Greece will be the first European country to ban trawling

Greece will soon ban trawling in its marine protected areas and will be the first European country to do so.This was announced by the country's Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mytsotakis.The Greek ban will come into force in 2026 for marine national parks and in 2030 for all marine protected areas.At the same time, Mytsotakis also announced the creation of two new large marine national parks, one in the Ionian Sea and one in the Aegean Sea, which will cover 11.7 percent and 6.6 percent of the surface of the Greek seas respectively.Trawling is a highly impactful technique that consists of dragging fishing nets across the seabed, catching everything that comes across it.A similar ban has been talked about for decades almost everywhere, but until now no European nation had made it official.

The announcement of the ban on trawling launched by the Greek Prime Minister Mytsotakis came on the occasion of the Our Ocean Conference, a global initiative founded in 2014 with the aim of “drawing international attention to the serious threats facing the world's oceans, and to take concrete measures across the planet to support maritime conservation and sustainable development”.At the end of the congress, which took place between Monday 15 and Wednesday 17 April in Athens, Greece released a document in which he lists the commitments made, including the cancellation of the practice of trawling.According to the memorandum, the ban on trawling will “significantly increase the protection of numerous species” and “vulnerable” habitats.This measure will also make it easier to "significantly strengthen existing bans and limitations", allow the ecosystem to regenerate and increase its CO2 storage, and "ensure the long-term sustainability of fish storage", contributing to the development of local communities that depend on maritime activities.The measure will begin to be implemented in 2026.The transition that Greece will now face, the document says, will be governed by a compensation mechanism for all those 247 registered boats that practice trawling, in order to "support the affected communities";to do so the Greek Prime Minister talks about the possibility introduction of a tax on offshore wind farms and a balance of employment, food quality and tourism.

In addition to introducing a ban on trawling, Greece is committed to expand its Marine Protected Areas (MPA) in order to reach the 30% objective set byEuropean Union to be achieved by 2030.To date, in Greece, MPAs cover an area of ​​22,796 km2, equal to 18.3% of maritime waters.To reach the 2030 goal, Mytsotakis intends to create two more maritime national parks, with which it would significantly extend the area of ​​Hellenic MPAs, which would thus reach the 32% of national waters.The Greek program also provides for greater protection of protected species and rehabilitation programs for the marine habitat, the improvement of water surveillance systems also through the use of drones, the mapping of waters both for research purposes and with a view to an improvement in maritime pollution monitoring systems, the implementation of some of the ports to make them more sustainable, the reduction of pollution from plastics and microplastics, and the rethinking of the country's naval system.

The measures promoted by Athens are numerous, but the program itself considers the ban on trawling to be one of the most important and innovative.Although the European Union has already established a ban on the practice by 2030, which was disapproved only by Italy, Greece is to date the first European country to implement this decision.To date, the European Union allows trawling in all seabeds between 50 and 1,000 meters deep beyond 1.5 nautical miles away from the coast, but in countries like Greece the monitoring of the areas involved is particularly complicated, not only for obvious patrolling reasons, but also due to the particular conformation of the coasts and waters, as well as their vast extension.Trawling is a widespread activity throughout the world and beyond damages and endangers the environment and animal species, but which contributes a lot to pollution maritime, how atmospheric, as demonstrated by one research which highlights how the use of the net on the seabed causes the release of carbon dioxide stored on the seabed into the atmosphere.

[by Dario Lucisano]