According to residents in nine Baltic countries, overfishing is one of the main problems and a significant majority saw it as necessary for professional fishermen to take action to improve the Baltic Sea environment.
The BalticSurvey, conducted by international research network BalticSTERN, interviewed 9,000 people from the nine countries bordering the sea.
In the survey, respondents ranked the importance of a variety of environmental issues from 1-5, with 5 standing for “a very big problem”. When asked how big a problem overfishing was, residents from all nine countries thought it was more of a problem than not a problem; i.e more respondents answered 4 or 5 than 1 or 2.
Russians, Poles and Swedes were the most worried by overfishing, and it was also residents of these three countries who thought that professional fishermen carried the resposibility for improving the environment in the Baltic Sea.