Updated: 23/11/2024
Ben Bradshaw, Minister for Fisheries in 2006 and closely involved with the build-up to the closure of Lyme Bay, Dorset, to towed gear in 2008, is still MP for Exeter. His government’s establishment of that original MPA was an act of far-sighted political bravery. Governments since, ‘greenest ever’ ones included, have rarely matched that courage.
“I would be very concerned by anything constituting a weakening of protection for these unique habitats,” Bradshaw recently said. “If the Government’s motives are to extend greater protection to vulnerable sites, or protect them in a more intelligent way, I would welcome it. My worry is that given the Government’s reluctance to establish an ecologically coherent network, this might fall into a similar pattern.”
Many would share his concerns. Rob Clark head of the Inshore Fisheries and Conservation Authorities (IFCA) for the eastern half of the MPA might argue that the introduction of new byelaws in 2014 was not glamorous enough for NGOs and the media, who have now woken up to what is happening and are both suspicious and poorly informed. But he himself contrasts the money for research made available after the 2008 closure with the near absence of new funding in 2014. It is the research in Lyme Bay that has made and still makes the real story, not the media or the NGOs.
That story is, in essence, not a complicated one. It has been obscured over the past decade by a thicket of acronyms that has grown up around this subject, penetrable only by the most determined. What was the MPA is now the ‘Lyme Bay and Torbay Site of Community Interest’. By next year they will have hit upon an even less memorable name for it, so I’m sticking with MPA. How many people really know their SCIs and SACs and MMOs and MCZs and NTZs apart? In her recent report, researcher Rebecca Singer of University College London noted that even those closely involved with managing Lyme Bay complain about how unnecessarily complicated the different designations have become.
But Rob Clark may well be right that NGOs and journalists should have paid more attention to the byelaws that were brought in in 2014. They do indeed protect more reef than was protected before. Further byelaws in 2016 expanded the area again. The stories we tell about this, and the way we tell them, matter. But you could also argue that to overplay such relatively small gains, in the absence of new funding for research, is to lock low ambition into the whole process.
For those members of the public who do not have time to memorise all the acronyms, this story is the same now as it was in 2008. The closure of a protected area to towed gear. Certainly, you can and should grow that area, and you should try different conservation regimens within it. But once you start with ‘maybe we’ll let a few dredgers back in after all, just here and there’, you weaken that core story. It is from that core story that all the others flow. We tamper with it, or allow others to, at our peril.
There is one very simple way to cut back to the story this whole process started with. Put in place what was intended from the outset. No Take Zones – areas in which there is no fishing of any kind – are the simplest designation you can have. They are cheap to maintain, they are popular with the public and they are vital to greater understanding. Without them ‘we don’t know what the sea might regenerate towards’, as Jean-Luc Solandt of the Marine Conservation Society recently put it. Without No Take Zones we can’t know the difference between natural and anthropogenic disturbance.
The Government will consult on re-opening protected areas when the scallop dredgers ask. Why will they not consult on No Take Zones when the best-informed marine biologists are unanimous on the need for them? The Government insists on features-based measures, which are far more costly to define and monitor, and then cuts funding for research.
Singer noted that the fishermen who have helped for years now with studies of the bay’s recovery are, understandably, asking what was the point if the dredgers are allowed back in to smash things up all over again? Areas of soft sediment rapidly ‘self-repaired’ after 2008, transforming our understanding of what the sea-bed can do when we leave it alone. We would never have learnt this if we had allowed dredging to continue ‘here and there’. And that knowledge would not have been available to those managing other MPAs.
Why is the ‘non-reef’ habitat treated as disposable?
As the Third Tranche of Marine Conservation Zone (MCZ) sites is selected, the main gaps in the network as we have it are sand- and mud-based habitats. So why is anybody speaking of ‘non-reef’ habitat in Lyme Bay as if it were disposable, when it is precisely non-reef habitat we need to protect more of this time around? It is the response of this very habitat to conservation measures that Plymouth University has been studying for almost a decade. We interrupt that experiment because the dredgers consider their profits to be in need of a further boost?
