Advice and Recommendations

Oil/gas exploration, wind farm construction and cabling are an important development in European offshore areas and the continuous growth of these sectors is to be expected. Pelagic AC is concerned over these potential impacts given the importance of spawning grounds for the health of the stocks under the Pelagic AC remit (notably, herring). The Pelagic AC is of firm belief that independent scientific research regarding the impacts are necessary and urgent.

The Celtic Sea Herring is a category one ICES assessment supported by a long time series of catch at age and an acoustic survey that has been conducted since 2002. The fishery is exploited by two separate fleets with the majority of the catch taken by trawlers operating primarily in division 7.g. A sentinel fleet of smaller vessels is allocated 11% of the total TAC and operates in division 7.aS. An inter–benchmark assessment was carried out in 2018, which focussed on the use of the acoustic survey tuning index in the assessment and the revision of the stock reference points. In order to support future stock assessments, it would be beneficial to permit a level of catch that would maintain an uninterrupted time series of fishery-dependent catch data.

Pelagic AC raises an issue with regard to the de minimis exemptions for horse mackerel and mackerel in the North Western Waters discard plan for the period 2019-2021 and to highlight the perceived inconsistency in the details of the implementation fo the landing obligations between this plan and for certain demersal fisheries in the North Sea Plan for the period of 2019-2021.

Over the past two years Pelagic AC has worked on the development of a rebuilding plan for 6a, 7b, c herring. Pelagic AC was very dissapointed by the final decision of ACOM by concluding the plan could not be evaluated because of an apparent lack of resources. While HAWG evlauated the plan  and concluded that the “revised plan had successfully addressed the shortfalls identified in the ICES advice from November 2017 and found that the revised plan was consistent with the ICES MSY advice rule.

The recent ICES inter-benchmark assessment of North East Atlantic mackerel and the considerable change in the perception of the stock that has resulted from this process, Pelagic AC asks that the European Commission requests ICES to revise the 2019 catch advice for NEA mackerel.

Concerns on impossilbe obligation to fish small pelagic mackerel with an 80mm mesh sieze in the North Sea and 100mm in Western Waters.

The Pelagic AC provides recommendations on TACs in 2020 for stocks under its remit.