Discardless: The closing science-policy conference

Fishsec has been attending the closing science-policy conference of the Discardless project, 30-31 January at DTU Aqua.

Titled: Landing Obligation 2019: What have we learned, what are the next steps?

The conference has been featuring many very interesting short presentations summerising the findings of a wide range of the work conducted within the project. There was also a brief presentation of FAOs third assessment of global discards. A useful global overview of discards in global fisheries.

Discardless is / has been a €5 million project funded under Horizon 2020 – the Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (2014-2020). The project set out to provide the knowledge, tools, and methods required for the successful reduction of discards in European fisheries. To achieve this, DiscardLess has worked through collaborations between scientists, stakeholders and policy makers to support and promote practical, achievable, acceptable and cost-effective discards mitigation strategies, and to make the EU landing obligation functional, credible and legitimate.

The Discardless website contains many useful resources and tools for fishermen and decision makers. Maps, manuals, fact sheets, stories and strategies are available. Discardless has even written a book which is available online or in hard copy.

It is titled: The European Landing Obligations: Reducing discards in complex multi-species and multi jurisdictional fisheries

Clearly a lot has been learned. Equally clearly there remains a lot more work to be done to reduce discards and implement the landing obligation for EU fisheries.

All presentations from the conference are now available online