Scotland has one of worst records for overfishing in Europe, according to a think tank’s analysis.
In two decades Scottish fishermen have taken nearly 1.2 million tonnes more fish than scientists believe is sustainable, the New Economics Foundation (NEF) has calculated.
The London-based think tank has discovered that so far this century only Denmark — the EU’s biggest fishing power — has overfished more than Scotland. NEF researchers compared national quotas — the so-called total allowable catches, or TACs, allocated to each nation every year by the EU — with gold-standard scientific advice from the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES).
They found that between 2001 and 2020 total quotas exceeded advice by nearly nine million tonnes across the EU, including Scotland’s
