Spatial challenges of Greater North Sea fisheries: Preprint

The economic challenge for five European fisheries fleets from the potential loss of fishing grounds was evaluated by combining commercial fisheries data with spatial information on future fisheries management in marine protected areas and offshore wind farms in the greater North Sea basin. By employing the concept of Stress Level (SL, revenues and catch) the impact of area losses on ten gear-groups and 16 species-groups was estimated for single national fleets and also for the aggregated fleets of Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and Sweden. Further, the Individual Stress Level (ISL) for revenues was calculated for single vessels and aggregated to ISL-profiles of gear-groups, national and aggregated fleets, single and national ports combined. The results show that whereas a specific fishery might show only a medium SL value, single vessels are at risk to encounter a much higher economic challenge. Further, the found SL values and ISL-profiles indicate that the spatial losses are likely to have different impact on the investigated gear-groups between the national fleets. The results also indicate that the potential economic constraints are not uniformly distributed throughout all ports where landings occur. Also, there is considerable variation of ISL profiles of ports within each of the studied countries. This study breaks down the ISL to the level of single ports and thus makes it possible to pinpoint mitigation measures to those coastal regions where the associated offshore fishing activities encounter higher spatial challenges. It is important to understand that this study is merely a snapshot in time since fisheries data of the years 2018-2022 are used and the assumptions on fisheries management in 2030 were based on the knowledge of 2023. Therefore, this study will need to be regularly repeated.