How to save over £3bn? Save our seas
4 min read
The new Secretary of State for Environment Emma Reynolds MP must be congratulated: she is taking on a pivotal role, at a pivotal time in history.
She is tasked with nature restoration in one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, at the height of the global biodiversity crisis. Her actions will be remembered.
The still-sparkling jewel in the UK’s fading natural riches is our ocean. Not only are the UK’s waters are home to a wealth of wildlife that is internationally important, they provide vital livelihoods to our coastal communities.
Right now, however, UK marine habitats and the sea life they support are in a woeful state. Battling sewage pollution, oil spills and overfishing, a grand total of two out of 15 key indicators of healthy seas have been met in UK waters, a full five years after missing the legal deadline.
Despite these sorry statistics, the government has just rejected a recommendation from the Environmental Audit Committee that marine protected areas should be free of destructive bottom-trawl fishing.
This lack of any real protection for so-called protected areas is presumably meant to be framed as ‘pro-growth’: but this is a dangerous fallacy. If we take pro-growth to mean ‘pro-stable livelihoods’, rather than ‘pro short-term profits for large corporations’, the wrongheadedness is immediately clear.
Our seas are not farmland – we don’t plant seeds and watch them grow, instead, when we fish at sea we are part of a wild ecosystem – we catch fish, and we do not replace them. There is nothing wrong with that – when done fairly and sustainably – but if all we do is take, we must make space for regeneration. We must leave undisturbed sandy beds, deep-water reefs, and kelp forests as vital spawning grounds, fish nurseries, and essential habitat. If we do not, we undermine our own livelihoods, and we put our own future at risk, as well as that of our seas.
The economics of this is borne out by hard numbers, published by the government itself. Right now, a public consultation is open over plans to ban bottom trawling in around 30,000 km2 of sea bed, spanning 41 marine protected areas. If this goes ahead, the government estimates a net financial benefit, after all implementation and other costs, of £3.1bn over 20 years. Pro-growth indeed.
These benefits come from boosted fish populations, nutrient cycling, carbon storage and climate regulation, all adding up. UK seabed habitats could capture almost three times the amount sequestered by our nation’s forests, up to 13m tonnes of organic carbon every single year. The abundance of commercially caught fish species increased by a jaw-dropping 370 per cent in the decade after a bottom trawling ban came into force in Lyme Bay.
When considering these issues, the Secretary of State should also know that protection for these marine wildlife havens has the strong backing of the UK public. A total of 80 per cent of adults support a ban on bottom trawling across all marine protected areas in the UK, a recent poll showed, across both inland and coastal constituencies. Two thirds of those polled thought mistakenly – but understandably – that it was already banned.
The Secretary of State will have hard decisions ahead, but this is not one of them. Safeguarding space for UK seas to thrive makes sense for our economy, our wildlife and our communities. The current consultation makes a good proposal, within its limited scope, and the government must ensure it is not watered down at the last minute. But it must also look beyond it, to a future where thriving seas can nourish both people and planet, and the growth we strive for is built for the future, on a foundation of evidence, sustainability, resilience, fairness, and respect.
Baroness Jones is a Green Party peer and Hugo Tagholm is executive director and vice- president of Oceana in the UK
