Where Europe's Sharks Are Really Managed: Notes from Ocean Week 2026
In Brussels, Ocean Week was about the Ocean Act, the next EU budget and a fairer future for fishing. For sharks, the more important decision will be taken in Vilamoura in November, and the Common Fisheries Policy already says how the EU should take it.
I spent the last week of September in Brussels for Sharkproject, at the annual general meeting of Seas At Risk and at the events of EU Ocean Week 2026. Sharks appeared on the official programme for a single evening, although almost every major decision discussed during the week will influence how many of them die in European fishing gear: the Ocean Act the Commission has promised, the EU budget for 2028 to 2034 and the question of what Europe's fleets are paid to do. The decision that will matter most for sharks this year was hardly mentioned at all. It will be taken from 16 to 23 November in Vilamoura, Portugal, where the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) meets and where the European Union will have to say whether the ban on keeping North Atlantic shortfin mako stays in place (ICCAT, 2026b). My point in this post is that the EU does not need a new law to get that decision right, because the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) already obliges it to apply the same standards on the high seas as in its own waters.
A week about Europe's own waters
EU Ocean Week ran from 28 September to 4 October 2026 under the theme "Delivering ocean health for Europe's future". It is initiated by seven environmental organisations, among them Seas At Risk, the Brussels based network of over 35 member organisations to which Sharkproject belongs (Ocean Week, 2026a; Seas At Risk, n.d.). As the week began, Seas At Risk placed a life sized whale in front of the European Parliament to make the point that this autumn is "crunch time for the ocean in EU decision-making" (Seas At Risk, 2026). Nine marine conservation organisations chose the same week to publish a scorecard which concluded that "European ocean health is off track" (Oceana, 2026).
Three dossiers explain why. The Commission has listed a European Ocean Act in its 2026 work programme for the last quarter of the year (European Parliament, 2026). Seas At Risk wants it to become the EU's overarching ocean law (Seas At Risk, 2026), and at its general meeting the comparison that came up again and again was the European Climate Law, meaning binding targets and a requirement that every use of the sea be measured against the good environmental status which the Marine Strategy Framework Directive has demanded for years. The next long term EU budget is being negotiated, and with it the end of a stand alone fisheries fund. Under the Commission's proposal of July 2025, support for fisheries moves into national and regional partnership plans drawn up by each Member State, with a minimum of EUR 2 billion reserved for the core functions of the fisheries policy (European Commission, 2026a; European Parliament Legislative Observatory, 2025). The fisheries ministers adopted their negotiating position on that regulation on 29 September, in the middle of Ocean Week (Council of the European Union, 2026). Three weeks after the week ended, on 20 October, the Commission published its Vision 2040 for fisheries and aquaculture, the long term strategy that everyone in Brussels had been waiting for (European Commission, 2026a).
The Rethink Fisheries Day on 30 September brought fishers, scientists, officials and campaigners together for a full day (Ocean Week, 2026b). What I took home from it was that the CFP already contains the tools for a just transition to low impact fishing, and that implementation and money directed to the right purposes are what is missing. The evening on shark protection had taken place the day before, on 29 September, when Stop Finning, Seas At Risk, the Deutsche Stiftung Meeresschutz, ElasmOcean and the Gallifrey Foundation showed film excerpts in the European Parliament and then discussed them with policymakers, shark experts and filmmakers under the title "Shark Protection for Healthy Oceans" (Ocean Week, 2026c). The room was full, which was encouraging. The dossiers that decide the fate of Atlantic sharks, however, were discussed in other rooms, by people who rarely mention them.
Where the money will go
Dovile Vaigauskaite, Head of Unit in the Commission's Directorate General for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, explained at the funding panel how the new system is meant to work. Payments will be made only once agreed milestones are reached, one set of rules will replace the current patchwork and the total will be smaller than today. Her advice to anyone who wants support after 2027 was to talk to their national authorities now, because the national plans are being written as we speak (Vaigauskaite, 2026). Constantin Tsakas, Chief Economist of Plan Bleu, showed where the money went until now. By his figures, up to 2020 about 38 percent of EU fisheries spending went into subsidies that increase fishing capacity and only about 5 percent into environmental measures (Tsakas, 2026). I have not checked those numbers against his underlying report, so I quote them as he presented them.
This matters for sharks because the fleets that catch most of Europe's pelagic sharks will be among those applying for the money. ICCAT's own catch statistics attribute about 87 percent of the recorded North Atlantic shortfin mako removals of 2022 to 2024 to EU vessels, and nearly four fifths of the total to Spain alone. Since retention is prohibited, these recorded removals are almost entirely sharks that were dead when they were hauled in and were then discarded; animals released alive, and the share of them that dies afterwards, do not appear in these figures (ICCAT, 2026a). Whether these fleets are paid for new capacity or for bycatch avoidance, observer coverage and data collection will be settled in the national plans over the next two years, so far with hardly any public debate. The Vision 2040 at least points in the right direction: it calls fleet capacity management "a major pillar of a viable business model" and promises to address "the challenge of unwanted catches, including the by-catch of protected species" (European Commission, 2026a).
