Greenpeace campaigners have begun dumping giant boulders in parts of the North Sea to obstruct fishing in protected areas.
The environmental group accuses boats of destroying habitats by dragging heavy nets across the sea floor to catch deep-lying fish, a practice known as trawling.
Greenpeace has insisted that the granite rocks, which weigh up to three tonnes, will pose no threat to wildlife or safety, but will stop trawlers from operating.
Whilst it is legal to fish in the conservation zone, called the Dogger Bank – about 100km off the east coast of England – the activists say that they have caught large vessels hiding their contentious methods by switching off their identification systems, which would be illegal in most cases.
“Our Government has utterly failed to protect the Dogger Bank and all our marine protected areas from destructive industrial fishing,” Greenpeace oceans campaigner, Chris Thorne, said from aboard the boat dropping the boulders.
“How can you continue to allow trawlers to plough the seabed in a protected area designed specifically to protect the seabed? Allowing trawling is equivalent to allowing bulldozers to plough through a protected forest. This must stop.”
Greenpeace challenged the Government to take more steps to ensure that the conservation zone is enforceable and threatened to keep putting down boulders until the reserve is properly protected.
The Environment department said that the Government would put sustainable practices at the heart of its fishing strategy after the Brexit transition ends.
A spokesperson said: “We have already set up a ‘blue belt’ of protected waters nearly twice the size of England, and we propose new powers to better manage and control our marine protected areas.
“The Common Fisheries Policy currently restricts our ability to implement tougher protections, but leaving the EU and taking back control of our waters as an independent coastal state means we can introduce stronger measures.”