The website of the industry-funded National Federation of Fishermen’s Associations (http://nffo.org.uk/news/new-research-to-aid-sustainable-fisheries-management-in-marine-protected-areas.html) is a useful guide to what is really driving this ‘review’ of the Lyme Bay SI. The site announced new research last year ‘to justify what levels of bottom towed gear can be carried out within MPAs and still encourage conservation’. That might sound like Monty Python but this is no joke. Note the Freudian slip: ‘justify’.
The purpose of research is to test for or discover something you don’t yet know. You don’t know what will happen to a habitat that has been hammered by dredges over decades, so you leave it alone and you wait and see. Then you wait and see some more. But to those who fund this research its aim is perfectly clear in advance. Its purpose, as its supporters readily admit, is to ‘justify’ the readmission of towed gear to closed areas. Its purpose is a return on capital at any cost to the sea-bed.
In early 2014, three storms hit Lyme Bay of a magnitude that one would usually expect every fifty years or so. Equipment being used to study the impact of potting at different intensities, deployed over several years, was swept away. Scoured sea fans and dead clean scallops were washed up in enormous numbers. That the site’s recovery was already being studied has made this an ideal opportunity to observe how protected sites recover compared to unprotected ones. It is too soon yet for conclusive results. Research takes time.
NFFO-style ‘justification’, by contrast, takes no time at all. Justifications carried out last summer from a dredging vessel by Michel Kaiser, Professor of Marine Conservation Ecology at Bangor University, have already ‘revealed’ no improvement to the site since it was closed to dredgers in 2008. That the entire site has been studied intensively for nine years can be simply ignored. The storms of 2014 were not an opportunity to study the impact of extreme weather events in our coastal waters, of which we are likely to see more as the climate warms. No, we should see them rather as the ‘justification’ for fishing methods that make a few people very rich and only do what severe storms are going to do ‘anyway’.
Professor Kaiser lobbied against the creation of the MPA in 2008. He is by now the dredging industry’s ‘scientist of choice’ when it finds itself in need of ‘justification’. He was brought in to justify tearing up the reserve in Cardigan Bay. You might well ask, why choose Lyme Bay of all places when there are so many other protected areas which have not been so intensively studied over the past decade?
The answer of course is that you choose Lyme Bay precisely to establish the principle that scientific research, no matter how exhaustive or how painstakingly carried out, shall never override commercial interests. It is in Lyme Bay above all that this point must be made. To try and make it without so much as addressing the research that has been going on there is of course discourteous as well as un-professional. The Professor’s unwillingness to engage with the findings of others also suggests that his case is unusually feeble. This kind of behaviour is a timely reminder of why the Statutory Instrument (SI) was needed in the first place.
But it is a reminder of more than that. Peter Jones’ book, Governing Marine Protected Areas (Routledge, 2014) is rich in foreign examples which those who care about marine protection’s future in the UK would do well to ponder. It was the Blue Marine Foundation that stepped in to try and build consensus after the tug of wills which led to the closure in Lyme Bay. In the Os Miñarzos reserve, off Galicia in northern Spain, a comparable role was played by the WWF, which has put in place a regimen that both favours local fishermen and has included them in the design of the reserve.
Strength of local feeling should not be underestimated
The climate of opinion on this is global. The Galapagos might seem a world away, with a level of economic development and legal institutions that are quite different from those in the UK. But the exclusion of interlopers, measures to improve the income of low-impact local fishermen and so decrease pressure on stocks, biologists and fishermen working together on stock assessment – all of these have both worked there and have close counterparts in Lyme Bay.
Neither should strength of local feeling about this be underestimated, wherever in the world you are. When the Government of Colombia granted licenses to explore for oil inside a marine reserve, this was challenged by the MPA agency and the Government’s decision was overturned in the high court. When dredgers were re-admitted to the Special Area of Conservation (SAC) in Cardigan Bay in 2012, conservationists threatened to take our Government to the European Court of Justice. The Government ‘revised’ its approach.
But the likes of Michel Kaiser are not so easily put off and we shall not have to trouble our heads with European justice for very much longer. The dredgers are already back in Cardigan Bay. They think Lyme Bay is next and they think that because they can’t tell the difference between responsible fishing and marine profiteering. They will discover that the public does know the difference.
This Author
Horatio Morpurgo writes on the environment and European affairs. The Paradoxall Compass, his book about the West Country, the sea and the origins of modern science, will be published by Notting Hill Editions in June, 2017.
