The fifth Scottish Inshore Fisheries Conference (SIFC) will offer a platform to discuss development of a new model of fisheries management for Scottish waters as the UK moves closer to its departure from the European Union (EU).
Held on 5 October, the conference will see Fergus Ewing MSP, the Scottish Government’s Cabinet Secretary for the Rural Economy, give the keynote speech. A later session will provide a forum to discuss the Scottish Government’s plans for taking forward work on the future of fisheries management in Scotland.
Sustainability focus
Workshop topics will include implementing the Scottish Inshore Fisheries Integrated Data System (SIFIDS), a GB£1.5m EU-funded project which commenced work in 2016 to develop an integrated system for the collection, collation, analysis and interrogation of data from the Scottish inshore fishing fleet.
The Community Inshore Fisheries Alliance will lead a ‘What Coastal Fishing Communities Can Bring to Science, Sustainability and Governance’ session to explore how Scotland’s coastal fishing communities can take an active role in improving the management of their local inshore fisheries.
Low Impact Fishers of Europe (LIFE) and the Scottish Creel Fishermen’s Federation will also co-lead a session to examine low impact fishing and its potential for Scotland.
In 2016 the reporting requirements for the under 10m fleet were changed, making location and fishing effort data mandatory to better inform inshore fisheries management. Spatial data is now linked to activity data for 93% of the Scottish fleet, up from 22% before these changes were introduced.
The workshop ‘Improving Inshore Fisheries Data’ will present on the structure of the new data, the initial analysis from 2017-18 on the under 10m fleet, how the data has been applied to the Inshore Fisheries Pilots, and the data’s strengths and weaknesses
