WEDNESDAY 4 JULY 2007

DR SHARON THOMPSON, DR MALCOLM VINCENT, PROFESSOR IAN BOYD AND DR TOM TEW

  Q380  Chairman: You sound like a politician!

  Dr Tew: In terms of English and UK approaches, the 2005 State of the Seas report Charting Progress was almost entirely unable to put any kind of measures on any of the things that you would want to use as indicators. I think that it is a strong indicator of the paucity of data out there at a national level.

  Q381  Dr Harris: I want to ask you about issues to do with conservation, SACs, planned SACs and the planned MPAs and under the new Bill. We have heard in evidence concerns that the research base to accurately allocate criteria to develop these areas is not adequate. Who is responsible for doing the research required or judging whether it is sufficient and is the system working well heading towards the proposals for MPAs and SACs?

  Dr Tew: For SACs, the duty is upon the Government to designate these sites under European legislation and it is a government responsibility. There is good news here because the Government have recently set aside considerable funding for SAC survey particularly for reefs and sandbanks. So, it is not all good news but the Government are responding to the need for more information. It is the forward look in terms of the MPAs which is the more worrying with no, as we have just said, coordinated or integrated view on habitats and ecosystems offshore.

  Dr Vincent: There are ways of coping. There is a tendency to translate practices on land to sea in terms of the Government's thinking about the sorts of data that you need. As Professor Boyd has said, in actual fact, that is unreasonable in many respects. It may be that we have to change the way that we think and be prepared to accept rather lesser data in support of measures at sea than on land. We have just got ourselves into a sort of mindset about the sea. In relation to MPAs, it is possible for us to use the geophysical data to actually pinpoint probable areas that are likely to be rich in biodiversity terms and then target those for survey. So, we do not necessarily have to survey the entire continental shelf and adjacent waters in order to be able to come up with a suite of ecologically-coherent sites. There are other ways of doing it.

  Dr Tew: I think that we might compare ourselves with the Irish who have just launched a £70 million survey over ten years to provide exactly the kind of information which they need and again the point is, if there is not duty to come up with MPAs in the Bill, this is exactly the kind of issue which will again confound the problem and it is why we only have one marine nature reserve in England after 26 years.

  Dr Thompson: I agree with everything that has been said before. One of the areas that we focus on is the SPAs for seabirds and this is an area where we have long been saying that the data is old and there are gaps in it, that it needs to be updated and that there needs to be a systematic survey to update that to get us to the next stage to be able to designate those sites. As well as designating sites so that they protect the biodiversity interest, I think that it cuts across to the issue that was brought up before in relation to the activities that take place at sea. If we do not know where the important sites are, every time an activity takes place, whether it be considered good renewable energy or something bad, it is always going to run into the problem of, is this site important for biodiversity or not? You are reaching that conflict on a site-by-site basis rather than having a better overview of what is happening at sea.

  Q382  Dr Harris: You are saying that there are gaps in the knowledge base for this but who is responsible for filling that? You said in your earlier answer that the Government have a role but the Government would say that there are research councils and it is for them to decide how to spend their money to this aim.

  Dr Thompson: I think that something on such a strategic level is going to benefit UK industry as well as meeting our national energy/national conservation objectives. It needs some strategic lead at least from the Government. We have had a series of strategic environmental assessments for offshore oil and gas in particular which have been surveying the whole of the UK continental shelf, but they have tended to focus on very specific issues that will, I suppose, bring the benefits for that industry itself, particularly oil and gas, and that started back in 1999 and I think that probably all of us there said that we needed more of the biological/biodiversity information as well. However, funds get prioritised and we feel that maybe there should be more funds put towards the conservation element of where we are actually going to move forward in that.

  Q383  Dr Harris: Is it the words "long term" that scare funders because it has to be a commitment to the collection of long-term datasets or is it actual research into specific species that is missing from the system in order to designate these areas or both?

  Dr Thompson: I am not entirely sure. Maybe more from a personal point of view, I would say that the marine environment is a new frontier that has been forgotten until now and we are only beginning to really look into it and hopefully, as more activities do take place there, people will understand the issues more and more funds should be put towards it.

  Q384  Dr Harris: I am trying to work out what is stopping this happening.

  Dr Vincent: Could I turn the question back and say that there is a certain lack of clarity, at least I am not very clear, as to which minister is responsible for marine science in the sense that the portfolio seems to shift backwards and forwards between the Defra Minister and what was the Office of Science and Innovation and it is not clear to us who in fact the relevant marine science minister is. If that could be clarified, then their responsibility could be to address cross-governmental objectives which would actually help direct the future marine science funding into those areas in order to meet those objectives and I think that there is a lack of clarity there.

