ETL’s technology development approach addresses governance failings in UK fishery

Posted on Tuesday 11 November 2025

After the catastrophic die-back of crustaceans along the Yorkshire coast during 2021, it has become clear that there is an absence of systematic monitoring of water quality in this internationally important crab and lobster fishing ground. For local fishers’, their experience of the die-back has reinforced a sense of injustice that had accumulated over decades in which policy and regulation has done little to support increasingly precarious livelihoods and has neglected local knowledge in the governance of marine environments. 

In this new project, funded by the EPSRC via the Ecological Citizens network, we propose that water quality monitoring technology has the potential to drive environmental justice. However, we recognise that the use of data and devices in environmental monitoring routinely neglects local knowledge and reinforces power hierarchies, even when devices are deployed by local communities. This deepening of injustice arises from technological solutions that embed the norms, perspectives and bureaucratic priorities of authority, implicitly marginalising the knowledge and interests of those who live and work in the environment.

However, technology designed with marginalised groups has the potential to disrupt power relations and the persistent environmental injustices that they sustain. In this project, we use this insight to help place fishers’ knowledge and experience at the heart of a new environmental monitoring and decision-making framework for the Yorkshire coast.