Category: Article

FISH, one of the three core NGO´s behind the campaign Race for the Baltic, visited Ronneby and its Harbour festival where the cycling team participated in the yearly Sillarodden.

FISH and Race for the Baltic teamed up with Marint Centrum when visiting Simrishamn on the third day of the race. Marint Centrum is a platform for tradition and innovation with the Baltic Sea as a focal point. The premise of the business is the belief that the ocean is an asset that can be used to create innovation, growth, while contributing to a sustainable marine environment for the future.

This morning, the team from Race for the Baltic met with local landowner Karl-Otto Alwén at the Tullstorp Stream outside Trelleborg in Skåne, Sweden. It is the first of a number of local initiatives contributing to a better Baltic Sea environment that the campaign wants to highlight along the way.

The multi-stakeholder campaign Race for the Baltic (RFTB) was launched today on World Ocean Day in Malmö, Sweden, by FISH, Coalition Clean Baltic and Oceana. A 3-month bike ride around the Baltic Sea will end in Copenhagen with a call for action aimed at the Baltic Environment Ministers.

Tomorrow, the launch of the Race for the Baltic campaign, initiated by FISH, Coalition Clean Baltic and Oceana, will take place in Malmö, Sweden to coincide with World Oceans Day.

Coastal fishers from Germany, Sweden and Denmark recently travelled to Poland to support their colleagues who believe that their cod catches are adversely affected by illegal and unregulated trawling for sandeel in the exclusion zone, and discussed the need to establish of a common European coastal fishing organisation.

In his new role as head of the Global Ocean Commission (GOC), former UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband espoused the need “to sound the alarm about the state of the oceans” and to bridge the gap between expertise in ocean management and politics in a speech delivered to the US-European Sustainable Oceans Summit last week in Portugal.

On 30 May, the Commission published its annual communication on fishing opportunities. Its initial section on status of stocks gives quite a mixed picture, but shows some improvements in the number of stocks covered by scientific assessments and the number of stocks managed at or below FMSY.

Today, ICES’ Advisory Committee (ACOM) published their advice regarding the exploitation of the Baltic Sea fish stocks for 2014. It shows that four Baltic stocks are now fished at or over Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY), whereas three are still considered overfished. Of the Baltic stocks, seven are also considered data poor, resulting in higher uncertainties in the advice.

In the early hours this morning, the Council and the European Parliament came to a hard-fought agreement on the basics for the reform of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), after months of trilogue negotiations.