Balticsea 2020

Fishery: Stronger regulations against ghost nets

According to a new report from Greenpeace, released last week, an estimated 640 000 tonnes of ghost gear enters the ocean every year, which is estimated to make up 10 % of the plastic waste in our oceans.

Ghost nets are abandoned or lost fishing gear, especially old fishing nets and trawls, made of nylon or other synthetic materials that are difficult to break down. The ghost nets continue to fish for decades, affecting fish stocks, is an animal abuse and an unforgivable waste of our common natural resources.

November 6, Greenpeace released the report “Ghost gear – the abandoned fishing nets haunting our oceans”, where they demand a stronger regulatory framework against ghost nets in international waters. The amount of fishing gear, including so-called ghost nets, equals 50 000 double-deckers being dumped into the sea (e.g. 640 000 tonnes of fishing gears). The report shows that over six percent of the longlines remain in the sea as waste. Furthermore, it says that 300 sea turtled were found dead by one and the same fishing net, in the sea off Mexico in 2018. The ghost nets have a terrible impact on marine wildlife.

Ghost nets are also a major problem in the Baltic Sea. In early 2010, BalticSea2020 started a series of projects aimed at highlighting the problem and showing that these nets can be retrieved. On the one hand, a collaboration was initiated with underwater photographer Joakim Odelberg to document and highlight the problem with ghost nets. Two films were produced and aired in Swedish broadcast (Svt Vetenskapens värld and TV4). In the same time an action-oriented project started carried out by WWF Poland in co-operation with the Lithuanian Fund For Nature, aimed at identifying and retrieving ghost nets from the bottoms and wrecks of the Baltic Sea. It was estimated that each year approximately 10 thousand of nets (in between 52 to 95 tonnes) are lost or abandoned in the Baltic Sea, each year. In addition, approximately 450 tonnes of fishing nets are entangled on ship wrecks in the Polish Economic Zone. Within the project, methods were established for retrieving the ghost nets and a total of six tonnes of nets were cleared form the se in 2011. In 2012, the project continued into a second phase where Polish and Lithuanian fishermen retrieved nearly 22 000 kilos of lost fishing gear. Its total length amounted to approximately 135 kilometres – a distance equal to the distance form Warsaw to Łódż! Both projects were documented in reports distributed to the media and stakeholders in the region.

In addition to these activities, an interactive map of “hooks” in the Baltic Sea was created, indicating the locations of shipwrecks and other objects remaining on the sea bottom that constitute obstacles for trawling. (Visit the Polish website sieciwidma.wwf.pl, to see what the map looks like.)

The projects on ghost nets have touch on and contributed to actions. The problem is noticed and several organizations are working to retrieve the old ghost nets, and to prevent the gear from falling into the ocean from the beginning. Today, measures are also being taken to reduce ghost nets in the Baltic Sea, in the Good Environmental Status (GES) of the EU's marine waters by 2020 (Swedish Agency for Marine and Water Management).