- The fishing practice of bottom trawling continues in European marine protected areas (MPAs) despite conservation concerns over its destruction of seabed habitats and indiscriminate catches.
- Four NGOs have sued the Netherlands to stop bottom trawling in the Dutch section of Dogger Bank, an MPA in the North Sea, citing its ecological importance.
- Advocacy efforts across Europe, including other lawsuits, have led to some restrictions on the practice, such as the closure of the U.K. section of Dogger Bank to bottom trawling, but most European MPAs remain insufficiently protected, a 2024 study indicates.
- Fishing interests often disagree with the NGOs’ position on bottom trawling in MPAs, saying that regulated bottom trawling can coexist with conservation goals and support communities socioeconomically, and that blanket restrictions risk marginalizing fishing communities without addressing broader environmental challenges like pollution or climate change.
Bottom trawling, a fishing technique in which vessels drag weighted nets along the seafloor, has long been condemned by conservationists for disrupting seabed habitat and capturing species indiscriminately. Yet it remains common in marine protected areas around Europe, including in some sections of Dogger Bank, a massive sandbank that experts consider the ecological heart of the North Sea.
On Dec. 23, four NGOs sued the Netherlands government in a bid to stop the country’s bottom-trawling vessels from operating in the Dutch section of Dogger Bank.
“The Dutch government needs to stop allowing trawling inside protected areas because it is like allowing bulldozers in a protected forest,” Emilie Reuchlin, director of Netherlands-based Doggerland, one of the NGOs that filed the suit, told Mongabay in an email. “Our lawsuit will hopefully lead to a total ban for the most destructive fishing practice — that is, trawling — [in] the protected Dogger Bank.”
The action in Dutch court follows four other lawsuits filed in Western Europe last year that seek to stop bottom trawling in marine protected areas (MPAs), as well as a complaint in Sweden with the same aim. This pressure on European nations to strengthen protections in their MPAs comes as they, like all the world’s nations, prepare to scale up MPA coverage to 30% by 2030 as part of the “30×30” pledge under a 2022 international agreement. The lawsuits are part of an advocacy push to make sure MPA designations are meaningful, rather than an exercise in creating or maintaining so-called paper parks with strong protections in theory but weak enforcement in practice. The effort has helped lead to the enactment of tighter bottom-trawling rules in MPAs in the United Kingdom and some EU countries.
“It’s hypocritical of the EU to be portraying itself on the global stage as an ocean conservation leader, and to be striving for the 30×30 target … when they can’t even get the basics right for their own protected areas,” John Condon, a lawyer at ClientEarth, told Mongabay. The London-headquartered environmental law NGO was also part of the suit, along with U.K.-based Blue Marine Foundation and Netherlands-based ARK Rewilding Nederland.
Dutch lawsuit
In the last ice age, Britain and continental Europe were connected by a land bridge that’s now Dogger Bank. Today, a gap exists not just between the two land masses but also between the two sides’ approach to protecting the area, which is richly biodiverse due to upwelling waters and the sun’s strength in its shallows. Even in what the NGOs call a “severely degraded state,” Dogger Bank remains a nursery for a variety of seabirds and marine mammals, including minke whales (Balaenoptera acutorostrata), and a spawning ground for sharks and fish.
The U.K., the Netherlands and Germany designated connecting sections of Dogger Bank as MPAs in the 2000s and early 2010s. Together the three sections cover 18,765 square kilometers (7,245 square miles), an area slightly smaller than Slovenia. (A remaining section of the sandbank is in Danish waters but hasn’t been designated an MPA, to conservationists’ chagrin.)
In April 2022, after much campaigning by NGOs, the U.K. government banned trawling in its Dogger Bank MPA, which is larger than the other two MPAs combined. Conservationists celebrated the move and said their advocacy work had helped “flip” a paper park into a real one.
Yet nearly two years later, the rest of Dogger Bank remains a paper park, as Reuchlin put it. Bottom trawling continues in the Dutch and German sections.
The four NGOs filed the lawsuit against the Netherlands’ Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, Food Security and Nature in the Dutch Administrative Court in The Hague as a follow-up to a rejected administrative request to the ministry. The immediate aim of the lawsuit is to establish that an environmental assessment is legally required before bottom trawling can be permitted in the Dutch Dogger Bank, which is larger than the U.S. state of Rhode Island. The ultimate aim, which the campaigners say will follow naturally from achieving the first, is to stop the bottom trawling.
