The Baltic Sea is a unique and sensitive inland sea with limited biodiversity. Emissions of a variety of pollutants have negatively affected its health for a long time. Much is being done in the Baltic Sea’s catchment areas to improve its water quality, but at the same time sufficient measures are lacking to improve water quality and biological status in the Baltic Sea itself. In the absence of sustainable fishing the situation for the herring is critical today, as the size of the stocks is far from the peak levels 30-50 years ago. (1, 2). Since 2019, cod fishing in the eastern Baltic Sea has been suspended, and in 2022 the western Baltic cod stock also collapsed despite repeated warnings and advice from experts to reduce cod fishing in time (3). Now the same situation is close for herring. A ban on targeted commercial fishing was introduced in the western Baltic Sea in 2021 and remains in effect today. There are certain periods during the year when fishing for herring is suspended also in the rest of the Baltic Sea (4). But this is not enough to secure the herring stock for the future. 

Herring is an important part of the Swedish national cuisine and is also a very important component of the Baltic Sea ecosystem. The number of species further down in the food web is kept at reasonable levels, and herring Is also the most important food for cod, salmon, porpoises, many seabirds and seals. It is therefore particularly serious that there are now repeated warnings that the stocks in both the Bothnian Sea and the Central Baltic Sea are at dangerously low levels. The International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) has pointed out that reduced fishing quotas for herring in the Baltic Sea are needed to meet the management plan. For 2024, ICES assessed that a fishing stop for herring was needed to meet the requirements in the management plan for the Baltic Sea outside the Gulf of Riga, since there is a clear risk that the stocks could collapse. The EU Commission also presented this proposal to the EU ministers for Rural Affairs and Fisheries. However, they decided to continue fishing with a quota of just over 95,000 tons of herring (7), an increase of 108% in the Central Baltic Sea for 2025, despite ICES warnings about the risk of overfishing of genetically different sub-stocks (8). In May 2025, ICES again advised on increased quotas in the Central Baltic Sea for 2026 (9,10), however, with the reservation that the quotas should instead be reduced to avoid the risk of collapse of the stocks based on the safety margin (the precautionary principle) contained in the regulations of the EU’s management plan (11, 12).

The quotas need to be substantially reduced. There are still herring in the Baltic Sea, but they are becoming smaller in size and the calculations made to estimate the stocks are based on data with very high uncertainty (1, 13). Something that ICES itself also clearly expresses (8). The biggest systematic error is that the age and size distribution of the stocks are not considered in the management plan adopted in 2006, even though according to the EU Marine Environment Directive there should be a healthy age and size distribution (14, 15). The EU’s Common Fisheries Policy from 2023 also states that fishing must be sustainable and resilient, and that marine ecosystems must be protected and restored (11, 12). The current MSY management of the Baltic Sea does neither consider the environment nor climate change.

Since the uncertainty is large in the data used for the calculations of future stocks, the new quotas must be based on the precautionary principle to help the herring stock to increase to a viable level. From an economic point of view, it is in any case more sound to fish on the interest and not on the capital as is done today. Stockholm University’s Baltic Sea Centre suggests, for example, that the catch quotas for herring should be 50% below the ICES-calculated maximum yield to avoid the risk of overfishing (16). Nevertheless, the EU’s fisheries and rural development ministers decided on maximum catch quotas for 2025 for herring in the entire Baltic Sea. It remains to be seen what they decide in October 2025, for the 2026 quotas.