Few industries are as woven into Scotland’s coastal identity as fishing and few face a more complex management challenge. The variety of different fishing methods and patterns that make up the fleet in Scotland need to be managed in different ways to lessen their interactions and impacts on the marine environment and support sustainable opportunities and coastal livelihoods.
In reality, the approach to management in Scottish seas plays out as a patchwork of policies delivered by different pieces of legislation and there are different rules depending on the fishing type, the health of the fish or shellfish stock, and the environmental conditions.
On paper, these instruments ought to work together to deliver an ecosystem-based approach to marine management – meaning that fishing can operate alongside other marine industries and activities all while not harming the environment. In practice, there is a persistent and troubling tendency for fisheries policy to duck the hardest decisions, producing plans and strategies that describe the status quo rather than driving meaningful change. The most glaring omission is spatial management.
Spatial management of fishing involves a system that specifies where, when and how fishing can take place. There are some rules in Scottish seas that implement spatial restrictions, but they tend to be insufficient and targeted to a single species, area or a particular gear type.
The closest thing we have to a framework for spatial restrictions of fishing is actually Scotland’s Marine Protected Area (MPA) network, where different types of fishing are restricted based on the species or habitats that are being protected. The MPA network is an essential foundation for nature conservation, but it was never designed to function as a comprehensive framework for fisheries spatial management. The process for implementing MPA fisheries measures has been delayed for over 10 years and, despite this, is still seemingly used as a scapegoat for fisheries policy actions where further spatial measures would be effective at achieving management goals.
A recent damning report by environment watchdog Environmental Standards Scotland shows that Scottish Ministers have failed implement their legal requirements to achieve Good Environmental Status (GES), a measure of marine health. They highlight that despite the existing MPA protection measures in Scotland’s MPA network and the different types of fisheries management, their scale, implementation and integration have been insufficient to achieve GES for the seabed. Persistent gaps in spatial management, weak governance and lack of data have left the health of Scotland’s seafloor habitats in continued decline, making robust spatial management the highest priority and most under-addressed solution in current fisheries and conservation policy.
What is needed is a broader spatial management framework that builds on the MPA network rather than hiding behind it, and that designates core recovery areas closed to damaging gear. There should also be linked buffer zones around protected habitats, established preferential access zones for lower-impact methods such as creel fishing, and defined areas where trawling can continue if sustainable use can be demonstrated.
Such an approach to management of fishing would be hugely beneficial, particularly in Scotland’s inshore (the area of sea out to 12 nautical miles from the shore). It would mean fairer opportunities for lower impact fishing gear, lower risk to vulnerable marine habitats and species, less conflict between fishers targeting the same species with different gear, and more win-win outcomes for nature and people.
However, it’s a potential approach that is consistently sidelined in Scottish Government decision-making in favour of options that have result in minimal change to the status quo. There are numerous examples where greater use of spatial management in policy development would address both environmental and economic needs, such as the recently consulted Nephrops (langoustine) Fisheries Management Plans. Across these policy processes, spatial management appears in the margins, acknowledged but never fully confronted. When it does appear, policymakers tend to point at the MPA network as if it were sufficient. Judging by Environmental Standards Scotland’s recent findings, it is not.
Crucially, a spatial management framework must complement MPA management and be developed in active alignment with marine planning and licensing processes, such as offshore renewables. Scotland’s National Marine Plan and the regional marine planning process provide exactly the governance architecture needed to make spatial fisheries management coherent and durable.
Fisheries management that ignores the marine planning framework risks creating contradictions and missed opportunities, such as reducing conflict for resources, better protecting key habitats (such as fish nurseries) and making more refined and environmentally appropriate decisions about use of space.
Large-scale spatial management of fishing stands out as the single most powerful tool available to Scotland for achieving Good Environmental Status of seafloor habitats, without which the health of the marine environment will continue to be stalled regardless of other policy measures.
The political difficulty of spatial management is real. Changing where fishing can take place affects livelihoods and communities, and those impacts must be taken seriously. But the costs of inaction and the slow erosion of ecosystems across Scottish seas, are larger, longer-lasting, more expensive to fix, and ultimately borne by the same communities. The harder decision is ultimately the better one.