Report | September 1, 2025
Joint NGO Feedback to the European Commission’s Consultation on Sustainable Fishing in the EU – Orientations for 2026
Introduction:
On behalf of the undersigned organisations, we welcome the opportunity to respond to the European Commission’s consultation on the state of play and orientations for sustainable fishing in 2026. To underpin our answers, we have produced a joint Briefing Series outlining our key recommendations on fishing opportunities, signed by nearly 30 organisations (including environmental NGOs and recreational fishing representatives) across all European sea basins. This Briefing Series delves into the core issues addressed in this consultation response and we urge you to carefully review both alongside each other. Please also refer to the joint NGO recommendations on fishing opportunities in the Baltic Sea for more specific input on that area. We acknowledge the Commission’s recognition that sustainability of European fisheries has improved compared to the early 2000s, with more fish stocks being fished at sustainable levels in 2024 than in 2003.
This is a notable achievement that reflects the potential of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) to drive positive change – a potential which needs to be maximised by ensuring its provisions are implemented correctly. However, DG MARE’s reporting on progress towards ending overfishing overlooks key indicators of population and ecosystem health, such as age/size structures and food web integrity, which masks fundamental flaws in EU fisheries management and how success is measured. This means conclusions drawn exclusively based on such reporting, without appropriate assessment against biomass- and ecosystem-health-related targets, are incomplete and potentially misleading. Despite long-term progress in reducing overfishing in some regions, many challenges and shortcomings remain. The EU has missed its legally binding 2020 deadline to end overfishing, as set out in Article 2(2) of the CFP Basic Regulation, and failed to achieve Good Environmental Status (GES) under the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) by the same year.
