France’s anti-ecological ocean strategy: until when?

31 March 2025

Ahead of the SOS OCEAN summit at which President Emmanuel Macron is expected to speak today around midday, the government has further undermined its position on so-called marine “protected” areas and, in a disturbingly dishonest display, revealed its bias in favour of the most destructive fishing practices: trawling. On the eve of the summit, on Saturday March 29, the Minister for Ecological Transition did not only publicly lie when she said that the areas where bottom trawling, the most destructive fishing method of all, was banned. The Minister also made it possible, by defending an anti-scientific approach to protection “on a case-by-case basis”, to trace the government’s entire pro-lobbies and anti-protection strategy, from the Montreal COP15 on Biodiversity in December 2022 to the UN Ocean Conference, via Brussels.

The President can now put an end to this anti-ecological diplomacy with a simple two-line formula. All he has to do is announce and implement genuine ocean protection, in line with international standards of protection and thus involving a ban on all destructive fishing methods towed through the water-column or on the seabed, such as pelagic trawling and bottom trawling, as well as all industrial activities and infrastructures in 30% of the marine territory, and place one third of marine protected areas (i.e. 10% of the marine territory) under “strict protection”, without any extractive activities.
For France, this means abandoning its “French-style” system of exceptions, which consists in supporting “case-by-case” protection when the international community demands real protection, and in promoting “strong” protection when the international community demands unambiguous “strict” protection.
To put an end to such an environmental hypocrisy, France must abandon the “case-by-case” approach and withdraw the decree on “strong protection” in order to align itself with international definitions of standard marine protection on the one hand, and strict protection on the other, with no extractive activity (in English, “no take” zones).

Genuine protection of the ocean would finally allow France to position itself as a true champion. As the nation with the world’s second-largest maritime territory and as the host of the third United Nations Ocean Conference in two months’ time, adopting a responsible stance of respect for the scientific recommendations that have been hammered out over the years would also be an acceptable minimum, but France is still a long way from achieving this.

A shameful statement by the Minister

This Saturday, March 29, at the “Climat Libé Tour” organized by the Académie du Climat, the French Minister for Ecological Transition, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, was asked to explain the false protection of so-called “protected” marine areas. She unveiled a new strategy to make citizens believe that France already bans bottom trawling in its waters, which is totally false. The Minister stated over and over again: “Today, 40% of the French maritime domain is already free from bottom trawling”. According to the Minister, this surface area should be added to the 30% of protected marine areas (in which trawling is NOT banned either)… Stunned by the audacity of this lie, which amounts to saying that France protects 70% of its waters from destructive fishing methods such as trawling, when in fact we protect less than 0.1% of our metropolitan waters, BLOOM founder Claire Nouvian, who had opened the day’s conferences and was still present during the Minister’s speech, confronted her and managed to understand the subterfuge used.

Pushed into a corner, Madame Pannier-Runacher had to admit that the 40% she presented as a sledgehammer argument for France’s virtue, actually corresponded to the zone where trawling beyond 800 metres was prohibited under the 2016 European regulation, which BLOOM won over the French government’s determination to protect the handful of industrial vessels fishing at these depths, most of which belonged to Intermarché.

The “deep-sea fishing” regulations concern very few boats, and have absolutely nothing to do with the 30% of marine protected areas we’re talking about today, which are already supposed to ban bottom trawling and all towed fishing methods such as pelagic trawling, over their entire surface area and without any bathymetric limits. This intellectually dishonest procedure was designed to mislead the public and conceal the government’s bias in favor of the destructive fishing lobbies: trawling. The lies uttered publicly by the Minister further undermine, if any were needed, the immense distrust that exists among the French towards politics and in particular the government, which inspires confidence in only 23% of the French according to the latest CEVIPOF poll.

Claire Nouvian reacted by saying: “The government supports the destroyers of the ocean ‘whatever the cost’, even if it means adopting a Trumpist attitude in the face of reality, and openly lying about the ban on bottom trawling by calling up a regulatory text that has nothing to do with the central issue, which is whether or not France is finally going to protect its ‘protected’ marine areas from the ravages of pelagic and bottom trawling. To protect not citizens and marine animals, but the beneficiaries of the world’s destruction, our politicians are prepared to cross every ethical boundary by resorting to lies and alternative truths. This is not only an environmental disaster, but also a democratic one. We know very well what such a relationship with science, reality and truth will ultimately do: give the far right a shortcut.”

–> France, the world’s second largest maritime territory after the United States, protects less than 0.1% of its metropolitan waters. In fact, one study found that only 0.005% of the Atlantic, Channel and North Sea coastline, and 0.094% of the Mediterranean coastline, are truly protected, with all destructive fishing banned.

Anti-ecological diplomacy for the benefit of destructive fisheries on the brink of bankruptcy

Since the adoption of ambitious objectives at the Grenelle de la Mer in 2009/2010, the French history of ocean “protection” has been one long series of anti-ecological acts, culminating in the current kafkaesque situation in which protection only protects the ocean’s destroyers, the trawlers, who have themselves become subsidised fishers.