The case hinges on the complexities of overlapping Dutch and European Union laws, Condon said. EU nations are required under Article 6 of the Habitats Directive, adopted in 1992, to shield protected areas from harmful human activity, and the Netherlands has loosely transposed this law into its Nature Protection Act, which requires an “appropriate assessment” to undertake activity in a protected area. However, fishing is granted an exception. The NGOs contend the exception clause is superseded by EU law.
“What would be very nice for us would be a ruling to say that actually Article 6 enables and empowers and even requires, for example, the Netherlands to take action in respect of its Dutch vessels,” Condon said. “The picture is a bit more complicated for foreign vessels, because that more clearly falls under the competence of the EU.”
The case thus directly concerns only Dutch-flagged vessels; there were 125 that bottom trawled or used other bottom-towed fishing gear between 2015 and 2023, according to data compiled by Doggerland and U.K.-based NGO Marine Conservation Society. The Dutch fleet’s combined trawling effort in the section was about 6,200 hours per year during that period, accounting for about 39% of the total trawling effort in the section, with the rest done by fleets from other European countries.
The Dutch and German governments have, after years of discussions, submitted plans to the European Commission that establish partial protection against bottom trawling in their sections of Dogger Bank. The Dutch plan would ban all bottom trawling, by any vessels, in 28% of its MPA as well as in a small area to the south, while the German plan would do so in 53% of its MPA. However, these proposals aren’t in effect, as they are still under consideration at the EU level.
Conservation NGOs support the partial protection measures but argue that they’re insufficient. Bund, a German NGO, filed a lawsuit in November that seeks to stop trawling in the German Dogger Bank MPA. The case parallels the Dutch one in that it’s more about legal precedent than immediate outcomes; the primary arguments deal only with German-flagged trawling, which account for just 8% of demersal fishing activity.
Reuchlin, who’s worked on Dogger Bank conservation for many years, expressed frustration at the slow pace of progress.
“We’ve been in conversation for what has it been, 16 years, and there’s no more patience, like there’s no reason for us to believe that any real protective measures are going to be taken,” she said in an interview.
“If you have a forest protected, and you say, ‘We’ll clear-cut it, but well, we won’t do clear-cutting in 28% of it, then the entire forest is not going to recover,” she added, using a comparison to bottom trawling that scientists have long made.
Bottom trawling is not the only threat to the Dutch Dogger Bank MPA: A wide array of ecologically damaging activity including oil and gas extraction takes place there, Reuchlin said. That’s the subject of a separate lawsuit brought by Doggerland and ARK Rewilding, filed in October against a different Dutch ministry; that suit seeks to strengthen protections not only for Dogger Bank but also Cleaver Bank and Frisian Front, two other Dutch MPAs.
Vissersbond, a Dutch fishing industry association, didn’t respond to requests for comment for this article. The Netherlands’ Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, Food Security and Nature declined to comment.
The fight to stop trawling European MPAs
Beyond Dogger Bank, there’s a broader legal push to stop bottom trawling in European MPAs, which Condon said was “still a massive, massive problem.” NGO staff members expressed hope the lawsuits would set legal precedents across Europe. A study published in September in the journal One Earth found that European MPAs provide scant protection from human activities such as fishing.
Recent lawsuits include one filed in a Paris court in September by ClientEarth and BLOOM Association, a French nonprofit, that seeks to stop bottom trawling in France’s Mediterranean MPAs that have certain seagrasses, maerls and corals, as per the Mediterranean Sea Regulation. Illegal bottom trawling is widespread across the Mediterranean, NGO findings indicate.
BLOOM is also taking aim at trawling on France’s Atlantic coast, with a lawsuit filed in July 2024 to stop bottom trawling in an MPA off Brittany. The nonprofit released a report in March 2024 showing that France’s MPAs are more heavily trawled than any others in Europe. On Feb. 5, as part of new campaign against bottom trawling in EU MPAs, BLOOM and other NGOs sent two open letters — one to French President Emmanuel Macron, another to an EU commissioner — calling for a stop to the practice.
In September, ClientEarth and Oceana, a Washington, D.C.-based NGO, filed a lawsuit to stop bottom trawling in about six Spanish MPAs in the Cantabrian Sea, the Gulf of Cádiz and the Mediterranean. That same month, the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation brought a complaint to an environmental court in Sweden regarding bottom trawling in the Bratten MPA.
