Screening the Cormorant Conflict on the European Level

Abstract

The great cormorant has fully recovered from an endangered status in the 1980s and is now present throughout Europe. Eating fish, this recovery is perceived as a danger by fishermen and anglers. The existing national or regional action or management plans are mostly ineffective due to the high mobility and numbers of the bird. At first sight astonishingly, no such plan exists at the European level. The reasons for this absence, identified through analyzing documents and interviews, are the following: value disagreement, different views on the necessity of such a plan, fear of lost autonomy, different views on species protection, and difficulties of integrating different interests. Steps are proposed how such plan could be achieved, and the final section describes the political development after the first publication of this analysis.