An alliance to save salmon

What must be done to halt the alarming decline in our wild salmon? Five leading conservation bodies are pooling their knowledge to find the answers, as Mark Bilsby explains

- Mark Bilsby

IT is a human condition to hark back to halcyon days when catches of salmon were bountiful, whether that was in the 1960s, ’70s or even the Noughties. The issue is that salmon are like the weather, you get good years and bad years. To get an overview of what is actually happening you need to step back from the riverbank and look at the Atlantic. The clear view from around the north Atlantic, wherever salmon roam, is that from the mid-1980s – when figures were first collected from all countries – there were between eight and 10 million salmon at sea; today, that figure is between two and three million, with no indication that the decline is slowing.

So do we give up? The answer must surely be a resounding no. Instead, we need to listen to the message that the salmon are telling us: there is something wrong with our rivers and seas, otherwise this iconic fish would be thriving.

If The Field surveyed its readers to find out what they thought was causing the decline in salmon, the range of answers would be staggering. The key is that there is not just one problem but rather a host of pressures combining to cause this relentless decline in wild salmon stocks. We need to pick these problems apart, find out which ones are truly causing the issue and focus on managing the ones we can.