Thank you for inviting me to speak today.
I would like to talk briefly of my concerns for the fishery and developing wind farm industries of the Atlantic.
First, to briefly introduce myself, I'm a marine biologist and fisheries oceanographer. Born in Nova Scotia, I began working on the coastal fisheries at age 18 for DFO Canada.
I studied the effects of the first tidal power plant in Annapolis Royal on river herring populations for my master's thesis at Acadia University. I examined scallop ecology for my Ph.D. at Université Laval and estimated the impact of the Exxon Valdez oil spill on the Prince William Sound herring fishery at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
For the past 25 years, I have worked on the sea scallop fishery of New England and Canada using an underwater drop camera to film 70,000 square kilometres of sea floor, counting the scallops and examining their habitat. I am the dean of the school for marine science and technology at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, which is in New Bedford, the number one fishing port in the United States. Our school focuses on interdisciplinary applied marine science and the development of innovative technologies.
The ocean faces severe threats from climate change, ocean acidification, land-based runoff, pollution and poor management of resources. Alternative energy sources are key to addressing several of these threats. Wind farms and fisheries both harvest renewable, sustainable energy.
The enthusiastic development of offshore wind will occur primarily on continental shelves, and as such, the overlap between wind farms and fisheries is inevitable. The U.S. plans to increase its offshore wind production by 79% between 2020 and 2030, and bids for lease areas have been in the billions of dollars. In 2021, there were 33 companies or call areas on the continental shelf of the east coast.
Given the structural requirements of offshore wind coupled with the huge financial investments backed by government mandates to replace emissions with renewable energy, fishing industries will need to adapt. The ability of fisheries to harvest within or next to these wind farms depends on the types of fisheries, weather conditions, the spacing and design of the turbine array, turbine foundation structure and the degree to which the wind farm development influences the fish and invertebrate communities. The wind farm industry should recognize and minimize these effects.
The proposed wind farms along the Atlantic coast are huge. The sea floor in these areas is similar, and they support a marine ecosystem based mostly on mud, sand and some gravel. Developing the wind farms will add hard structure, thousands of small islands, throughout these areas, islands that pull energy out of the system. This will change the environment: the sea floor makeup, the current structure, the acoustics both during construction and operation, and the electromagnetic field. All these will impact the associated flora and fauna of the areas. This will happen on the scales of the individual turbine, which is centimetres to kilometres; the wind farm fields, from tens to hundreds of kilometres; and the entire eastern seaboard. It will affect the fisheries. Some will be able to harvest within the wind farms; some will not. All will have to navigate through or around them.
Right now, some wind farms are beginning to monitor the marine environment and the animals associated with them, but it is a disjointed effort. There is no overall framework to coordinate the different scientific research or push for broader ecosystem understanding.
I suggest that a framework that categorizes information about the ecology, economics and social and institutional effects of each of these two industries, with appropriate spatial and temporal scales, is key to reducing conflict and improving co-operation.
Everyone wants to develop sustainable energy, but you do not want to replace one form of sustainable energy harvest with another. Rather, you want to optimize both and reduce our dependency on non-renewable resources. These are billion-dollar developments, the largest in the world, and there should be a similar effort towards understanding the effects, both positive and negative, on the ecosystem and on our coastal communities.
Thank you very much.