Update April 2022: The Government announced that bottom trawling will be banned from four of the UK’s offshore Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), including the Dogger Bank!
From puffins and seals to the bizarre ‘fried-egg’ nudibranch, this shallow patch of ocean is packed with amazing animals. And with a new ban on destructive bottom trawling in the area, there’s new hope for the sea life of Dogger Bank.
What is Dogger Bank?
Located about 100 km off the east coast of England, Dogger Bank is a large shallow area in the North Sea. It was once part of a landmass known as Doggerland, connecting Europe and the British Isles during the last ice age. Scientists think stone age humans would have once hunted wooly mammoths in this area.
Today, the long-submerged Dogger Bank is home to some very different residents. Unusually, Dogger Bank’s waters are rich in tiny floating plants called phytoplankton all year round, providing a perfect feeding ground for a variety of birds and sea creatures.
Dogger Bank has been trashed by industrial fishing
But the same things that make Dogger Bank a wildlife hotspot also make it a target for the fishing industry. Dogger Bank has long been known as a fishing area, but the rise of huge industrial fishing ships that can pull up hundreds of tonnes of fish a day has caused huge damage to the ecosystem.
It’s protected in theory, but not in practice – until now
Dogger Bank is officially designated as a ‘Marine Protected Area’ (MPA), but until recently, that hasn’t mean much in practice. As with most of Britain’s MPAs, industrial fishing was perfectly legal inside the so-called protected area, until the government officially banned bottom trawling here in April 2022.
Ocean campaigners call supposedly protected areas like this ‘paper parks’, because their protection only exists on paper.
Despite the good news about Dogger Bank, most of the UK’s offshore Marine Protected Areas are still ‘paper parks’. But that might be starting to change.
After decades of campaigning, there’s new hope for Dogger Bank
Greenpeace and other organisations have been working to protect Dogger Bank for decades, but recently we’ve stepped things up. In 2020, Greenpeace activists placed dozens of large boulders on the sea floor around part of Dogger Bank, creating a 47 square mile ‘boulder barrier’ where industrial fishing ships can’t drag their nets along the seabed – a technique known as bottom trawling.
A few months later, the government proposed a total ban on bottom trawling in the Dogger Bank Marine Protected Area, plus new restrictions in three similar areas around the country. In April 2022, the ban was officially confirmed.
This is brilliant news for Dogger Bank and its weird and wonderful creatures. But it leaves 94% of the UK’s so-called protected areas offshore as a destructive fishing free-for-all.
We need the government to get us on track this year to fully or highly protecting all of our marine protected areas. That means, as a starting point, banning all destructive industrial fishing vessels.
This could be done using post-Brexit powers to restrict fishing licences, rather than simply relying on the cumbersome process of introducing partial site byelaw restrictions. Only then will the UK be a true world leader in marine protection, allowing nature and coastal communities to recover.
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