Missing Salmon Alliance Goes from Strength to Strength as Two New Organisations Join
The Missing Salmon Alliance is delighted to welcome two new members, Fisheries Management Scotland and The Rivers Trust.
In 2019 a group of conservation focused organisations came together to drive action and save our wild Atlantic salmon from extinction by combining expertise, coordinating activities and advocating effective management solutions.
The three existing organisations, The Atlantic Salmon Trust, the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust, and the Angling Trust, have now been joined by Fisheries Management Scotland and The Rivers Trust. As new members both organisations will bring their expertise and experience to the fight to save the Atlantic Salmon. The wild Atlantic salmon is in crisis. The number of salmon returning to their spawning grounds has fallen dramatically since the 1970s and wild Atlantic salmon could be lost from many of our rivers within our lifetime if we do not act now. Since the 1970’s, based on the abundance of adults returning to coastal waters, large salmon have declined by between 54-88% whilst smaller salmon (grilse) have declined between 40-66%.
“We are delighted to welcome both Fisheries Management Scotland and the Rivers Trust to the Missing Salmon Alliance. Both bring unique experience, perspective and expertise that will complement the skills and knowledge of the three existing members in taking forward urgent action to stop and then reverse the decline in Atlantic salmon.”
“We are delighted to join the Missing Salmon Alliance and contribute to this important initiative. Our wild salmon are reaching crisis point, and it is vital that we work in a coordinated manner across the UK to help wild salmon survive and thrive in our rivers and seas. As the representative body for Scotland’s district salmon fishery boards and fisheries trusts we look forward to playing a key role in partnership with the members of the Alliance. Our members, working with a range of key stakeholders, are already delivering essential work to protect and enhance salmon in Scotland, but through the Missing Salmon Alliance our collective capacity to address the pressures which wild salmon face will be significantly enhanced”
“The decline in wild salmon populations should be of grave concern to everyone and it is a grim indicator of the impact that humans have had on the natural world. The Rivers Trust is delighted to join this alliance of organisations that have committed to gathering a robust evidence base about the principal causes of this decline to support advocacy and management decisions. Our member Rivers Trusts have a wealth of information to contribute to the alliance and they are carrying out an increasingly wide range of projects to address water quality and quantity issues, remove barriers to migration and restore natural habitats in the freshwater environment”
As an Alliance of five organisations, we will build on the existing work of our partners and maximise our impact by taking a coordinated approach and vital action in order to halt and reverse the decline of wild Atlantic salmon.
The goal of the Missing Salmon Alliance is to build an evidence-base to influence national and international decision-makers to regulate activities that adversely impact wild Atlantic salmon.
The Missing Salmon Alliance
The MSA is comprised of the following members:
Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust, Atlantic Salmon Trust, and the Angling Trust with Fish Legal
https://www.missingsalmonalliance.org