European Union, Norway and the United Kingdom - fisheries consultations: agreed records 2023

Agreed records of consultations from meetings of delegations from the United Kingdom, Norway and the European Union, held between November and December 2022 on the joint management of shared North Sea stocks.


Whiting

18.1 The Delegations noted that according to the ICES MSY approach catches in 2023 should be no more than 110,172 tonnes. This represents an increase of 25% compared to the advice for 2022. ICES estimates that discards and BMS landings are at 44.1% of total catch (in weight) in 2021, and ICES projects discard rates of 36.7% of total catch (by weight) in 2022.

18.2 The Delegations agreed that they would not pursue the full TAC increase implied by the ICES headline advice given that such a large increase could have a detrimental impact on the status of the North Sea cod stock. They therefore agreed that it would not be appropriate to follow the MSY approach.

18.3 The Delegations discussed the methodology for the split of whiting TACs between the ICES Subarea 4 and Division 7.d. They agreed that from the 2023 TAC year onwards, Parties would allocate 80.23% of the whiting TAC to ICES subarea 4, and 19.77% to ICES Division 7.d. The Parties used as the basis for this calculation the mean between two different methodologies to set the new fixed allocation. The first methodology looked at a mean total catch split between 2017-2021 between subarea 4 and Division 7.d and the second used the mean actual TAC split over 2019-2023 (using, as the value for 2023, what the TAC split would have been, had the previous methodology been applied).

18.4 The Delegations agreed to establish a TAC for 2023 in ICES Subarea 4 (North Sea) and Division 7.d (Eastern Channel) of 42,744 tonnes. This is an increase of 30% compared to 2022.

18.5 The Delegations agreed that the resulting TAC for Subarea 4 is 34,294 tonnes (80.23%), and the TAC for Division 7.d is 8,450 tonnes (19.77%).

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