A campaign to reform the management of Scotland's seabed

This website will be launching soon as part of our joint campaign to end the daily damage to our coastal seabed and recover Scotland’s marine natural heritage.

In recent months over 40 organisations have united in support of urgent measures to recover the health of Scotland’s seas.

For nearly 100 years our coastal waters were protected from bottom-trawling by the ‘Three Mile Limit’. This was set up to protect fisheries such as herring and was a haven for fishing and marine life. However, this protection was removed in 1984 leading to the damage of critically important seabed habitats, including fish spawning grounds and nurseries. This has fundamentally changed the ecological health of our seabed. The result has been a collapse in many inshore fisheries, and a loss of vital economic opportunities for coastal communities.

Together we wrote a series of letters to the First Minister highlighting our concerns about this situation.

These letters and their responses can be viewed here:

1st letter – 17th December 2018 (Reply 21st January 2019)

2nd letter – 25th February 2019 (Reply: 18th March 2019)

3rd letter – 22nd August 2019 (Reply: September 2019)

If your organisation is interested in joining this campaign, please get in touch: