fishing method that indiscriminately catches everything in its path, causing damage to the seabed and releasing carbon. Over the past 150 years, bottom trawling has depleted fish populations and harmed marine biodiversity. Efforts have been made to mitigate the impact of bottom trawling through the establishment of marine protected areas and the development of more selective fishing gear. However, the recovery of fish populations and the restoration of the seabed will take time. It is important for consumers to be informed about the fishing methods used and to support environmentally friendly fishing practices.

In this podcast I talk to Dr Jean-Luc Solandt, Principal Specialist in Marine Protected Areas at the Marine Conservation Society.

Marine Conservation Society:  https://www.mcsuk.org/

Pictures courtesy of www.skytruth.org

#BottomTrawling
#FishingImpact
#MarineConservation
#SustainableFishing
#ProtectOurSeas
#OceanHealth
#MarineBiodiversity
#EcoFriendlyFishing
#FisheriesManagement
#EnvironmentalAwareness
#SeabedDamage
#SelectiveFishing
#ConservationEfforts
#MarineProtection
#FishPopulationRecovery

Transcript

Angela Walker: 0:07

It damages the seabed, it kills plants and animals and it releases carbon, which can contribute to climate change. I'm talking about the practice of bottom trawling, that's, dragging a fishing net across the ocean bed indiscriminately, catching everything in its path. I'm journalist Angela Walker, and in this podcast I talk to inspirational people and discuss under reported issues. My guest today is Jean-Luc Soldand, from the Marine Conservation Society. Welcome to the programme.

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 0:37

Thank you very much for having me.

Angela Walker: 0:39

First of all, what exactly is bottom trawling?

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 0:43

It's a process by which a powered ship, fishing boat, pulls a net along the seabed by the use of these walks, which are metal ropes to take the tension of the net, and that is held open by either otter boards, which are these big wooden or metal boards that hold the net open at the mouth of the net, and it drags along the seabed, catching a fish.

Angela Walker: 1:10

And what's the scale of these things? I'd like to work out. How big are they?

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 1:15

They can be tens and even up to 100 plus meters wide, about 10, up to 10 meters in height. The length of the walks going out on the net can be hundreds of meters in length. And then there are other forms of other seabed disturbing types of line that are dragged along the seabed to a static net called Danish or Scottish Saining and that can be up to four kilometres length of rope that is just used to disturb the seabed that moves the fish into the net. So it's an industrial scale of fishing.

Angela Walker: 1:49

They are absolutely huge. It's almost hard to comprehend just how big these nets are, and when I first started reading about it I was quite shocked. So it almost stands to reason that they are causing a lot of damage. But just talk us through what is happening when these things are dragging across the ocean floor.

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 2:07

So, first of all, it crushes marine life.

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 2:10

So, even though the problem with some of the fishing industry in a way we reported the damage of these things is that of course a lot of the marine life is left destroyed on the seabed and it's not there for coming up in the net to describe the damage that is occurring, and it creates a lot of sedimentation.

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 2:26

So the sediments that are stirred up on the seabed bottom can be from sediments that are buried down to 10 or even 20 centimetres into the seabed and those are locked carbon stores. So that occurs, and also some of the chains that are required to weight down the net actually on the seabed, dragging along the bottom, in turn cause damage. And the worst of all is perhaps scallop dredging, which is what it is, that there are these six inch teeth that are designed to, with spring loaded dredgers, to bounce in and out of the seabed to stir up the scallops, to then get rise up to about a foot into the water column and then be caught in a chain mail bag behind them. So it is industrial plowing of the sea to a certain degree and the damage that's occurring.

Angela Walker: 3:15

How bad is it? I mean, how long does it take to recover? What's the sort of scale of the damage itself?

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 3:21

well, the sad thing is over over the course of industrialisation of this type of technique is it's been. It's been going on for about 150 years. 150 years means we've pretty much dragged every single bit of the seabed off the UK and off Europe. In our continental shelf, that means in waters less than 200 meters deep, because those are feasibly and economically and industrially accessible to these sorts of fishing and that's where the most fish are. So the damage has happened in our fathers and our grandfathers and our great-grandfathers time and now. What we're seeing in the, in the marine environment, is probably a small fraction of the biodiversity and the remnant productivity of the oceans wealth. A paper came out in 2010, which is quite a long time ago, describing the fact that we probably lost about 95 percent of our fish in the North Sea from this, this, this mechanised form of fishing. So the damage is done in our forefathers time.

