Authors: Katrina Goddard, Karli Thomas, Barry Weeber
Together with Greenpeace Aotearoa, WWF-NZ, Forest and Bird, LegaSea, New Zealand Sport Fishing Council, Our Seas Our Future, and Environment and Conservation Organisations of Aotearoa New Zealand (ECO), the DSCC is calling on the New Zealand government to ban bottom trawling on seamounts.
In November 2020, the DSCC and partners delivered a petition to Parliament, signed by 52,443 people, calling for an end to this devastating and outdated form of fishing.
Our petition has been referred to the Environment Select Committee, and this report sets out further evidence in support of our petition for the ESC to consider.
We call on the New Zealand Government to protect all seamounts in Aotearoa New Zealand’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), and to stop issuing high seas permits to New Zealand bottom trawl vessels, which almost exclusively target seamounts and similar deep-sea features when they fish in international waters of the South Pacific and Tasman Sea regulated by the South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organisation (SPRFMO).
Read the full report here.