September 5, 2025
What Scotland’s trawling announcement really means for its marine protected areas
BY: Alec Taylor
Topics: Habitat Protection
The decision by the Scottish Government this week to close around 120,000km2 within twenty marine protected areas (MPAs) to bottom trawling and other bottom-towed fishing is a significant moment for UK seas. This includes around 60,000km2 of new protections, in a mix of full-site and partial closures. In this blog, our Director of Policy and Research, Alec Taylor, reflects on this important decision, look under the surface to question some of the detail, and look ahead to the future.
A moment to celebrate?
We should take a moment to recognise the excellent progress being made in reclaiming our protected areas from the grasp of destructive fishing. This is in no small part the result of the campaigning by Oceana, our allies and our supporters, which has elevated the issue of bottom trawling scouring the UK’s protected seabeds unchecked. No longer is the issue out of sight or out of mind, as demonstrated by the harrowing footage in Ocean with David Attenborough. At Oceana, we’ve exposed the true extent of suspected trawling taking place in these MPAs year after year, devastating wildlife, releasing carbon and hollowing out seabed habitats.
Combining these measures with the 30,000km2 of additional protections proposed for English offshore MPAs, around 10% of UK seas could be safeguarded for the first time from bottom trawling. The UK is finally waking up to fact that it is no longer politically, publicly or scientifically acceptable to allow this damaging activity in the sites we are trying to protect for nature.
In the detail, a more mixed picture emerges
While marking some real progress, these measures fall short of the whole-site protections that Oceana UK and many others have been calling for. What’s more, the partial protections consistently and deliberately leave open the areas most trawled, as we called out in our response to the consultation. You can see this, for example, in the Central Fladen site below, where the protections leave the most fished areas open. In fact, when you dig into the documents, the Scottish Government actively admit this in seeking to minimise the industry impacts. most damaged areas open to bottom trawling.
In fact, when you dig into the documents, the Scottish Government actively admit to keeping areas open for fishing in seeking to minimise the industry impacts. Many of the final measures in the partially protected sites also go against the advice of the Scottish Government’s own scientific advisors, the JNCC, that you can see here. This makes clear, in JNCC’s view, that the partial measures would not deliver the necessary recovery in these sites.
For two sites in particular, including Central Fladen MPA, mentioned above, the Scottish Government actually took the unusual step of drawing in an opinion from the Chief Scientific Advisorto justify keeping the site open to fishing. In essentially asking what level of protection would lead to the recovery of these sites, we feel that the Chief Scientific Advisor (ironically) demoted the science, ignored the actual fishing activity in these areas and played down the benefits of whole-site protection. To us, this is a worrying level of reverse-engineering to fit a pre-determined outcome that is not just ecologically dubious, but legally questionable.
Attention turns to inshore waters
Make no mistake, the fact that more waters will be off limits to trawling as a result of these measures is hugely welcome. The UK as a whole inches closer to delivering its ‘30×30’ commitment in practice, not just on paper. Yet most MPAs, particularly in the precious inshore waters around the UK coast, still allow bottom trawling, meaning that the job is far from done.
With this in mind, attention in Scotland will shortly turn to the long-overdue process to bring in similar fisheries management measures for Scotland’s inshore waters, with a consultation expected in November. At Oceana, we’ve been proud to work with our partners at the Our Seas Coalition to prepare for this vital moment, which could finally safeguard some of the most beautiful and important waters in the UK, and support the livelihoods of low-impact fishers and coastal communities. Watch this space for more to come. The fight to remove bottom trawling from our protected and precious waters continues.