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 4:11

Therefore, how do we attribute blame? It's really difficult. If society does something in a particular way, like burning fossil fuels, and doesn't consider the impacts of it from 150 years ago, who do we blame? Maybe we should change our, our narrative of this, saying let's just sort the issue out, rather than look at individuals to blame. So the way we've done it in society up to now is to try and create these vast protected areas that should eliminate this sort of activity, or try and reduce the impact of the heaviness of this equipment and the intrusiveness of it, and to make it more selective to catch the fish we really want to catch. Those are what's happened probably in the last 10 to 30 years to more, more or less effective means.

Angela Walker: 4:53

So you're talking about a reduction, a loss of 95% of the of the fish in the north See over the last 150 years. So are you saying that really, the lack of fish has sort of become normalized? We're used to the fact that there's a lot less in there. Are we just sort of accepting that that's how it is now?

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 5:14

That's a really good point. What we are facing as every generation is born and grows up, is something called the shifted baseline of perception. So your baseline when you were born, maybe 40 years ago minus 53 years ago, we saw the ocean and the world looking like something. I mean, I grew up with the Amazon being almost pristine and since then we've seen it being cut down, considered. Probably about 30% of it's gone. So my kids born 20 years ago, they've seen the Amazon of a certain extent. Now we can extend that to the sea to a certain degree.

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 5:45

So yeah, 150 years ago, these perceptions in science, these, these, these analyzed data suggests that fishers could go out with a net and just throw it over the side of their boat without any steam power or petrol power in their engines, and catch fish that the that would sort of be up to the gunnels. You know, almost thinking about. You hear about that with the herring fisheries, you hear about that with cod, with mackerel and, and this does this does not exist anymore. So we've had to fish harder and harder as every generation comes into the fishery. And when we argue every December with our European partners about quota allocation, we're talking about the dregs of the ecosystem and sort of. If there's a 20% rise from a baseline from the last 30 years, that to a fisherman 150 years ago would be derisable, because we've just hammered the ecosystem so much in the last 150 years. So any increase is perceived by the fishing industry to be a good thing. But ecologists look at it much more cynically and much more over a longer time scale.

Angela Walker: 6:46

Of course, because you're looking at the bigger picture, it seems a lot of the damage has already been done. What's being done now to sort of mitigate that and you know, is there any possibility that the oceans can recover from this overfishing and this bottom trawling?

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 7:04

Yeah, it's a really good. It's an interesting time to be around because I think in the last 10 to 20 years we have seen a public and civil society and even political shift in the United Kingdom to deal with some of this issues. So I started working with client Earth in about 2010. You probably heard of client Earth because they take very successful air quality cases in London, for example, and they also worked with me in the ocean and we took a case to UK government that they weren't regulating their protected areas and making sure that the protected areas had bands for these sorts of fisheries in place, since which time we've seen about 17,000 square kilometres of UK seabed protected from this sort of activity, which the public would have thought would be automatic when marine protected areas are designated. But a designation of a place doesn't necessarily mean such an activity is regulated, which I think is criminal. In philosophy, we should have protection so the public aren't duped, perhaps, over what an area of the ocean should be. They would think automatically dredging or trawling would be eliminated. So it took us with client Earth a number of years to make sure that that happened and then the government started to make changes and then, ironically, since Brexit, which I don't think has been particularly good for society.

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 8:28

One of the things that has been good for the UK is we've been able to control our fishing in our offshore marine protected areas, and that's been a vast change in approach since that time. And also outside of protected areas, there are mechanisms to make fishing gear lighter, as I alluded to earlier, so reducing that amount of metal, the weight of nets, and make sure that they rise above the seabed. There are even some research that's taken place in Dutch fisheries to electrocute fish into nets rather than drag them using weighted gear. But that also has secondary effects on other animals in the marine environment, you can imagine. So it is still a very, very coarse way of catching our food. We must think of it as indiscriminate, because it just has these the ways of catching everything, and then things end up dead on the deck. It's very, very difficult to see the survivability. So protected areas have had one course of progress, and then there is this technological solution to make the gears lighter.

