Report | September 22, 2026
Making the landing obligation work: tackling Europe’s bycatch crisis through fisheries transparency
The EU’s landing obligation (LO) is intended to reduce waste, encourage selective fishing and improve the catch information used to manage stocks. For catches within the LO scope, fishers must retain, record and land catches, including bycatch, and count them against quota where applicable, subject to defined exemptions. More than a decade after the obligation was phased in, and seven years after it became fully applicable, these objectives have not been achieved.
The problem is not simply that discarding continues. Discards include catches released lawfully under exemptions as well as illegal or unreported releases, so scientific estimates of discards and associated fishing mortality cannot by themselves establish non-compliance. The central weakness in governing LO compliance is the lack of reliable, independently verifiable information about what was caught, retained, released and landed. Missing or poorly estimated mortality can bias quota uptake and stock assessments, weaken confidence in advice and intensify “choke” problems in mixed fisheries whereby the smallest quota species in a mixed fishery is exhausted.
The European Commission’s (EC) 2025 supporting study found local successes but no clear large-scale reduction in discarding, with average rates falling by less than two percentage points. It identified weak monitoring and enforcement, operational complexity, economic constraints, limited uptake of selective techniques and extensive use of exemptions as persistent barriers. In individual fisheries, scientific estimates demonstrate disappointing results: for example, almost half of Irish Sea haddock catches were estimated to have been discarded in 2022–2024, while the estimated ratio of discards for eastern English Channel plaice approached four-fifths in 2025. These figures are not direct measures of illegality, but they underline the scale of unwanted catch and the aforementioned documentation gap.
