Letter to European Commissioner Kadis regarding the renewal of the Specific Grant Agreement with ICES

This joint letter, co-signed by 17 organisations working on EU fisheries and environmental policies, was sent to the European Commissioner for Fisheries and Oceans, Costas Kadis, ahead of the 2025 renewal of the Specific Grant Agreement with the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) which guides the provision of scientific advice on fishing opportunities.

In this letter, we highlight that the current ICES advice on fishing opportunities does not fully reflect all relevant legal requirements and policy objectives applicable to the EU or the core aims of the European Ocean Pact, including the goal to maintain a “healthy, resilient and productive ocean”. Concretely, it is not geared towards

1. recovering fish populations within a concrete timeframe and maintaining them above sustainable levels in the near future;
2. preventing fish populations from, or minimising the risk of, falling outside safe biological limits, despite legal safeguards in the EU’s Multi-Annual Plans (MAPs); or
3. delivering on all relevant elements of “Good Environmental Status” (GES) under the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD), such as healthy population structures and/or food web integrity (e.g. leaving enough food in the sea for other marine life).

In order to address this, we urge the Commission to use the renewal of the Specific Agreement with ICES to initiate key improvements to the advisory process ahead of this year’s fisheries negotiations, and to apply additional precaution until the necessary changes have been made. This means the Commission and other ICES advice clients need to explicitly request ICES to

1. Provide advice on fishing opportunities that is explicitly geared towards rebuilding fish populations above sustainable levels within concrete and ambitious timeframes, and that respects safeguards in the MAPs;
2. Visibly include additional elements in the ICES advce sheet to support fisheries decisions that factor in mid- and longer-term implications;
3. Fully and coherently integrate broader policy objectives regarding population and ecosystem health (beyond single-stock maximum sustainable yield exploitation); and
4. Enhance the presentation of the ICES advice to minimize the risk of misinterpretation, improve the science-policy interface and foster transparency in fisheries management.

The following organisations, including environmental NGOs and recreational fisheries’ representatives, added their logos to this letter: Baltic Salmon Fund, Baltic Salmon Rivers Association, Baltic Waters, Bass Angling Conservation, BirdLife Europe and Central Asia, Blue Marine Foundation, ClientEarth,Coalition Clean Baltic, Deutsche Umwelthilfe e.V. (DUH), Deutsche Stiftung Meeresschutz (DSM), European Anglers Alliance (EEA), FishSec, North Sea Foundation, Oceana in Europe, Sciaena, Seas At Risk, Swedish Society for Nature Conservation.

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Find other files produced or co-signed by ClientEarth related to the annual negotiations on fishing opportunities from 2015 onwards here.