Norwegian Wild Salmon Critically Endangered

This year’s salmon fishing season in Norway started on 1 June, but it has not been quite the same as usual because wild salmon are disappearing from Norwegian rivers. At a third of all fishing spots, there are so few salmon that fishing will remain closed for the entire season.

– It has never been worse,’ says Torbjørn Forseth, senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research and chairman of the Scientific Council, to DN (Dagens Næringsliv).

– Last year, we had the lowest salmon migration to rivers ever recorded, many waterways were closed, catches were the lowest in history, and a growing number of rivers lack a sustainable surplus for fishing.

Existential crisis

Sport fishermen in Norway says it’s even worse:

– We are now facing an existential crisis for wild salmon, and politicians do not seem to realise the seriousness of the situation. Politicians must take action before it is too late, says Torfinn Evensen, secretary general of Norske Lakseelver, on the association’s website.

In the 1980s, over a million salmon swam up the Norwegian rivers to spawn, but last year there were only 323,000. This can be compared to the number of salmon in salmon farms, where there can be 200,000 salmons in a single cage.

Threats from many directions

There are many threats to wild salmon, such as escaped farmed salmon, large numbers of salmon lice, hydroelectric power regulations, alien species such as the humpback salmon, and, on top of that, climate change.

Wild salmon is also threatened in Sweden. This year, SLU sounded the alarm about sharply declining stocks in the Säveån river, among other places. There, Sportfiskarna and Säveåns nedre FVOF have introduced new, severely restricted rules for salmon fishing to give wild salmon a chance to survive.