Thank you very much for the invitation to speak to you. I appreciate that, following Isabelle Côté's presentation, there's a lot that I don't need to say now, which is always convenient.
I know that in previous evidence you have heard some fairly glowing remarks about the English marine protected area network and how we've gone ahead and protected more than 20% of our seas in about six years or so. I think this is from Linda Nowlan, who is from the West Coast Environmental Law Association.
Let me just put a slightly different complexion on the experience of England so far. I might title this, “How not to build a national network of marine protected areas”. I have to say, I have skin in this game, in that I was part of a science advisory group that was helping to oversee the process. I also provided advice on design criteria.
To start at the beginning, we created a marine act and passed that in 2009, enabling us to create a national network of marine protected areas; so far, so good. Then the government's agencies, the U.K. equivalent of DFO put together a “cookbook” on how to establish or design a network of marine protected areas. The advice was based on very good science, and if you follow the recipe in this cookbook, then you're going to come up with a network that covers the right habitats to the right degree, and puts them in big enough marine protected areas, close enough that they are well connected.
Then, taking good advice that stakeholders should be a key part of the process of establishing protected areas, the government set up four stakeholder bodies with broad participation, and asked them to meet a number of times over two years to design a network according to these criteria.
The first big mistake was to leave fish out of MPAs. These MPAs then suddenly became focused on seabed habitats only. The argument was—and this was from the fishing organizations—that because fish move around and things in the water column move around, they can't be protected using MPAs. This flies in the face of all of the evidence that Isabelle has already talked to you about and that I'm sure previous speakers have talked to you about, but this was the process that we had then.
The next thing that really was a departure from common sense was to ignore historical evidence of change in ecosystems around the U.K. We took the present situation and asked, “What's it like now?” and set our conservation objectives on the basis of what things were like at that moment. One of the paradoxes of this is that if you like the look of what you have now, then you'll be fine protecting it from essentially nothing, because existing activities are obviously compatible with nature conservation.
For 90% of the different habitats that were identified and made part of this process, the conservation objective set was to maintain the habitat in the present condition; only 10% of the habitats were restored. This ignored historical evidence that showed that many fish species had declined by greater than 95% in abundance over the last hundred years or so, and that much of the seabed habitat of complex invertebrate structures had been swept away by bottom trawls and dredges. That was another big mistake.
Once the stakeholder groups gave their advice, that advice was checked by the science advisory panel and was found to be good. The designs that they came up with would achieve almost all of the objectives and criteria. That was then passed on to the minister.
If you want to build on a process of trust and goodwill, you don't then ignore what your stakeholders say and consult on only a minority of the protected areas that were being recommended. As soon as you do that, you no longer have a network of protected areas, so it begs the question why you went to such elaborate lengths to put together these design criteria, if in the end all you were going to do was cherry-pick a few sites.
The other thing the minister did—and this was post hoc—was to say, “Although we said we want you to work on best available evidence, now we want best evidence.” Again, there is a strong suspicion that this was because of pressure from the fishing industry coming after the process and saying, “Sorry, we're not going to go with this, and we want you to whittle down the number of protected areas that are going to be established.”
Another problem, another flaw, is that instead of settling on a number of simple marine protected area types that have a particular type of protection—for example, completely no take in one type, and exclusion of mobile fishing gear like bottom trawls and dredges in another type—the government, in its wisdom, decided that it would set management objectives habitat by habitat. Let's say you have a marine protected area with 10 different habitats. That means you have to have 10 different kinds of management going on in the protected area, which swiftly makes it completely impossible to implement as a practical approach.
Another thing that happened at this stage was that 65 no-take zones were dropped from the plan, all of them. There is not a single proposed no-take marine protected area left in the U.K. national plan at the moment, so we are in a position of having probably the world's most elaborate network of paper parks at the moment. Since the establishment of these protected areas—and I'm putting “protected areas” in inverted commas—no new management has been applied to any of them.
Although it looks good on paper—there are now 50 marine protected areas around England, for example, with 30 around Scotland—the English ones are not worth anything. They're completely paper parks. The Scottish ones go a bit further towards genuine protection. There is a significant area of those that is protected from mobile fishing gear, but again very little of that is actually no take, which is the gold standard of protection and which science says will deliver the highest level of benefits.
We have many pitfalls, and I think negative role models are a good thing for people to learn from, as are positive role models.
I'd just like to make one final comment on the coverage of marine protected areas. I authored a study, probably one of the ones Isabelle was referring to, on how much of the sea you need to protect. All of her comments are absolutely right. Ten per cent is an unashamedly political target for the establishment of MPAs. It's more than nothing, and it's not so bold that it's unlikely ever to be achieved, but it is a political target.
If you want to actually ramp up towards having a real, genuine, biological benefit that is going to be fish in the bank, for example, that will sustain fisheries, and that will provide resilience against global change, you need much more than that. I would say that the studies are showing that we need in excess of 30%, so a target of 30% by 2020 is now being promoted by environmental organizations. I'm fully behind that. Ten per cent by 2020 is a waypoint, on the way towards effective ocean governance and protection. We really need to be moving in the direction of 30%, and even potentially higher than that. But we need to do it in an adaptive way as we're going beyond these higher values.
That's fully justified, and what is remarkable is that we ever considered that we could do very much at all with 10%. It's really at the level of tokenism at that sort of protective stage. We need to get beyond that to make ocean management effective.
Thank you.