Fisheries committee  Thank you very much indeed, Mr. Chairman, and good morning, everybody. It's a real pleasure to join you via video link from the U.K. I would like to thank the committee for the invitation and time to provide evidence today. As has just been said, my name is Dan Laffoley. I'm mar

Fisheries committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I was just explaining the nature of the IUCN in the global conservation network. The World Commission on Protected Areas is the premier global network of protected area professionals, creating and providing leadership and guidance on protected areas.

Fisheries committee  Yes, I'm just about to conclude. I think the final point I would make is that we need to view MPAs and fisheries management in the context of ocean change and the significant challenges now upon us from ocean warming, acidification, and deoxygenation. My final three points are

Fisheries committee  Thank you very much. Basically, the issue is that there is an interaction, and if we strictly protect areas, allow the ecosystems to recover, and allow higher-level predatory species to recover, those areas are going to be able to counter some of the invasive species better. The

Fisheries committee  We've been taking a close look at this and the relationship between aquaculture and marine protected areas. We believe there are better choices that can be made by the industry in relation to some of the points that Daniel Pauly has already made. Farming higher level species an

Fisheries committee  I can't immediately put it up, but yes we have a clear mission statement. It is effectively about the engagement of civil society in the protection, management, and sustainable use of ecosystems, and about ensuring that a fair proportion of those ecosystems are effectively manage

Fisheries committee  Yes. I think there's a really interesting relationship here. The use of the environment is also dependent on the protection of the environment, and we're actually well out of balance. Dr. Pauly has also described the expansion of fisheries, but as I touched on towards the end o

Fisheries committee  I think the issue is that we're taking too much out of the ocean and not protecting enough of the ocean. I think the reality is about getting a better balance on that and ensuring that we do protect a core element of ecosystems along the way, to enable us to maintain those valu

Fisheries committee  It's multiple things. I sit here looking at my own community of marine-protected-area specialists and governments committed to it, saying that we actually need to do better. We need to do better in the level and scale of management. We know that if we put management in place

Fisheries committee  They represent slightly different approaches in my book. Protected areas that fully protect ecosystems are what we call in situ conservation, which enables you not necessarily to understand all of the linkages in the chain, in the food webs, but that it produces greater resilie

Fisheries committee  It's a simple statistic. It's more complicated under the surface, but this is based on the statistics of the protected areas that Canada has officially supplied to the world database on protected areas. It is an area-based measurement of how much you have currently protected wi

Fisheries committee  No. Basically, one of the statistics that is gathered for the Convention on Biological Diversity is the area of ocean that countries are committing to marine protected areas, and it is that statistic alone. There are, obviously, as we've been talking about in these questions, a

Fisheries committee  First, I'd be very happy to provide that information. An entire initiative, called the science of marine reserves, has analyzed hundreds of peer-reviewed papers. That is one of the bodies of evidence. There was also a paper published very recently in Nature, and that was the one

Fisheries committee  Basically, on the issue of what marine protected areas do when we strictly protect an area of ocean, we find in virtually all cases that we are taking the pressure off and are allowing the ecosystems to recover to a more natural state. The statistics show that on average, we get

Fisheries committee  Yes, I made that comment. I'm just finding my reference to that. This is the Convention on Biological Diversity that countries signed up to. There was a meeting in Aichi, Japan in 2010 to review and renew the targets. That's why they're called the Aichi targets. There are 22 tar