Clyde cod closure to go ahead this year
22nd January 2025
The controversial 11-week Clyde cod box closure will go ahead next month, but the Scottish government says that following this year’s closure it will ‘consider the way ahead’ and carry out a consultation with stakeholders.
This will review how the closure has operated since 2022 and any changes that have taken place, using scientific and socio-economic evidence as the basis for future decisions. The commitment is made in a report the government has published on the 2024 closure.
The annual closure is intended to protect spawning cod, but the Clyde industry argues that there is in fact very little cod in the area.
The Scottish government’s report says scientific work found spawning cod both inside and outside the closure area, with similar proportions of spawning and non-spawning cod in each. But given the low numbers, ‘it is impossible to draw firm conclusions on the relative abundance or proportions of spawning cod inside and outside the closure area’.
The proportion of cod caught as bycatch on observed fishing trips was ‘very small’ compared to other species
in the bycatch. “The limited samples and few occurrences of cod capture during 2024 monitoring work do not give sufficient confidence to make further decisions,” says the report.
It accepts that no fishery remains static and says that the government is committed ‘not just to drawing sound conclusions from our scientific evidence but also engaging meaningfully with those closest to the fishery’.
During the remainder of the current legislation enabling the closure, additional work will be undertaken in the Clyde to strengthen the evidence base for future fisheries management. This will include analysing data that has been collected from passive acoustic receivers, as well as considering options for additional sampling and survey work ‘subject to best use of the various resources at our disposal’.
The closure has taken place since 2001, but between 2002 and 2021 included exemptions for prawn trawlers, creelers and scallop dredgers due to the low numbers of cod that they catch. These exemptions ended in 2022 because, the government said, ‘the abundance of cod in the Clyde area has shown little sign of recovery’.
This year’s closure will run from 14 February to 30 April.
The full report can be seen here.
