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Marine litter is recognized as a global environmental concern. Seafloor litter can provide important information to help assess the status of the marine ecosystem and is relatively easy to collect on a regular basis. The Belgian fisheries area covers different parts of the OSPAR Greater North Sea region and the Celtic Seas. In these regions, seafloor litter data were gathered by quantifying the litter items caught in the trawl net during two different fisheries surveys to investigate litter distribution on both regional and local scales. In the international beam trawl survey (BTS), covering essentially the OSPAR Greater North Sea and Celtic Seas, an average of 2.2 ± 0.05 items.ha-1 were caught with a median of 1.4 items.ha-1. In the environmental monitoring survey (EMS) only the Belgian part of the North Sea was covered and a smaller cod-end mesh size was used, resulting in 12.7 ± 1.7 litter items.ha-1 in the coastal zone (< 12 nm) and 2.8 ± 0.2 items.ha-1 in the more offshore zone (> 12 nm). In both surveys plastic items were predominant, representing up to 88% of the collected litter in the Belgian part of the North Sea. The impact of human activities at sea such as fisheries, sand extraction, wind farms and dredge disposal was investigated. A significant correlation was found between fishing activities and the amount of litter registered in the Belgian part of the North Sea, but not for the OSPAR Greater North Sea and Celtic Seas.

The COVID-19 outbreak and subsequent public health interventions have depressed demand and disrupted supply chains for many fishing businesses. This paper provides an analysis of the COVID-19 impacts on the profitability of the EU fishing fleets. Nowcasting techniques were used to estimate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the economic performance for the EU fishing fleet in 2020 and 2021. Our results show that the economic impact of COVID-19 on this sector was smaller than initially expected and overall profits remained positive. This was in part due to low fuel prices that reduced operating costs of fishing, and the early response from governments to support the sector. The results vary by fishing fleet, revealing that small-scale fleets and the fleets in the Mediterranean and Black seas have been more impacted than large-scale fleets and the fleets in the Northeast Atlantic.

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