To assess the likely economic outcomes to fishing fleets of the Landing Obligation (LO), bioeconomic models covering seven European fisheries, ranging from the North East Atlantic to the Mediterranean, have been applied to estimate the economic performance of fleets before and after implementing the LO. Even with mitigation strategies and/or quota trade in place, most of the analysed fisheries are worse off under the LO than what could be expected if the LO was not implemented.

Regarding the potential impact of the policy on marine ecosystems, foodweb models have been applied in several regions; Ecosystem models predicted that discards contributed very little to the diet of scavengers at a regional scale. A reduction in discards through the Landing Obligation may therefore affect populations for a few species in some areas, but generally this is unlikely to be the case. But it is challenging to identify how important discards might be to scavengers, as they are taxonomically diverse and vary in the role they play in scavenging interactions.