All but two of Scotland’s offshore marine ‘protected’ areas are paper parks

All bar two of Scotland’s 24 offshore benthic Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) were damaged by bottom-towed fishing gears in 2020, making their ‘protected’ status mere lines on a paper map. Oceana recorded over 44,000 fishing hours using bottom-towed gear in inshore and offshore MPAs in the Scottish Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) in 2020. The analysis … Read more

Protecting the unknown

If space is the ‘final frontier’, the ocean depths are no doubt the ultimate frontier. To this day it is hard to imagine, despite all our advanced technology, that we know more about the surface of the moon — hundreds of thousands of kilometers away — than of the complex ecosystems that inhabit the ocean’s deep … Read more