Angela Walker: 9:27

So what happened? So tell me a bit about the process. They drag the net across the seabed and then they bring the catch up onto the boat, I guess, but it is indiscriminate. So what happens to all the stuff that's been caught in the net? What would be in that net?

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 9:46

Well, there will be an element of the seabed that comes up depending on the mesh size, so that's the size of the squares in the net. Obviously, the smaller the size of that mesh, the more animals of a smaller size can be picked up, be they fish or be they invertebrates, so animals without backbones, perhaps similar animals that generally are stuck to the seabed, which are kind of like the trees and the bushes on the seabed. Now, those trees and bushes are really important and allow the habitat for other organisms to live, much like our own forests. So by degrading them to duty, you actually reduce the biodiversity and the functional importance of the seabed for it to maintain life and hold carbon and to strip the ocean of nutrients, which we need to do. But also the fish that come up and the invertebrates that come up, like sponges, corals, small fish, shellfish, and you also get a lot of shrimp and other bycatch like that that's sorted on deck into desirable species and non-desirable species, and those that can't be sold are simply heaved over the side.

Angela Walker: 10:51

Dead.

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 10:52

Yes, and there are some fisheries that are much worse than others.

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 10:55

So we have a fishery for something called Nephropes, which is our scampi, and the bycatch of that is something it is very, very bad. I mean it's more than the weight of the scampi that's caught on the deck. So you know there are alternatives and, for example, there are in Scotland constant arguments between the potfishers, which are benign fishers, which target scampi by putting just a pot on the seabed with some bait in it, and the scampi, the longustine or the prawns move to the pots and then they're just hauled up after a couple of days. Now those guys are fighting really against the trawlers that just hoover them up and kill everything else, and we would like to see and Scottish government has been really bad about this much more restricted donation to protect that much more benign way of fishing for scampi than the harmful practice of trawling for it. So there are some authorities have been better and some authorities have not been so good, and I think the Scottish government has been pretty poor at dealing with that issue for decades. It's been a problem.

Angela Walker: 11:56

Is there any way of telling, when we buy fish, how it's being caught? I mean, I had scampi this week and I feel terrible because I've got no idea how that was caught. You know, we know if we're having free range chicken, you know how can we tell if the fish that we've, that we're eating, has been caught in an environmentally friendly way?

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 12:16

Well, the Marine Conservation Society does do a good fish guide and you can find out the capture methods of the stocks that you can see in the supermarket. So everyone should download the app onto their phone from the Marine Conservation Society and they can see what's being caught, how it's being caught, when they actually buy it in the marketplace. It is more difficult in supermarkets, perhaps in restaurants. In restaurants they tend to be proud when they actually have dive caught, scallops or pot caught, long esteem or scampi. But most of the scampi you'll get from an average place will be not only caught by trawl, but then it will be shipped off to China to be processed and then shipped back in a frozen form for us to eat. So we've also got to think of air miles in the way we industrialise our seafood production, which is nowadays not really not suitable for how we need to manage the planet.

Angela Walker: 13:06

Gosh, that's another thing I can't eat now.

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 13:09

Yeah, I afraid so.

Angela Walker: 13:10

It's better to be informed and I should look into that app because that sounds really interesting. So you've talked about marine protected areas. Are they working? Just talk me through it a bit, because you said we've got these marine protected areas, but it doesn't necessarily mean that trawlers aren't operating in them. That's so confusing.

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 13:29

So marine protected areas are set up by different laws. As you can imagine, People get together in rooms and discuss where would be a good place for them, where not. Does it protect certain amount of biodiversity? Does it protect things like good carbon storage habitats like seagrass beds and Merle beds? These are amazing plants that lock down generations worth of carbon in the soils and the seabed sediments. So we're getting more and more aware of what habitat should be protected when the designations happen.

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 14:00

So you call something a marine protected area, it doesn't mean it regulates everything automatically. So if something is ongoing in an activity that's there prior to the designation, sadly in our country it doesn't mean it's stopped or immediately restricted. We at the Marine Conservation Society, with so many other actors, know this, unlike the public, and we've tried so hard for many, many years to stop trawling in many protected areas, the most obvious ones being where the seabed is protected. So that would immediately suggest that trawling should be banned immediately. But it's taken us many, many years of, in a way, fighting with regulators and discussing with fishermen that this is unreasonable to us and to the long term health of the ecosystem to perpetuate this activity. So because it's out of sight, out of mind. Underwater, the public isn't so concerned. If it were to happen on your local woodland or in your local park you saw someone going there with a dredger or a roller and just eliminated the habitat There'd be uproar. That is not the case at sea. That's really why.