Didier Gascuel of Institut Agro Rennes added a finding that conservationists should take seriously. His TransiPêche programme shows that France's small scale passive fisheries land about a third of the catch but create almost two thirds of the value added, and that they beat bottom trawling on overfishing, seabed abrasion and carbon emissions. The one indicator on which they do worse is the bycatch of sensitive species in nets (Gascuel, 2026). He was talking mainly about seabirds and marine mammals, but sharks and rays die in gillnets just as readily. A low impact fishery is not automatically a low shark bycatch fishery, and anyone who wants public money to fund a shift to passive gears should ask for bycatch safeguards at the same time.
The CFP does not stop at the edge of EU waters
This is the point that I think Brussels misses. The three dossiers above are about EU waters. The sharks that European longliners catch in the open Atlantic are managed somewhere else, in regional fisheries management organisations (RFMOs) such as ICCAT, where the EU negotiates as a single party. The CFP is explicit about how the Union must behave there. Article 28(2)(d) of the basic regulation obliges it to "ensure that Union fishing activities outside Union waters are based on the same principles and standards as those applicable under Union law in the area of the CFP". Article 29(2) requires that the positions of the Union in RFMOs "shall be based on the best available scientific advice so as to ensure that fishery resources are managed in accordance with the objectives laid down in Article 2", and adds that the Union "shall seek to lead the process of strengthening the performance of RFMOs". Article 2(2) in turn says that the CFP "shall apply the precautionary approach to fisheries management", which the regulation defines as "an approach according to which the absence of adequate scientific information should not justify postponing or failing to take management measures to conserve target species, associated or dependent species and non-target species and their environment" (Regulation (EU) No 1380/2013, Articles 2(2), 4(1)(8), 28(2)(d) and 29(2)).
The Vision 2040 repeats the commitment in its own words. "A stronger and more coherent external action is an integral part of the Vision for 2040", the Commission writes. The EU "will be a key driving force in making RFMOs increasingly effective and efficient", and its "ocean diplomacy for sustainable fisheries will support science-based decision-making and the precautionary approach" (European Commission, 2026a, section 7). These are welcome commitments, but they are not new. The CFP has required the same of the Union since it entered into application in 2014, and the ICCAT meeting in November is simply the next occasion on which the EU can show that it applies its own rules.
What ICCAT will decide in Vilamoura
Since 2022, vessels in ICCAT fisheries have not been allowed to keep North Atlantic shortfin mako. Recommendation 21-09 prohibited retention outright for 2022 and 2023, and since then an annual calculation, which subtracts the previous year's total fishing mortality from a ceiling of 250 tonnes, has left nothing to retain (ICCAT, 2021, paragraphs 3 and 5 and Annex 1). The recommendation sets a rebuilding objective, biomass levels that support maximum sustainable yield by 2070 "with a probability of a range of between 60 and 70% at least", defines total fishing mortality as "the sum of any retention, dead discards, and post-release mortality of live discards" and caps that mortality at 250 tonnes "until new SCRS advice is provided to the Commission", the SCRS being ICCAT's scientific body, the Standing Committee on Research and Statistics (ICCAT, 2021, paragraphs 1, 2 and 4(a)). That new advice now exists, because the SCRS adopted a new assessment in September. In 2024 the stock was still overfished, with spawning stock fecundity at 95 percent of the level that supports maximum sustainable yield, but it was no longer subject to overfishing. The probability that the stock sits in the green zone on both biomass and fishing pressure is 37.1 percent, and the probability that it sits in the red is 18.3 percent (ICCAT SCRS, 2026, section 12.15).
The scientists attribute the change to several factors. One of them is a new set of estimates for growth and natural mortality, in other words a different view of the animal's biology rather than only a reduction in the number of sharks killed. They also note that the projections to 2070 were run with a single age structured model which does "not capture the full range of uncertainties originally considered in the stock assessment" (ICCAT SCRS, 2026). The same report records that total fishing mortality averaged 1,046 tonnes a year between 2022 and 2025, four times the 250 tonnes the recommendation allows (ICCAT SCRS, 2026). A retention ban therefore does not mean zero mortality. ICCAT's own satellite tagging study found that 29.4 percent of shortfin makos released from pelagic longlines die anyway (Domingo et al., 2025).
Because the 250 tonnes apply only until new advice arrives, Vilamoura will hear calls to raise the mortality ceiling and let retention resume; the SCRS itself notes that future retention would give the contracting parties "a critical opportunity" to collect biological data (ICCAT SCRS, 2026). If the EU reads this against its own CFP, its position should follow from the rules quoted above. The stock is overfished on the scientists' central estimate, the improvement depends on biological assumptions that an age validation study is still testing and the projections leave out part of the uncertainty. The CFP's definition of precaution does not allow an absence of adequate information to justify weaker measures. The Union's own law therefore asks it to keep the ban and to work on the mortality that occurs despite the ban, through better handling practices and gear that catches fewer sharks. That is my reading of the texts. Sharkproject's position for Vilamoura is being coordinated with partners, and I will write about the outcome.
