The campaign group Greenpeace has also announced that it intends to take more direct action to better protect MPAs.<\/p>\n
It will use one of its ships to drop boulders onto the seabed creating physical barriers to restrict access.<\/p>\n
It has not said which sites will be targeted but it has previously taken similar direct action at sites in the southern North Sea, the English Channel, and off the south-west coast of England.<\/p>\n
Fishing boats tend to avoid areas containing large rocks because they can catch onto nets and other gear.<\/p>\n
The UK government dropped a legal case it had taken against Greenpeace in an attempt to stop the direct action.<\/p>\n
The Scottish Fishermen’s Federation insists that “everyone wants healthy seas, abundant marine life and thriving coastal communities.”<\/p>\n
Chief executive Elspeth Macdonald said the call to ban trawling and dredging in 30% of inshore waters “is based on an arbitrary target rather than scientific evidence, and takes little account of the diversity of Scotland’s coastline, seabed habitats, fisheries and fishing communities.”<\/p>\n
She believes the fishing industry is now heavily regulated and that management measures need to be “proportionate”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The campaign group Greenpeace has also announced that it intends to take more direct action to better protect…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":653045,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[1397,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-653044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=653044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653044\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/653045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=653044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=653044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=653044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}