  Professor Boyd: I think that there are probably two different issues being confused here in terms of the science delivery. There is a process of documentation of distribution and abundance of biodiversity to put it very broadly, but there is also the process of understanding why it is there and how it changes. In other words, it is the underlying mechanisms. Those two aspects are often delivered from two different directions. The research councils tend to deal with process, why is it there and how is it changing. The government departments have more traditionally dealt with the documentation process/monitoring process. Of course they are not mutually exclusive, but I do think that we need to join the two up an awful lot better than we have in the past because the reasons why everything is there are very important to being able to predict what the effects of climate change might be for example, or the introduction of turbines or whatever it might be. So, there are those two mechanisms and I think that they are dealt with quite differently within—

  Q385  Chairman: I thought the Interagency Committee for Marine Science and Technology did all that. I thought that it was their job and then to advise the Government accordingly.

  Professor Boyd: I think that is—

  Q386  Chairman: It has been a huge success since 1990.

  Professor Boyd: It is a job that they are trying to do. I am not directly involved with IACMST except as a member of a subcommittee on marine noise and I think that works very well. So, from my perspective, that works well. In other parts of it, I do not see the joined-up-ness happening.

  Q387  Dr Harris: Finally on the issue of conservation, unless anyone has a burning comment to make, if we take mammals, they are generally considered to be the best study of species in the marine environment. As far as you are concerned, are there still gaps that need to be filled before we can designate sites for conservation? There will always be some but are there significant gaps?

  Professor Boyd: Some species of marine mammals are very well studied but some are almost not known to us at all. There may in fact be some species out there that we do not know exist yet.

  Q388  Dr Harris: The Loch Ness Monster, for example?

  Professor Boyd: That would be a reptile, it would not be a mammal!

  Q389  Dr Harris: You know that!

  Professor Boyd: I think that there is a lot more that needs to be done even for marine mammals and that there are major gaps there, as I have indicated. In my response on the turbine issue, we were unable from first principles to be able to provide a coherent answer to that question and that reflects a lack of basic understanding of how these animals operate on small scales within the marine environment.

  Dr Tew: I think that we are searching for a national framework. A national marine policy statement is what is promised in the Bill that provides an overview. The marine environment has to provide us with so much: it has to provide us with renewables and fish and biodiversity. Where is the balance between the Blue Sky research in the deep sea and the applied research in near shore? Who sets the framework for that?

  Q390  Chairman: Oceans 2025 has done it.

  Dr Tew: Oceans 2025 was an excellent start as a NERC initiative but again it failed to deal with the bigger picture. In response to Dr Turner, industry collects fantastic data but it is not coordinated. We are reactively dealing with each case on a case-by-case basis and that is why it takes time to deal with it. There is no proactive integration.

  Dr Thompson: You were asking about conservation and I think we have all admitted that there are gaps in the data. At the same time, I think we would also caution about not protecting anything or putting any management tools in place until we know everything because we are never going to know everything.

  Chairman: We mentioned the marine protected areas earlier and I know that Dr Turner has some questions around that.

  Q391  Dr Turner: It seems clear to me from your evidence so far that if you were asked to set out a designated marine protected areas as will undoubtedly come assuming that the Bill comes as we expect, you do not have the knowledge base to be able to say where they should be and I also get the feeling that you see a conflict between marine protected areas and use of offshore regions for energy production. I put it to you that in fact there could be a synergy there because you prohibit all sorts of damaging activities, notably fishing. How would you people like to see the network of such areas set out? How would you go about it?

  Dr Vincent: I do not think that we need to have comprehensive knowledge in order to deliver that objective. I think that we can do it. I think that we have sufficient information to be able to identify broad scale habitats across the continental shelf and adjacent waters on the basis of this type of the seabed. I think that we can then match that information with available information on human use of the area because human use of the area, for example trawling, will give us an indication of how damaged it is likely to have been. We can then select areas from those kinds of information which will give us a representative sample of protected areas of the different habitat types which have had relatively little disturbance and then we can focus survey over the next ten years to identify sites from that sample. I think that it is perfectly achievable within the next 10 years.

  Q392  Dr Turner: Do you want to wait ten years?

  Dr Vincent: It can be done progressively over the period of ten years. The point about particularly representative types of habitat is that they do not have to be the best examples, they just have to be good undamaged examples and they will maintain characteristic biodiversity. Provided that they are protected and provided that they are not damaged to start with and providing that you have a suite of different types of them relatively close to each other so that they are not too far apart and can support each other, then that will do the job.

  Q393  Dr Turner: There are a number of provisions in that answer. Do you actually believe that there are areas of the seabed in our offshore waters that have not been damaged?

