On 13 May 2026, a small group from Patagonia and the Protect Our Catch coalition walked into the European Commission’s office in Brussels with a stack of petitions signed by 250,000 Europeans. The ask was straightforward. Stop allowing bottom trawling inside Marine Protected Areas.
The number it should not be possible to write next to “Marine Protected Areas” is sixty percent. As of 2026, roughly sixty percent of European Union MPAs are still being bottom-trawled. The protection exists on a map. It does not exist on the seafloor.
I have written here about marine protected areas that actually work. Cabo Pulmo, in Mexico’s Gulf of California, climbed 463% in fish biomass over a decade once the local community closed it to fishing. Western Manus in the Bismarck Sea was just declared by Papua New Guinea as a 214,000 square kilometre no-take reserve, the largest in Melanesia. The Verde Island Passage in the Philippines has a fisherfolk coalition pushing the national congress for ENIPAS-level protection. The pattern is consistent. Where extraction stops, life returns.
The European case is the opposite. The boundaries were drawn. The legal designations were issued. The compliance never followed.
What Bottom Trawling Does
A bottom trawl is a weighted net dragged across the seabed by one or more boats. It is the most efficient way humans have ever invented to catch demersal fish, and it is also the most efficient way humans have ever invented to destroy the seafloor. The gear scrapes corals off rock. It ploughs through seagrass meadows. It breaks the structure of reef formations that took centuries to build, and it resuspends sediment that smothers what is left. Whatever was living there, on the substrate or in it, is removed.
Inside a Marine Protected Area, this should not be happening. The point of an MPA is to give the seafloor a chance to do what coastal ecosystems do when humans stop pulling on them, which is to recover, structure themselves, and produce more life than the alternative. Trawling inside an MPA undoes the only thing the MPA was designated to do.
The Petition
On 13 May 2026, Patagonia and the Protect Our Catch coalition handed Commissioner Costas Kadis, the European Commissioner for Fisheries and Oceans, the names of 250,000 Europeans calling for the practice to end. The campaign asks the Commission to fully enforce the existing Habitats Directive, hold member states to the ambition of the 2023 EU Marine Action Plan, and ensure the upcoming EU Ocean Pact directly addresses bottom trawling inside MPAs.
The political case is not difficult to make. Polling across seven EU countries shows that 82% of citizens support stricter regulation of bottom trawling, and 73% would support an outright ban inside Marine Protected Areas. The opposition has come from the fishing industry lobby and from a handful of member states that have built national fishing quotas around continued seafloor extraction.
The Legal Challenge
The petition is the visible half of the pressure. The less visible half is a fresh legal challenge filed in May 2026 by ClientEarth, Oceana Europe and Seas At Risk against the European Commission for failing to act on persistent bottom trawling in MPAs in three specific countries: Denmark, the Netherlands and Spain. The challenge argues these member states are in breach of the EU Habitats Directive, which prohibits activities that significantly damage Natura 2000 sites, including marine ones.
The legal mechanism is infringement action. If the Commission accepts the complaint, the case moves toward the Court of Justice of the European Union. Member states found in breach face binding compliance orders and, eventually, fines. The legal route is slower than petitions but more durable. A ruling sets the standard for the whole bloc and survives the next political cycle.
What “No Plan to Phase Out” Actually Means
Recent research on EU MPA management has produced a number that is bracing in its honesty. As of 2026, no EU country has a comprehensive plan to phase out bottom trawling inside Marine Protected Areas. Some have partial restrictions in some sites. Some have voluntary guidelines that the industry can opt out of. None has a national-level pathway from the current state to the state the MPA designation legally promises.
This is the gap between paper and water. A Marine Protected Area declared without enforcement is a piece of cartography, not a piece of conservation. The whole point of the marine protected area framework is to convert ecological intent into ecological outcome. The EU is, on average, running that conversion in reverse.
The Bigger Pattern
Sixty percent of MPAs trawled is not a European story alone. It is a global pattern with a European leading edge. Around the world, marine protected areas are increasingly being designated without the enforcement architecture needed to make them real. The global 30x30 target that nearly two hundred countries committed to in 2022 will meet its area-protected percentage by 2030 even if every new MPA is paper-only. The numbers that will not meet their target are biomass recovered, reef structure rebuilt, fish populations returned. Those numbers only respond to actual protection.
This is where the European case matters beyond Europe. If the Commission accepts the May 2026 legal challenge and starts enforcing the Habitats Directive against member states, it sets a precedent that no-take means no-take, enforceable at the level of an international body. If it does not, it sets the opposite precedent, and the credibility of the entire MPA framework softens.
What Happens Next
The European Commission has not yet formally responded to the petition or the legal complaint. The next pressure point is the upcoming EU Ocean Pact, the bloc’s marquee ocean policy framework, which is expected to be finalised in late 2026 and will set EU ocean policy for the rest of the decade. If the Pact includes binding language on bottom trawling inside MPAs, the petition succeeded. If it includes only voluntary guidelines, the fishing-industry lobby will have held the line.
What can be done from outside the EU is supportable but limited. The Patagonia coalition, Oceana Europe, Seas At Risk and ClientEarth all accept public engagement and donations. Citizens of EU countries can write to their members of the European Parliament urging strong Ocean Pact language on bottom trawling. Citizens elsewhere can signal that the European seafloor is being watched by divers, scientists and the rest of the ocean conservation community.
A Closing Thought
The pattern repeats. Cabo Pulmo, Western Manus, the Verde Island Passage. Where communities and governments actually close protected areas to extraction, the ocean answers, and quickly. Where they declare protection without closing extraction, the ocean does not.
The 250,000 names that landed in Brussels this week are an attempt to push one of the most heavily-fished regions on the planet from one side of that pattern to the other. Whether the European Commission lets it work, or lets the trawl gear keep dragging across “protected” seabed, is what the rest of 2026 will tell us.
