How to ensure sustainable fisheries while renewing the EU fishing fleet for modernization and energy transition?

The European Union’s (EU) fishing fleet has struggled with overcapacity, which has led to overexploitation of fish stocks. Since the 2013 Common Fishery Policy (CFP) last reform, efforts to promote sustainable fisheries have resulted in healthier fish stocks and a reduction in fleet size. While EU fleets now comply with capacity limits, challenges remain, threatening sustainability and the fishing sector’s viability. Despite improvements since the reform, economic disparities and imbalances in fish resources persist. By collating expert knowledge and data analyses, this study examines if facing future challenges, such as energy transition and attracting young fishers, may require extra capacity to accommodate more efficient or alternative engines for greener fuels, and improve working conditions, in the context where country-specific capacity ceilings limiting the fishing capacity are not reached. However, current policies may limit short-term profitability of the current active fleet. At the same time, the EU fleet policy should ensure that fleet renewal, modernization, and profitability improvements, which may require additional capacity or not, alongside improved efficiency over time, do not result in an improved ability to catch fish that would exacerbate fleet imbalances, create overcapacity, or put more pressure on exploited stocks. Our findings indicate that the current EU fleet imbalance will likely worsen whenever capacity is reused, or extra capacity is granted without controlling for the ability to catch fish, and without monitoring for the right metrics beside fleet or vessels kW and GT. It appears optimistic to assume that reactivating unused fishing capacity or granting extra fishing capacity will not be used to catch even more fish. The findings aim to inform recommendations for improvement and to find applicable solutions within the EU framework, while addressing ongoing challenges in EU fisheries without compromising the fleet’s capacity to catch fish in ways that do not contribute to overcapacity and imbalance. It appears advisable that fishing capacity would best be managed at the fleet level, not reduced per individual vessel, to ensure balance with fisheries opportunities, support the energy transition, and safeguard socioeconomic resilience under the CFP.