What Ocean Week leaves behind
Seas At Risk placed its whale in front of the Parliament to remind Brussels that the ocean is watching. For sharks, I would add that the sea which decides their future does not end at the 200 mile line, and that the relevant decisions are not only taken in the Berlaymont, the Commission's headquarters. They are taken in Vilamoura in November, in the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission when it meets again next year and in the national capitals where the fisheries chapters of the partnership plans are being drafted now. Europe has written the rules for all three places into the Common Fisheries Policy. Those of us who care about sharks should hold it to those rules, and we should make the case in the meetings where sharks are not on the agenda.
Sources
Council of the European Union. (2026, September 29). Agriculture and Fisheries Council, 28–29 September 2026 [Meeting page]. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/meetings/agrifish/2026/09/28-29/
Domingo, A., Baez, J.-C., Bowlby, H., Cardoso, G., Carlson, J., Coelho, R., Cortes, E., Da Silva, C., Forselledo, R., Kerwath, S., Macias, D., Miller, P., Natanson, L., Ortiz de Urbina, J., Rosa, D., Santos, C. C., Travassos, P., & Mas, F. (2025). Post-release mortality of shortfin mako in the Atlantic Ocean using satellite telemetry (SCRS/2025/034). Collective Volume of Scientific Papers ICCAT, 82(2), 1–17.
European Commission. (2026a). Vision 2040 for fisheries and aquaculture (COM(2026) 701 final). https://oceans-and-fisheries.ec.europa.eu/publications/vision-2040-fisheries-and-aquaculture_en
European Parliament. (2026, September 20). The European ocean act [Legislative train schedule]. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-sustaining-our-quality-of-life-food-security-water-and-nature/file-ocean-act
European Parliament Legislative Observatory. (2025). Common Fisheries Policy 2028–2034 (Procedure 2025/0235(COD)) [Summary of the Commission proposal of 16 July 2025]. https://oeil.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/en/document-summary?id=1830670
Gascuel, D. (2026, September 30). The case for a just transition [Keynote]. Rethink Fisheries Day, EU Ocean Week 2026, Brussels, Belgium.
ICCAT. (2021). Recommendation by ICCAT on the conservation of the North Atlantic stock of shortfin mako caught in association with ICCAT fisheries (Rec. 21-09). https://www.iccat.int/Documents/Recs/compendiopdf-e/2021-09-e.pdf
ICCAT. (2026a). Task I nominal catch database (T1NC), version of 28 January 2026 [Data set]. https://www.iccat.int/en/accesingdb.html
ICCAT. (2026b). Circular 02258/2026: 25th Special Meeting of the Commission, Vilamoura, Portugal, 16–23 November 2026. https://www.iccat.int/Documents/Meetings/Docs/2026/02258-26_ENG.pdf
ICCAT SCRS. (2026). Report of the Standing Committee on Research and Statistics (SCRS), Hybrid/Madrid, 21–25 September 2026. https://www.iccat.int/Documents/Meetings/Docs/2026/REPORTS/2026_SCRS_ENG.pdf
Oceana. (2026, September 29). EU Ocean Week: New assessment finds Europe not on track to achieve a healthy ocean by 2030 [Press release]. https://europe.oceana.org/press-releases/eu-ocean-week-new-assessment-finds-europe-not-on-track-to-achieve-a-healthy-ocean-by-2030/
Ocean Week. (2026a). EU Ocean Week 2026 [Website]. https://www.oceanweek.eu/
Ocean Week. (2026b). Rethink Fisheries Day: Pathways for a just transition [Event programme]. https://www.oceanweek.eu/rethink-fisheries-day
Ocean Week. (2026c). Shark protection for healthy oceans [Event page]. https://www.oceanweek.eu/shark-protection-for-healthy-seas
Regulation (EU) No 1380/2013 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 December 2013 on the Common Fisheries Policy, consolidated text of 1 January 2023. http://data.europa.eu/eli/reg/2013/1380/2023-01-01
Seas At Risk. (n.d.). About. https://seas-at-risk.org/about/
Seas At Risk. (2026, September 28). We are the whale. https://seas-at-risk.org/general-news/we-are-the-whale/
Tsakas, C. (2026, September 30). [Panel contribution]. Enabling the future of fisheries: Towards a fairer and more effective EU funding framework, Rethink Fisheries Day, EU Ocean Week 2026, Brussels, Belgium.
Vaigauskaite, D. (2026, September 30). [Panel contribution]. Enabling the future of fisheries: Towards a fairer and more effective EU funding framework, Rethink Fisheries Day, EU Ocean Week 2026, Brussels, Belgium.
Note: This post reflects my personal reading of public documents and of what I heard in Brussels. Figures quoted from conference presentations are given as presented and have not been checked against the speakers' underlying reports. It is not an official Sharkproject statement.
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