Angela Walker: 15:11

That's a really interesting point that you make, and it brings me onto the thought of who is policing it and how. I mean it must be incredibly hard to check if it's going on and to what extent.

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 15:25

Yeah, there are various ways. In our near shore waters we have in England we're very lucky something called the inshore fisheries and conservation authorities Ten authorities dotted around the coast from Cornwall all the way up to Northumberland, that know their fishermen, they know their fisheries that are taking place and they also are able to put satellite technology on the boats to show where they are all times. And in the similar vein, offshore, which is where there's much more international foot fishing, another agency called the Marine Management Organization is looking at the activity of these vessels only using remote sensing technology, as we call it, or satellite technology. So that is basically a unit on the wheelhouse of the boat that sends a message every two hours in the case of offshore fishing or near shore fishing, much more frequently than that to a satellite. That satellite transponds the position of the boat and the speed at which it's moving, which is critical To the regulators.

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 16:21

Assure now, if those boats are moving at less than four kilometers an hour for knots, sorry, should use the nautical term they are deemed probably to be fishing, because when you're trawling you have to allow the net to go at a speed that catches the fish Officially, and also trawling on a satellite chart looks like a zigzag line, because they go back and forth over an area that they think is productive, rather than a boat. Going from A to B necessarily goes in a straight line at a faster speed. So we can use these different attributes as to managing our our activities at sea.

Angela Walker: 16:57

Yeah, it's interesting. When you see these aerial photos and the satellite imagery, it's quite obvious what is going on actually, isn't it? You can see the lines and the zigzags in the ocean.

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 17:09

Indeed, and something that the civil society Communities, these, these NGOs that we are, these charities like the Marine Conservation Society we can use a really wonderful resource called global fishing watch, which is set up in the United States to allow Not only NGOs like ourselves but also governments the government of Indonesia uses this, this, this great web resource, to map fishing activity and see it in real time, and then you can send authorities out to see where boats are and actually see if they're in the act of fishing within enforcement vessels or Helicopters or planes and do overflight data and then possibly prosecute individuals if they continue to Be acting suspicious or have fish caught in those protected areas.

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 17:52

So that's the way the world's going, with much more remote sensing technology, but it's the, the. The information from that global fishing watch resource is not Prosecutable in court. It can be circumstantial evidence around Something that has to be set up by government just for for fishery surveillance, because that's a safety device that is actually pinging that data. So there's this tension still between civil society saying we know they're fishing and Authorities saying, well, we have to use our official remote sensing devices to track them. So it's sort of like the. The problems do go on and persist, but nevertheless we have got a way of policing our policemen, if you like.

Angela Walker: 18:33

Well, at least we can see what's going on and maybe in future that will make it easier to clamp down on. And you've been working in this field for many years. Tell us a bit about what changes you've seen.

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 18:45

Well, we've seen changes. Most importantly, like I said earlier about this, out of sight, out of mind, I think we really started to see the wonders of the sea. You are interested in it yourself. You just described your concerns about microplastics and this the sewage, sewage overflow systems problems I think society is starting to be concerned about. The sea is, after all, 70% of our planet and it is it has absorbed 90% of our Carbon that we've we've pushed out into the atmosphere to carbon dioxide Emissions. So people are really understanding. If we don't deal with this issue, we really really suffer as a species. So I think we've seen that change and that pressures politicians, which in turn pressures regulators to pressure the users of the sea to actually do the right thing.

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 19:27

So, definitely, in about the 15 to 20 years I've been working in this work, I started making sure that these sorts of most damaging fishing activities Scallop dredging weren't happening in our coastal waters. With others, we saw sites closed in Cornwall, we saw sites closed in in plumber's, and then we started to work on a systemic basis by which we wanted to ensure that all Regulators in the UK protected all the marine protected areas that were vulnerable to all these types of bottom trawling and that started to happen in about 2012 to 2016. We saw in short waters and then, as I said earlier, brexit allowed us the opportunity to manage the seas from six miles out to 200 miles, and now we've seen progress in about. Well, the doggie bank, which is near you here on the shipping forecast, is a bank which used to be land before the last glacial, the glacial meltwater. It was land up until about 12,000 years ago, would you believe so? It's a shallow bank in the middle of the North Sea, used to be called dogger land, and that you were.