This week, BLOOM released a ground-breaking study based on scientific research, formally demonstrating that bottom trawling is structurally unprofitable and would not survive without public subsidies.

• Read the report “Breaking free from trawling”.

• TRAWLING FIGURES:
There are 805 vessels in metropolitan France (19.8% of the total) registered in the European register as bottom trawlers (including demersal seines) or pelagic trawlers, all sizes combined.
361 of these vessels are under 12m, 444 are over 12m.

What has taken shape, and is now openly confirmed, is a diplomacy with a very clear strategic objective: never to protect the ocean.
• On April 12, 2022, the government published a decree creating a French exception to strict protection and inventing the concept of “strong protection”, allowing destructive activities to be authorized in zones that are supposed to prohibit all extractive activities, not just the most destructive.
• Before COP15 Biodiversity in Montreal in December 2022, France, with the support of the Netherlands in particular, had emptied the European Union’s negotiating mandate: instead of aiming for the European target of 30% real marine protection, of which one third would be full protection, the EU mandate no longer mentioned the target of 10% “strict” protection and simply spoke of 30% global protection, without specifying what was meant by “protection”.
• In Montreal, during the COP15 negotiations, France put all its diplomatic weight behind destroying the ambition of the international agreement by successfully avoiding defining what “protected” means. France had then begun to lay the groundwork for its real objective: to challenge the international scientific consensus, which clearly and unambiguously defines protection (a total ban on all towed fishing methods, i.e. all forms of trawling and all fishing over 12 metres, as well as industrial activities and infrastructure).
• In April 2024, France took the lead in a European alliance to attack the UK, which had dared to ban bottom trawling in some of its protected areas, a measure too environmental for our government.
• At the beginning of March 2025, the European Commissioner for Fisheries and Oceans, Kostas Kadis, contaminated by French anti-ecological diplomacy, backed down on the European Commission’s ambitions for marine protection and announced, at the European Ocean Days that he would position himself in favour of a ‘case-by-case’ approach to protection, echoing the language of France and the trawling lobbies.
• On March 21, 2025, Madame Pannier-Runacher took the issue a step further, reiterating her opposition to a general ban on destructive activities in MPAs on a “case-by-case” approach to protection.
• On March 31, will President Macron continue with this harmful strategy, or will he at last seek to protect the general interest by announcing an end to all forms of trawling in protected areas, and the use of the offshore wind tax to support the sector towards a sustainable transition?

These manoeuvres do not reflect yet another example of inaction, delay or renunciation on the part of the government in environmental issues: they are, in fact, a deleterious step backwards. At a time when the window of opportunity to stabilise the climate and prevent the collapse of the living world is closing, the government has chosen to bend under the threats of the trawler lobby, a minority in terms of number of vessels but fiercely defended by industrialists determined not to question their model and the sources of their wealth: public subsidies.

Trawlers stand together to defend the destruction of the ocean and oppose the protection of the marine environment.

Increasingly isolated from public aspirations for real protection (78% of French people are in favor of real protection for the ocean, as per a poll from IPSOS 2023) and for low-impact fishing, trawling fishers refuse to accept any responsibility for the destruction of the ocean, thus asserting an assumed anti-scientific position. Brittany’s regional fisheries committee even claimed on its Facebook page that trawling “saves marine ecosystems” (!).

Working as a block against NGOs, and in particular BLOOM, which, despite threats, insults and intimidation, has not given up on telling the truth about the destructive effects of trawling, trawlers and their representatives have invariably adopted a “hard-line” stance over the decades, rejecting any responsibility and blocking any change through physical, verbal and even judicial violence, going so far as to set fire to the Parliament of Brittany in Rennes in 1994, or to the OFB headquarters in Brest in March 2025.

Faced with the irresponsibility of professional trawling representatives, BLOOM has written an open letter to Olivier le Nézet, President of the Comité National des Pêches Maritimes.

Economically condemned, rejected by public opinion, enjoined to transition by scientists, trawlers have everything to lose by refusing to transform. The protection of the ocean must be immediate, but the transition must be gradual, and the 700 million euros from the offshore wind tax that will be allocated to the fishing industry must be earmarked as a priority for the social and environmental transition of the sector. The first beneficiaries of marine protected areas will be fishers. Fishing less initially and letting the ocean regenerate will enable them to fish more in the long term. Public subsidies should be used to support the sector during the regeneration and transition period.

Will Emmanuel Macron choose to defend the general interest and the aspirations of citizens, or a tiny, loss-making industry dependent on public subsidies and associated with the worst environmental performance?

Find out today at noon.

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TO FIND OUT MORE :

• More than 300 international researchers call for real ocean protection
• British scientists call on their government to urgently ban trawling in marine protected areas, pointing out that “a single pass of fishing gear in contact with the seabed reduces the richness of seabed invertebrate species by 19% and their diversity by 26%.”