Environmental campaigners are urging the public to get behind the message of hard-hitting new feature film Ocean With David Attenborough, which has just seen its worldwide cinematic release and is also streaming on Disney+, National Geographic and Hulu.
Powerful footage depicting bottom-trawling’s destruction of sea-life and the ocean floor itself previewed in the documentary’s trailer has already been widely viewed online.
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Bottom trawling bulldozes through seabed habitats, stirring up silt, releasing carbon and indiscriminately scooping up marine life, say the film-makers, who hope that by exposing this devastation in high-definition footage, audiences will be inspired to take action.
“It’s hard to imagine a more wasteful way to catch fish,” says the now-99-year-old Attenborough in the film. “Bottom-trawling is still allowed in many so-called Marine Protected Areas [MPAs] worldwide and, perhaps even more astonishingly, it is subsidised by governments. Very few places are safe from this – including almost nowhere in my own country.”
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Lines seen from space
An Oceana UK report found that domestic offshore MPAs alone endured more than 33,000 hours of bottom-trawling in 2023.
Worldwide, an area almost the size of the Amazon rainforest is trawled every year, with the same sections of seabed being trawled repeatedly, according to National Geographic Society’s Pristine Seas, adding that the lines etched into the seafloor from bottom trawling can be seen from space.
A study in Nature found that the annual carbon dioxide emissions released through bottom-trawling are on a similar scale to the annual CO2 from global aviation. Another study in Frontiers In Marine Science concluded that more than half of the CO2 produced by bottom-trawling will reach the Earth’s atmosphere within nine years.
This is reflected in recent research measuring the full economic cost of bottom-trawling in European waters (the EU, UK, Norway and Iceland). This shows that the practice costs society almost 11 billion euros annually. It might create jobs, provide food and bring in revenue but the overall costs far exceed the benefits, according to the report.
In Ocean Attenborough also highlights the plight of species such as sharks, whales and krill, emphasising the need to safeguard nearly a third of the world’s oceans to allow recovery from overfishing and habitat destruction.
However, the film adopts a more positive tone when it highlights success stories in which marine ecosystems have rebounded when given the opportunity through collective action.
Examples include the recovery of kelp forests in California and the resurgence of whale populations following international bans on whaling.
‘Rallying cry’
Greenpeace has described Ocean as a “rallying cry” ahead of the 2025 UN Ocean Conference, which starts in Nice on 9 June. They and other environmental campaigners such as Blue Marine Foundation are calling for governments to show their commitment to eliminating “ecological vandalism” by imposing effective bans on bottom-trawling in MPAs.
Blue Marine says that it has just carried out a poll showing “overwhelming” public support for a trawling ban in MPAs, and hopes that Ocean’s graphic scenes of seabed destruction will help to raise a groundswell of public opinion.
“Now we are faced with one of the greatest ocean opportunities of our time – to ban bottom-trawling in UK MPAs, most of which are still subjected to this destructive fishing method,” says the foundation, which has launched a campaign along with Oceana UK and Only One called #TheBottomLine.
They and Greenpeace UK have already written to UK prime minister Keir Starmer calling for the ratification of the Global Ocean Treaty and a full ban on bottom trawling in UK MPAs. As Attenborough says in the film: “If we save the sea, we save our world.”
Ocean With David Attenborough is a Silverback Films and Open Planet Studios co-production directed by Toby Nowlan, Keith Scholey and Colin Butfield and produced by Nowlan.
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