The massive digital transition in the EU creates an opportunity to reconcile environmental and socio-economic issues in the fisheries and seafood sector. It offers solutions to better manage fisheries’ activities and increase transparency and traceability, and it also plays a key role in the transition towards a truly sustainable blue economy. However, the digital transition in the fisheries sector also comes with significant challenges for some actors, especially small-scale fisheries (SSF).
Modernising SSF is crucial as they represent a large portion of employment in the fisheries sector (80 to 90%), responsible for about half of fish captures, and they are challenged by the evolution of fish stocks and competition with other coastal activities.
The Fish-X Project is a technology and open-source driven project.
It is a 3-year project and is co-funded by the Horizon Europe Programme. The project aims at developing a Fisheries Dataspace (Fish-X), an Insight Platform, and a Traceability Application to support the objectives of Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), EU Green Deal, and Farm to Fork Strategy. It aims at overcoming key sets of challenges including the following points: 1) collection and sharing of data, in particular from small-scale and recreational fisheries; and 2) accessing, managing, and utilising data to strengthen the monitoring and control as well as the sustainability of EU fisheries.
