The next conference of the Forum on Recreational Fisheries and Aquatic Environment entitled ‘Cormorant - management needed across the borders' will take place on the 9th of October in the European Parliament in Brussels.
The event will be chaired by MEP Annie Schreijer-Pierik and MEP Werner Kuhn.
It has been 10 years since the European Parliament adopted the Resolution ‘Towards a European Cormorant Management Plan‘. Speakers at the event will give insight into the cormorant situation today with suggestions how to improve management of the European cormorant population.
In the resolution, the Parliament forwarded a number of sensible requests to the Commission and Member States to lessen the negative impact by cormorants in Europe. For example, the Parliament urged “the Commission and the Member States to promote the sustainable management of cormorant populations by means of increased scientific and administrative coordination, cooperation and communication, and to create appropriate conditions for the drafting of a Europe-wide cormorant population management plan”.
Today only some of the Parliament’s requests have been met such as the publication of a “..more generalised guidance on the nature of the derogations allowed under Article 9(1) of the Wild Birds Directive...” However, more could and should be done. The cormorant population is still on the increase, in particular in the Nordic region. Europe counts more than 2 million cormorants which eat more than 1 million kilo of fish every day. The bird is still a cause for great concern with regard to the impact on vulnerable fish species, aquaculture and fisheries.
Today the cormorant is mainly managed locally by reducing or scaring away the bird from specific localities. However, as the bird is highly migratory the effect of local management is hampered by incoming birds from other localities. And scaring away the bird from one place creates problems in other places. Local management alone is not good enough.
A key message to be delivered at this event is that cross-border cooperation is a necessity to manage properly and cost efficiently the cormorant population – as the European Parliament requested ten years ago.
If you wish to register to the event or if you need an accreditation to access the European Parliament, please send an email to marta@eaa-europe.eu by the 28th of September 2018.
More information and the draft agenda of the event are available here.
