Economic and social impacts of the landing obligation of the European Common Fisheries Policy: A review

Abstract

The European Union landing obligation (LO) entered fully into force in 2019, with the aim of reducing discards by inducing fishing gear selectivity improvements and fleets' behaviour changes. However, to date there has been no synthesis review of the economic and social impacts of the LO. To cover this gap, the objective of this paper is to provide a summary of what the scientific literature concludes on the economic and social impact of the LO considering also the exemptions and management adaptations in force.Results: we show that while the number of scientific studies related to the economic impact of the LO is high, almost all of them are related to the forecasted consequences of the LO rather than actual consequences. Only a few studies used quantitative social indicators to measure the impacts of the LO. Findings from the synthesis review also indicate that the scientific literature generally concludes that the short-term economic and social impacts of the LO are likely to be negative, because choke effects will occur and mitigation measures require time to deliver results, while long term effects are variable and will depend on the mitigation measure in place. However, these results assume there is full compliance by fishers with the LO, while the literature suggests this is not the case. The review concludes that analysis of the economic and social impacts of the LO based on actual and not on forecasted results are scarce, which ultimately drives the policy recommendation of producing actual results and contrasting them with the forecasted results.The results serve as a decision-making framework to determine how critical factors of the LO may have the most economic and social effects, which are relevant in the context of the evaluation of the EU Common Fisheries Policy.