The UK Government Has Betrayed the Ocean

Four months ago, ministers promised to ban bottom trawling in marine protected areas. This week, they backtracked. DEFRA has now called an outright ban “disproportionate” and instead proposes to tinker around the edges with regional consultations. In other words: the destruction will continue.

Bottom trawling is not fishing in any ordinary sense, it is bulldozing. Vast weighted nets, sometimes as wide as ten jumbo jets, are dragged across the seabed, ripping up seagrass, flattening coral, crushing sponges, filling in burrows, and turning entire ecosystems into wastelands. Everything in their path is hoovered up, sharks, rays, dolphins, seahorses, starfish, only for up to 75% of it to be discarded as unwanted “bycatch.”

Sir David Attenborough compared it to bulldozing a rainforest. Scientists call it “marine deforestation.” It is the mass destruction of ecosystems and one of the most reckless carbon-emitting activities on Earth.

The climate crime

Research shows bottom trawling releases around 370 million tonnes of CO₂ every year. That is on par with, or worse than, the entire aviation industry. Between 1996 and 2020 alone, trawling emitted 8.5 to 9.2 billion tonnes of CO₂ into the atmosphere. Sediment plumes can even be seen from space. It is hard to imagine a more self-defeating policy than allowing industrial fishing to destabilise the world’s largest carbon sink while we face climate collapse.

DEFRA knows this. MPs know this. The Environmental Audit Committee spent months gathering evidence from scientists, conservationists, and academics, concluding unequivocally that whole-site bans were needed. Their recommendation was ignored. Instead, ministers are hiding behind legalese: only banning trawling if it is “assessed as damaging” to specific features within an MPA. The reefs may be safe, but the seagrass next to them is fair game. These are not “protected” areas, they are lines on a map with no meaning in the real world.

The numbers don’t lie

🐟 In 2023, industrial trawlers clocked 33,000 hours inside Britain’s so-called marine sanctuaries.

🐟 In 2024, it was 20,000 hours, and that’s likely an undercount.

🐟 Some of the worst-hit sites, like the South West Deeps off Cornwall, are among the most important carbon stores in UK waters, holding the equivalent of a million London–Sydney return flights.

If the term “Marine Protected Area” means anything at all, it cannot include tens of thousands of hours of industrial bulldozing.

The economic myth

Predictably, the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations has condemned the idea of bans, claiming catastrophic economic harm. Their estimates of losses are four times higher than the government’s, and they accuse ministers of “anti-fishing agendas.” But the evidence from West Sussex, where bottom trawling was banned nearly five years ago, tells a different story. Kelp forests, stingrays, and seahorses are already returning. Healthy oceans don’t destroy fishing communities, they sustain them. Short-term profits for industrial fleets cannot outweigh the permanent destruction of ecosystems on which their livelihoods depend.

The global picture

Britain’s excuses fall flat when compared internationally. Greece and Sweden have announced broader bans. The EU aims to end bottom trawling in all marine areas by 2030. The UK, meanwhile, is one of the most nature-depleted countries on Earth, with just half its biodiversity left. Yet instead of leading, we are actively going backwards, clinging to a system that allows “multi-use” exploitation even in areas supposedly set aside for conservation.

The moral failure

MPs, conservationists, and the public have said it plainly: continuing to allow bottom trawling inside MPAs undermines the very integrity of the concept of protection. It is fraud. The government’s green rhetoric means nothing while it sanctions bulldozers at sea. As one academic put it: if politicians refuse to follow scientific advice, they should be removed from decision-making altogether.

Conservation is not a meaningless label. A protected area that permits destruction is not protected. The science is overwhelming, the climate stakes are existential, and the hypocrisy is staggering. The government pledged to act. It lied.

Until bottom trawling is ended outright, not managed, not consulted, not restricted in a patchwork of exceptions, Britain cannot pretend to care about its seas, its climate commitments, or its future.