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 20:29

No. Ibiza is historically being fished and that was entirely closed. 12,300 kilometres square, which is five times the late district, was entirely closed to all forms of bottom trawling in 2022 and we saw a 98% reduction in fishing activity because of that closure, with some errant vessels sort of tweaking at the edges. That was the 2%. So we have seen successes. We must be positive, we must forge ahead, because conservation could just look at itself and go. What difference are we making in the grand scheme of things? But if we don't try? We must try to resolve some of these issues and then start to see the productivity return and the richness return, and that inspires me and it should inspire everyone.

Angela Walker: 21:13

That's what I was going to say. So it was only a couple of years ago that trawling stopped at Dogger. Do we know if the area is recovered at all?

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 21:22

That's a good question.

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 21:23

It's very costly to do the science to monitor the seabed, as you could imagine. You've got to go out 100 kilometres east of Hull on a research vessel which costs £6,000 to £10,000 a day just to have at sea and then you've got to drop the cameras onto the seabed and you've got to record what fish populations are there by using things called baited underwater remote video to put the bait on the end of a pole and have a GoPro on the weight and you see what turns up. So these are the sort of techniques we're using and I know that some colleagues in a Dutch NGO because it is in the middle of the North Sea they funded such a research trip in November and they did record some interesting marine life in areas that had hitherto been trawling but they hadn't been before the ban. So it's really difficult to compare the difference. I think we'll only see a difference in about five to ten years when long-term restrictions of that sort of scale will start seeing fish populations go up and seeing the seabed life start to recover.

Angela Walker: 22:18

Yeah, I'd love to know how quickly the seabed can recover after this kind of intensive fishing. I mean, at the end of the day, there are a lot of people making an awful lot of money out of bottom trawling. I know that you're pleased with the progress that we've seen and we're hoping to see more progress. How confident are you that you know that we'll see an end to bottom trawling eventually? Is that your goal? Is that your goal?

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 22:46

It would be a girl. That's a reasonable thing to suggest as the evidence comes in of its secondary effects to the planet. The way the ocean functions, that carbon is definitely affected by it, be it the stuff in the seabed, in sediments or living organisms that also hold and lock down carbon. Everyone forgets that in the debate. They're always obsessed with what's in the sand and mud rather than the living organisms. So yes, we probably should as a civilized society that looks at science and goes well, if we started again, we wouldn't catch fish this way. So in that sense, what we need to do is go back to line fishing. We need to go back to static net fishing, which is where you put nets on weights but don't drag them through the seabed, just put them down. Those of course have problems with bycatch of things like dolphins and sharks and seabirds.

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 23:35

So no fishing technique is really pretty devoid of its secondary impacts, you know, outside of its target species, and that's the difficulty of it With farming. Of course we can seed the ground and say we're going to have cabbages, we're going to have a parsonage or whatever on this plot of land, and we know we're having this footprint impact. But the fishing industry would also say look, 90 or you know, 70 percent of arable, potential arable use land on land is plowed every year and is effectively a monoculture. So is there really a massive difference to what we're doing at sea and on land? Possibly not, but we need to protect the protected bits better and we do probably see. I would like to see in my lifetime what's left of it, a further reduction in the pressure from this fishing gear. But a complete plan globally or in Europe is unlikely, I just have to say politically and economically at the moment.

Angela Walker: 24:32

Yeah, talking economically, of course, if it's harder to catch fish because you know we're not using this intensive bottom trawling system, then surely that will push the price up to for consumers, and ultimately people don't want to pay more for their food, do they?

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 24:49

Yeah, that's known and a lot of the fishing industry is subsidised. Did you know that the fuel that the fishing the trawler is using is subsidised by us? So we're paying the tax for the fuel. So where we're packing, I don't know what we pay the tax at the pumps, maybe 20 to 30, 40 percent, that is. That is paid for by government to fish using these gears, which I think is not good.

Angela Walker: 25:10

So we're actually funding the bottom trawling out of the taxpayers' money.