  Dr Vincent: That is an unknowable thing. What we can identify are areas that we know are being relatively intensively fished and we can probably set those to one side. So, we can look at the remainder and select from those and investigate those.

  Professor Boyd: I would like to respond to that. I think that there are quite significant areas which are undamaged. Fishing tends to go to the very traditional areas and some recent surveys, for example, in the sea of the Hebrides have suggested that there are some quite pristine areas there—these surveys have been carried by the Scottish Association for Marine Science—and I would expect that that might happen in other areas. If we were to be able to survey the shelf seas appropriately, I think that we would find pristine areas.

  Dr Thompson: I also think that there is an issue there. There are some areas, particularly around the coast, where we could probably go out tomorrow and say, "We think that there are important species or habitats here and they could do with protection", but the burden of proof is to prove scientifically that this site requires to be protected. That is why we keep coming back to the science. You could go out and say, "We will protect a couple of sites and see how it goes", but we are not in the situation of being allowed to take that approach which is why we keep coming back to the science.

  Q394  Dr Turner: What sort of area of our offshore waters would you expect to be covered by MPAs because obviously the sea moves, the fish move, mammals move, everything moves? How big would you want an MPA to be? What percentage of our inshore waters do you think should be covered should be covered from there? Should we take Evan's favoured line of precautionary principle and say that, until we know more, we should protect more?

  Dr Thompson: I quite like that one! I think that going down the line of percentages can be quite dangerous because we are trying to set the criteria of how much needs to be protected before we know what needs to be protected and where and how much of it we have. I know that there are lots of percentages flying about. I think that what we need to do is to protect enough to meet our conservation objectives and make sure that we maintain functioning ecosystems that deliver those services that we get from it, whether it be food or climate regulation.

  Q395  Dr Turner: We legislators are going to have to move before you have all that data and it will take years to get all that data. We are going to have to set out a map and say, "That is it" in about a year's time.

  Dr Thompson: I think as legislators we are asking you to put the legislative tools in place that will deliver that and then we should progressively put sites in place. As a conservation NGO, we want it faster and sooner rather than a long time in the future. What we are saying is that we want to see the Marine Bill now and what we want to see in the Marine Bill is an effective system for designating sites that puts a duty on people to designate and can actually manage those sites once they are in place.

  Q396  Chairman: May we ask everyone if they agree with that analysis because Dr Turner's point is really crucially important to us.

  Professor Boyd: I am not sure that I necessarily disagree with it but I think I can add to it. In the short term, we have to come up with mechanisms and you are absolutely right about that. We actually do know more than we let on a lot of the time—

  Q397  Dr Turner: Do not be coy with us!

  Professor Boyd: We can use indicator species. For example, OSPAR is already moving down this track of trying to provide ecological quality objectives using indicator species. There are dangers with that in that you might choose the wrong indicators. After subsequent research, you might find that it is not the best way to go. In general, if we use upper trophic level animals in the marine system and if you are protect them, you are protecting the system that they support and this would go for seabirds or marine mammals and some marine fish as well. I think that some of the mechanisms which we already have in place have the potential to provide the kind of process that you are looking for.

  Q398  Dr Turner: It seems to me that, in logic, there has to be a minimum size for an MPA to be of any great value because, if it is too small, the effects of what is going around it are going to possibly swamp its ecosystem. The other point is, if we protect an MPA, what is the degree of protection? Would you be prepared to see, for instance, turbines being put in an MPA because you might well find that several of your most interesting sites ecologically happen to coincide with the richest energy sources? We have all sorts of competing priorities here.

  Dr Tew: The conservation community are very alive to potential win-win scenarios. We are also alive to different possible mechanisms where you have highly protected marine reserves which are really left to recover in a completely pristine state and MPAs where they are of a variety of sustainable uses. The concept that MPAs are exclusively just for nature conservation is an old-fashioned one and the conservation community is very alive to the win-wins. I think that we are all agreed on two things. One is that the process must be based on science. You cannot simply draw random lines out at sea on no good evidence because, as Malcolm says, there is much evidence there already and particularly if we can start to integrate. The other thing that we are all agreed on is that we want to proceed with all possible haste because industry suffers from uncertainty just as much as conservationists suffer from uncertainty. So, the balance is driving the process forward and getting these areas as large as is necessary on the best possible sites and I do not think that picking 25, 30 or 40 per cent is a helpful way forward.

  Q399  Dr Turner: I come back to my first point that we cannot wait for more science before designating these areas, we have to make a start with the knowledge base that we have.

  Dr Tew: At the moment, the marine environment is more or less totally unprotected and there is a crisis going on out at our seas and we need to do something about that as a nation.