On Jan. 20, Sweden proposed a new law that would ban bottom trawling in its territorial waters, which extend 12 nautical miles (22 km) from the shore; if adopted, it will come into force on July 1. The law won’t apply to Sweden’s entire exclusive economic zone, which is subject to EU legal processes. Greece has also committed to ban bottom trawling in marine national parks by 2026 and in all its MPAs by 2030, but hasn’t yet implemented a corresponding law, according to Nicolas Fournier, a campaign director at Oceana.
Under EU processes, Germany tightened bottom-trawling rules in five of its MPAs in 2024, including complete bans in two of them.
In 2024, Spain, France, and Italy instituted regulations restricting bottom trawling below 800 meters (2,625 feet) in sections of their Mediterranean waters, but the Spanish ban was later repealed and the two others have limited practical effect, conservationists told Mongabay.
In November, the parties of the General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean established a trawl-free area in in the southern Adriatic Sea, off the Italian coastal town of Otranto; the European Commission and Albania led the effort, according to Domitilla Senni, executive director of MedReAct, a Rome-based NGO.
Conservationists, however, are calling for more action at the EU level. Fournier told Mongabay that legislation in Brussels is necessary to better protect European MPAs from bottom trawling and overcome EU processes, which he said are “inadequate.”
In February 2023, the European Commission did release an action plan that calls for a ban on bottom trawling in MPAs by 2030. However, the plan, while undergirded by laws already in place, was nonbinding.
“So far there is hardly any progress and the 2024 targets haven’t been met,” Fournier said.
The push against bottom trawling has been led by a coalition of environmental NGOs that cooperate on an ad hoc basis and at times more formally under the banner of Seas At Risk, an umbrella group of 30 NGOs that’s based in Brussels.
Victories include the EU’s decision in September 2022 to close 87 deep-sea sites to bottom fishing. A study published Jan. 16 in Science Advances found an 81% reduction in bottom-contact fishing at the 87 sites in the year following the ban. Though that’s notable progress, it’s not enough, conservationists argue: BLOOM filed a complaint to the European Commission the day the study dropped due to the significant illegal trawling it documents.
The U.K.’s 2022 Dogger Bank closure, which was made possible in part by Brexit, was more effective, reducing bottom trawling to nearly zero in the U.K. MPA, early findings showed. Reuchlin said it still seems to be enforced well today. The U.K. has moved forward with protections elsewhere, restricting trawling in 13 English MPAs last year; Scotland has meanwhile proposed tightening trawling rules in 20 MPAs in its waters.
Fishing interests often disagree with the NGOs’ position on bottom trawling in MPAs. Regulated bottom trawling can coexist with conservation goals and support communities socioeconomically, Daniel Voces, secretary of the European Bottom Fishing Alliance, a Brussels-based lobby group founded in 2022 that represents 7,000 vessels and is affiliated with the larger trade group Europêche, told Mongabay in an emailed statement.
“The fishing industry is a cornerstone of coastal communities, providing food security and economic stability,” Voces said. “Blanket restrictions or lawsuits risk marginalizing these communities without addressing broader environmental challenges like pollution, climate change or the impacts of non-fishing activities.”
Voces also suggested that the lawsuits could threaten established governance systems.
“[T]he growing number of legal actions could potentially undermine the role of established governance frameworks” that “ensure science-led management” within the EU and multilateral fisheries bodies, he said.
For environmental campaigners, however, the problem is that established systems aren’t working — many say governments have been too slow to act.
“The lack of ambition and political will at both the national and EU levels must be addressed urgently, and we hope these lawsuits will help with that,” Tatiana Nuño, a senior marine policy officer at Seas At Risk, told Mongabay in an email.
Banner image: A bottom trawler works in Dutch waters of the North Sea. Image © Split Second Stock / Shutterstock, courtesy of Seas At Risk.
Illegal bottom trawling widespread inside Mediterranean marine protected areas
Citations:
Victorero, L., Moffitt, R., Mallet, N., & Le Manach, F. (2025). Tracking bottom-fishing activities in protected vulnerable marine ecosystem areas and below 800-m depth in European Union waters. Science Advances, 11(3). doi:10.1126/sciadv.adp4353
Aminian-Biquet, J., Gorjanc, S., Sletten, J., Vincent, T., Laznya, A., Vaidianu, N., … Horta e Costa, B. (2024). Over 80% of the European Union’s marine protected area only marginally regulates human activities. One Earth, 7(9), 1614-1629. doi:10.1016/j.oneear.2024.07.010
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