CONSERVATION NEWS

What are marine protected areas for? What can and could

they achieve? By Dr Jean-Luc Solandt, Principal Specialist, Marine Protected Areas, Marine Conservation Society UK

Do you think our seas are degraded? Do you think the amount of sh in the seas should be greater? Do you feel that the sea oor deserves a right to be rich in biodiversity, species and habitats ourishing with life abounding around them? Sadly, our seas are denuded compared to pre-industrial times, with aspects of species richness, important habitats for sh and juvenile sh hugely degraded since before the advent of industrial exploitation of marine resources, and intensive land and coastal development. We’ve pumped tonnes of nutrient-rich waters from upland rivers into our estuaries, a ecting the health of many sh nurseries. We’ve allowed our shallow seas to be dredged, whilst large trawlers operate day and night in our o shore banks, catching sh and shell sh. How do we pare back from the collateral damage from these activities that we are so accustomed to in our daily economies?

In order to recover our seas, Ireland is taking on the cause to create nationally designated ‘Marine Protected Areas’. But be careful. We have them in the UK already and they are largely useless. Here’s why…….

Let’s start with a de nition: Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) de ne an area of ocean or coastline for protection of one or more habitats or species. at is a pretty broad de nition. e public thinks of these as places where all things are ‘protected’ from being taken ( shed or mined), dumped on (e.g. waste material from ports), and dredged (from shing operations such as scalloping, or for ‘aggregates’ – that’s those lovely pebbles for your patio). Unfortunately there are no

places that – by law – are protected in this way in all of Ireland. In England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, there are about 20 square kilometres. It’s not really enough is it?

On the other hand, there are some places where the MPA laws have blocked developments such as kelp harvesting in Bantry Bay, port development in the Solent and Falmouth, the dumping of ‘dredge spoil’ in south-west Cornwall, and for the protection of fish habitats off Sussex. In other isolated cases there have been bans on fishing (usually using the most damaging fishing technique – scallop dredging) in Scottish sea lochs, Falmouth, Plymouth and Welsh MPAs. All progress you’d say. But these are isolated cases, each one requiring a battle often initiated by NGOs or local groups, rather than by the due checks and balances that should be there within internal government processes and structures. I lament the lack of power that Natural England, National Resources Wales, and Scottish Natural Heritage have in holding industry at bay. They regularly feel eviscerated in their ‘conservation advice’ (individuals say this whilst their paymasters cannot or will not). Often their advice is overly complex about the ability of an activity to comprise the ‘health’ of an MPA.

Another worrying point is that in most circumstances our nature conservation advisors are dealing with a severely affected baseline condition of MPAs at the time they were designated. If MPAs were to have been designated before the industrial revolution, and the advent of nearshore trawling before the 1980s (thank you Margaret Thatcher), then setting limits on activities would have been much more aligned with public perceptions of ‘protection’. Sadly, as most habitats are now degraded, it offers an excuse in many MPAs to allow the damage to continue – because the seabed is so sparsely populated.

Why then do we call large parts of our seas MPAs if they aren’t there to ‘recover’ our seas? Well, it’s because it’s a lie – a monumental lie of massive political greenwashing proportions. They are – in the majority of cases - nothing of the sort (protected that is). Politicians realised about a decade ago that they could actually designate these areas, but either create laws to be equivocal about the levels of protection of the ‘sites’, tell the public that ‘things in them aren’t damaged, so we don’t have to restrict ‘activities’, or their regulators simply ignore the laws that govern them (for example by allowing terrible leaching of nutrient rich waters from upland farming, or ignoring incidences of scallop dredging in vulnerable seafloor habitats because fishing boats aren’t effectively ‘tracked’ even though we could use available ‘remote’ technologies to do so).

So what can be done to make MPAs go from ‘lines on maps’ to actually recovering (what we see as) our degraded seas?

