The European Commission’s “Ocean Pact”: a prospect of nothingness

09 May 2025

Just a few weeks before the official publication of the European Commission’s long-awaited “Ocean Pact”, a working document has been leaked. In the face of urgent climate and environmental concerns, this “Ocean Pact” should set the course for European maritime policy and mark a turning point in favor of protecting marine ecosystems and small-scale fishing. But the Commission’s working document is a bitter disappointment: at this stage, the Pact is little more than a catalog of declarations of intent and already existing objectives, without any real legislative innovation or political courage. 

At a time when our oceans are under unprecedented pressure – from overfishing, plastic pollution and acidification – the European Union has an historic opportunity, following the publication in February 2023 of its “Action Plan to protect and restore marine ecosystems for sustainable and resilient fisheries“, to reinvent its relationship with the ocean. Instead, the “Ocean Pact” on which the European Commission is working is likely to be an elephant giving birth to a mouse, carefully avoiding controversial issues and perpetuating a technocratic vision out of touch with ecological urgencies. 

The main omission: destructive fishing

At a time when scientists and the international community are calling for an end to the ongoing destruction of the oceans by industrial fishing fleets, and documentary filmmaker David Attenborough is denouncing the massive impact of trawling on marine ecosystems in a new documentary, the European Commission is ignoring the need to put an end to destructive fishing techniques, chief among them bottom trawling. On 28 pages, the word “trawl” does not appear once. Not a single line is devoted to the necessary transition of the fishing industry towards sustainable practices. All that remains is a few banalities on the energy transition of fishing boat engines, a subject particularly dear to the industrial fishing lobbies, who have been pushing for years to obtain European funding to renew their fleets on the pretext of switching to less polluting engines, without however changing the techniques used to plunder the seas and pulverize the seabed. Continuing to practise bottom or pelagic trawling with unproven hydrogen engines will not put an end to the destruction of undersea habitats, overfishing, by-catches and energy bills that are incompatible with sobriety objectives. The persistent influence of the fishing industry lobbies in Brussels seems to have paid off. 

So, while the Commission should be forcing States to apply hitherto scorned European law concerning Article 17 of the Common Fisheries Policy, which provides for the preferential allocation of quotas to the most virtuous operators from an environmental, economic and social point of view, in other words, to artisanal fishermen, the Commission appears to be content with a simple “vade-mecum”. This is a clear-cut surrender on the part of the Commission, which intends to provide an explanation of the text to States and fishermen, when the social and ecological urgency requires it to enforce European law and put an end to a quota allocation policy tailored by States for industrial fishing.  

Faced with collapsing fish stocks and stagnating catches by European fleets, the Commission does not seem to want to replenish the abundance of marine life, but instead is banking on the massive development of aquaculture to achieve 46% European self-sufficiency in seafood by 2050. This headlong rush into the future ignores the problems inherent in intensive fish farming: pollution of coastal waters, massive use of antibiotics, pressure on wild stocks to feed farmed fish to the detriment of food security for populations in the South, as in Senegal and Mauritania. 

The only “breakthrough” announced by the Commission in favor of the socio-ecological transition of fisheries? In this working document, the Commission proposes to extend the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) to the fisheries sector. 

All that remains is a techno-industrial vision of the ocean as a “larder to be optimized”, which does not meet the challenges of preserving marine biodiversity and is in line with an outdated productivist logic that has contributed to emptying the ocean of its riches, with the abundance of predatory fish having plummeted by over 90% in the North Atlantic over the last century. 

Marine protected areas: objectives without resources

As far as marine protected areas (MPAs) are concerned, the Pact merely reiterates the target of 30% of European waters under protection by 2030, without proposing a clear strategy for achieving this, given that less than 12% of European waters are currently “protected”. There’s nothing new either on the vital need for strict protection, which should cover at least 10% of European waters by 2030, whereas it currently stands at just 1%. Finally, there is nothing on the means of control and sanctions to guarantee effective protection.  

The recommendations of the action plan published by the Commission in February 2023, which took the measure of the urgency and advocated the end of bottom trawling in so-called “protected” European marine areas by 2030, have disappeared. The undermining work of industrial lobbies, who for years have been pushing the hollow concept of “case-by-case” protection, in defiance of scientific recommendations, already taken up by the European Commissioner for Fisheries and Oceans Costas Kadis, thus seems to be bearing fruit, to the detriment of marine biodiversity, the climate and small-scale fishing. The Ocean Pact merely mentions the need to finalize the long-awaited reform and update of the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD), which has been stalled for months awaiting publication of this famous “Ocean Pact”. 

While the initial debates surrounding the Ocean Pact called for the possibility of creating a centralized “Blue Fund” to finance the ecological transition of the blue economy and fisheries, the Pact abandons this ambition. Funding sources will continue to be split between different instruments: European funds for aquaculture and fisheries (the current FEAMPA fund), the multi-annual financial framework, European cohesion funds, the Next Generation EU program, and private funding. This fragmentation risks diluting the financial effort and complicating the coherence of actions. Without a clear and ambitious budgetary commitment, the stated objectives will all too likely remain wishful thinking. 

The risky bet of geoengineering

In the face of the climate emergency, the Commission is betting heavily on “blue carbon”, i.e. the capacity of marine ecosystems to sequester CO2. If this meant that the Commission had decided to seriously protect the seabed and the carbon stocks it harbors from the destructive effects of trawling and other industrial activities, this would be excellent news. But this is not the case. By 2026, it plans to draw up a blue carbon action plan heavily based on geoengineering, including habitat mapping, and to develop research into techniques for sequestering the CO2 emitted by human activities. This commercial approach to nature, which transforms ecosystems into “carbon sinks” that can be traded on financial markets, distracts attention from the structural measures that are needed: drastically reducing emissions, banning the opening of any new fossil fuel projects, and prohibiting destructive practices such as bottom trawling, which releases carbon sequestered in marine sediments. 

A missed appointment for the ocean

The leaked document from the European Commission is a “simple” working paper. But with only a few weeks to go before its publication, the document betrays a glaring lack of ambition ahead of the United Nations Conference on the Oceans (UNOC), to be held on European soil from June 8.  

As it stands, this “Ocean Pact” is a sign of the Commission’s defeat in the face of industrial lobbies. Its lack of ambition confirms the need for greater citizen mobilization to impose real protection for the ocean and our waters. 

The future of marine life and coastal communities deserves better than this catalog of cosmetic measures. It’s time for the European Union to move from words to deeds by banning destructive fishing practices, establishing a coherent network of truly protected marine areas, and signing an end to the expansion of the fossil fuel industry. Our common future depends on it. 

BLOOM will continue to advocate to European institutions for its 20 points for the ocean, climate, and jobs, 20 key measures presented with the Citizens’ Coalition for the Protection of the Ocean, which provides concrete and effective responses to all the issues that this “Ocean Pact” refuses to address. 

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Photo: copyright European Union, 2025 – Photographer: Claudio Centonze