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 25:16

That is a truth that is unpalatable, I would suggest, given its effects on the oceans. And those subsidies also are in certain EU fleets. In Spain, the subsidies extend to things like docking facilities, harbour ports, freezer units. If you go to northern Spain, you can see these enormous, beautiful EU funded infrastructure projects that support a fishery that is reducing in it its catch rates and its efficiency. So we need more regulation on restriction rather than keeping the thing going in its current form.

Angela Walker: 25:54

Would you argue then that, instead of subsidising bottom trawling, that the EU should be subsidising more environmentally friendly fishing methods? Surely?

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 26:04

Absolutely, and it's still the power of the bottom trawling industry that lobbies the EU to keep it going. So I think power is where money is and money is where those big, big industrial trawlers exist. So I would go back on an earlier point that you said. I don't think there are a lot of money, a lot of people earning a lot of money, but there are a few people earning a lot of money that have a lot of power and that own a few big, big, big boats that they keep things going as they are. So and there's been a lack of democracy in the allocation of quota. We've heard about Greenpeace have done some excellent work and sees at risk some colleagues of mine to find out that lobbying goes on behind closed door with fishing industry representatives to the ministers that set the quota for fisheries that aren't in the interest of the average smaller boat fishermen. But that's more of an EU problem.

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 26:52

In some ways, what we've done since leaving the EU has been more helpful to our smaller scale fishers who are less impactful to the environment in British waters and also I don't know if you know there's been a general restriction on sand deal fishing, which was then generally prosecuted by the Danes in UK waters, as an announcement last month, there is a Danish industry for turning sand deals these tiny anchovy sized fish, very oily, very important for seabirds, porpoises, sharks, fish like card herring, mackerel. They're basically turning them into dried pellets to feed salmon farming. Now you were turning basically part of the oceans ecosystem into a food for another part of a false ecosystem, if you like, because clearly agricultural salmon isn't a natural process and also the ratios of conversion from how much pellets you have to give a salmon to growing a salmon is about two to one, so you have to have two times the amount of fish to feed one fish that you want to eat eventually. So it's clearly not a very good industry for the ecosystem. And, of course, you might know, our seabeds are in massive decline our seabirds.

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 27:59

So this decision was extraordinarily powerful. The Danes do not like it. They're still complaining that this wasn't part of our trade agreement with the EU when we left in 2021 officially. So I think that's an extraordinarily positive step the UK government have done to on an ecosystem wide scale, not just the protected areas. This is the entire seas of the UK, which is hundreds of thousands of square kilometres that have been protected from this sort of fishing. So we are starting to learn and seeing some expansive measures.

Angela Walker: 28:28

So there are some positives to take from it. So what would you like to see next?

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 28:34

I'd like to see the final set of marine protected areas closed off offshore English waters. That's probably about 10,000 square kilometres. Those are going through consultation this year. Their target is to get them done by the end of this year. I'd like to then see the Scottish protected areas closed, which have been much more politically difficult because the Scottish fishing industry is more powerful than the English one, because they actually have more sea and more investment per capita in that fleet and again it's big boats. One of the most exciting things is we've learned from the work we've done legally in the UK and we're replicating that with a project we're doing with our European and non-governmental organisation partners in a number of countries. So they're hopefully going to start seeing their waters closed in their protected areas, at least to some of these trawling gears, in the next two to three years. So I'm pretty hopeful.

Angela Walker: 29:27

Thank you so much for talking to me today. It's fascinating You've done so much. How can people find out more if they're interested?

Jean -Luc Solandt, Marine Conservation Society: 29:35

They can follow our website, they can follow me on Facebook and they can definitely just keep bottom trawling into their search engines to see how things are moving. The very famous clothing company, patagonia, has got a campaign to ban bottom trawling, so there are various ways they can get engaged and learn about the subject, and it is a global issue. It's not just the UK, but there are lots of things online that people do. There are lots of petitions, there are lots of campaigns.

Angela Walker: 30:03

Thank you so much for joining me. It's a pleasure. I'm journalist Angela Walker, and today I've been in conversation with Jean-Luc Soldant from the Marine Conservation Society. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Please don't forget to subscribe, rate, review and share it with your friends, and you can check out my other work on my YouTube channel and my website, angelawalkerreportscom. Until next time, goodbye.