MCS (the Marine Conservation Society) – the organisation I work for – allowed me to undertake a 15-year campaign to make MPAs actually deliver for wildlife, species, habitats, and essentially people. People need to know that protecting just bits or parts of MPAs (for example the parts the dredgers and trawlers can’t get to) is nonsense. MPAs need to allow the seabed to recover. Bottom trawling in ‘parts’ of MPAs that ‘aren’t sensitive’ to abrasion is still allowed to continue. We have fought for many years to change this, working with scientists looking at a ‘whole site’ management approach. This is necessary for fish, habitats that support fish (e.g. seagrass, corals, sponges, byrozoans), scallop beds, cobble and boulder reef, and mud grounds to ALL be protected. This has been reported as ‘good’ for important species like cod, whiting and haddock in Scotland by academics from the Universities of Glasgow and York. Similarly, commercial species of fish were more prevalent in an MPA in Lyme Bay (southern England) where whole mosaics of different habitats were protected from the trawlers and dredgers. We’ve just published research from seven years of monitoring of a seabed protected from trawling near to Plymouth (the Eddystone) that offers the chance for regrowth of long-lived, slowgrowing lifeforms on the seabed. None of this is rocket science, but it is important.

Another recent report by New Economics Foundation commissioned by the EU-wide umbrella NGO Seas at Risk illustrated a simple fact. If the ‘whole site approach’ was offered to all Europe’s MPAs (i.e. if there was an immediate ban on bottom trawling in them), then there would be a windfall of recovery of services that the seas provide us for free. Services such as water filtration, nutrient absorption, sediment stability (meaning less damage from storm erosion), protection of habitats important for nursery stages of fish, and locking down carbon into sediments (like peat bogs in our soils) would all recover.

The conclusion is simple. Why not go the whole hog with MPAs? There’s a biodiversity crisis. We need to control the most damaging activities (mostly fishing in offshore waters) to provide benefits for us all. The whole site approach to managing MPAs should be an obvious option with the environmental crisis we see today. It’s the least the public deserves. Please stop lying to us about MPAs, and start delivering for society and wildlife.

By Jacek Matysiak.

Jean-Luc works with UK and EU NGOs, lawyers, regulators and academics to make MPAs help both people and wildlife, as well as understanding and recording their benefits.

Ocean action is climate action!

By Regina Classen

And never has that been more clear than now: Irish scientists are finally collecting data on the amount of carbon stored within ocean sediments and habitats and we can now estimate what it would mean if this carbon was to enter the atmosphere following human disturbance. Initial studies have quoted some striking numbers for coastal and near-shore habitats. Saltmarshes, for example, have similar carbon densities to low-lying blanket bogs. Irish saltmarshes are estimated to store 8.8 million tonnes (Mt) of carbon. If these habitats were destroyed, it would result in the release of 32 Mt CO2e, equivalent to the annual emissions of 17 million cars. Seagrasses, marine flowering plants that form beautiful bright green meadows in Ireland’s bays, are estimated to sequester 10,000 tonnes of carbon each year, which is equivalent to growing 600,000 tree seedlings for 10 years. Other carbon-rich habitats include maërl, an extremely slowgrowing corraline algae that forms dense beds on the seafloor, trapping sediment and providing an important habitat to countless organisms. These habitats store around 1.1 Mt C in Ireland. Phytoplankton, unicellular organisms that produce energy through photosynthesis, cover large parts of the Irish marine territory. These organisms are estimated to draw down 7.1 Mt of carbon per year in Ireland alone. Part of this phytoplankton sinks to the seafloor after it dies, along with the carbon stored within it. This means the ocean floor, including deep sea sediments, are one of the world’s most significant carbon stores. Studies on the impact of bottom trawling, where fishing gear comes into contact with the seafloor, are only now beginning to investigate whether this activity causes the stored seafloor carbon to re-enter the atmosphere. Initial studies suggest that bottom trawling may be as impactful as the entire aviation industry. We therefore called on the Irish government to take action for our ocean during COP 26, because protection of our vulnerable marine ecosystems is also climate action. Seagrasses, for example, are currently facing steep declines around our coasts, while over 50% of the Celtic Sea and 28% of the Irish Sea seafloor is trawled each year. We clearly must take better care of our seas - for climate, nature and people.