Synthesis of the landing obligation measures and discard rates for the Mediterranean and the Black Sea

In 2013 the Common Fisheries Policy introduced the landing obligation (LO). The MedBLand study aims at an improved understanding of the management measures put in place in the Mediterranean and Black Sea to implement the LO, to evaluate if discard reduction took place, the main reasons for discarding and to ensure enforcement and control.

The review of documents, mainly in the phasing-in period (2015-2019), combined with interviews to stakeholders and modelling of the discard data from the Data Collection Framework was the integrated methodology applied along the study.

Results highlighted some improvements as well as the need for further developments.