What is Oceana Doing to Protect the Ocean Environment?
Oceana is working with scientists, lawyers, commercial and recreational fishermen, U.S. ocean policy managers at the regional and federal levels, the White House, U.S. Congressional members, state public officials, and other interested private organizations to protect deep sea coral communities and other critical ocean environment from destructive fishing gear including bottom trawlers and dredgers.
We are working in partnership with others for concrete policy changes that will limit or prohibit bottom trawling in areas known or suspected to contain deep sea coral and sponge habitat in federal waters off the U.S. east coast from New England down to Florida, the Gulf of Mexico coast, and the U.S. Pacific west coast from Alaska down to Mexico. Our key tools are advocacy to educate policymakers, public pressure to help persuade policymakers, and public education and media efforts to increase public awareness of the threat to deep sea corals.
Specifically, Oceana is "freezing the footprint" of bottom trawlers and dredgers in a precautionary way by doing the following:
- Identify and map coral communities so they can be placed off-limits to bottom trawling.
- Close currently trawled areas with known concentrations of corals and sponges.
- Strengthen enforcement and establish penalties severe enough to prevent deliberate destruction of corals and illegal fishing in areas already closed to trawling.
- Prohibit any expansion of trawling into currently untrawled areas likely to have coral or sponge communities.
- Require modification to trawl gear so that trawling in coral habitat is no longer possible.
- Set absolute limits or "hard caps" on the amount of coral and sponge that can be removed by bottom tending mobile fishing gear. Once hard caps are reached, the fishery will be closed to prevent further destruction.
Essentially, Oceana is setting the boundaries where bottom trawlers and dredgers are able to fish, which is largely the areas in which they are already fishing.
Oceana and our partner organizations are working at both the regional and federal levels to make progress on these objectives. We will:
Testify and present information to the all U.S. regional fishery management councils.
- Visit U.S. Congressional offices to distribute educational materials about the value of deep sea corals.
- Testify at Congressional hearings on deep sea coral protection.
- Continue to advocate for appropriate rulemaking at the U.S. Department of Commerce, the Council on Environmental Quality and the White House.
