Conor D McGuinness: Do Norway's First No-Fish MPAs Work?

Professor, I understand that you're tenured in a university in Norway, and Norway is a country that we often look to in terms of being innovators in the marine space and having a very positive and progressive attitude towards their maritime resource, if not always the shared maritime environment, if I could put it as bluntly as that. But could you tell us a little about the MPA structure in Norway, the journey there, the public acceptance, the industry attitude, ongoing management and benefits, please? They're actually not very well advanced in MPA until last year, they created the first few around Oslofjord, where they have created a sort of a park around Oslofjord, but this is an area polluted by sewage, overfishing, lots of human pressures, and they've created some no fishing areas within that. So they're the first ones in Norway. And generally, as you say, Norway has been very much focused on using its resources and less on nature conservation, especially in the sea. And in part, that's because, you know, it's a huge coastline and they probably feel that it's not that threatened. But increasingly, the public and others, some guys have an argument outside the car now, but increasingly, the public are very concerned in our local protected area. Even the local council has told the fisheries that they have to stop fishing in the protected area and that they have to control it better because it's an embarrassment to everybody when they see so many hooks and lines lost in the water and people fishing for entertainment inside it, which is not necessary. And there's now two involved in two projects in Norway. One is designing where to be the best place of protected areas. They had a similar exercise 20 years ago, but that didn't protect them. So we'll be looking at that again. And then a second project, which is to look more specifically at exactly which areas within this sort of network should they prioritize and start working on. So I think when Norway, when they do have their regulations, they enforce them very strictly. But at the moment, the protected area near me has got so many exemptions. It really doesn't work at all for anybody. And the coastal, the local people or anybody. Well, it works for tourists, I suppose. They come and go fishing for the first time in their life and lose the hooks and lines in the water. Thank you for that. So it just shows that the Norwegians aren't leaders in everything to do with the sea. You've advocated or you've made the case strongly, I believe, in your opening statement and the summary you delivered here today for no fish areas. And we've also heard evidence that, you know, there are MPAs where certain types of fishing activity can take place. Is there an argument to be made, do you believe, for a checkered or a mixed approach where some MPAs, again, depending on local socioeconomic factors, local ecological factors, allow certain types of fishing? And then there will be parts of MPAs or additional MPAs that are specifically no fish areas. Do you think there is a mixed approach like that could work? Yes, and I forgot to mention, of course, the lobster reserves in Norway. They've been a huge success. There's more than 60 of them. They're under fishing regulations and they're mostly driven by local communities when they see the other ones work so well. So I forgot to give some credit for that. But that's kind of a resource management exercise more than nature conservation. But there's appeared also to be side benefits that other species now they're finding. But back to your question, there's a big debate within the nature conservation community about the approaches. Should they be people centred or nature centred? And of course, in reality, it all has to somehow fit together. But I think if you're calling it a protected area, the main focus must be the conservation of biodiversity and then any benefits to fisheries are kind of secondary in a way. But you could also have places that are aimed to manage fisheries or wind farms, and they may have benefits to biodiversity as a secondary benefit. So they seem to be the two pathways that they're moving forward with what they call other area based effective conservation measures. Could be areas that are essentially like designed for wind farm, but the biodiversity increases for some reason. So, yeah, and I guess all this has to be built in with sustainable development, because in some way you could say you want to go back to Charlie's Hoagie's day when he declared all of Ireland a sanctuary for whales. You could declare the whole coast a protected area if you had sustainable fisheries in all of it, which is what we want. But, yeah, that might be a little bit cheeky, but maybe some of the Pacific Island nations, that's what they have done. They've declared their Cook Islands, their whole easy marine protected area. And then they give permits for particular activities in certain places. Thank you. I think that's probably the first call for a return to the Charlie Hoagie era. I've heard it in an Arctis committee since the Charlie Hoagie era. Apologies. Thank you. We all shivered a little here. But thank you for that, Professor Costolo. Ms Bramley, I see your hand is raised. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. I just wanted to respond to add a point to the previous committee members question on climate change. And it speaks to the no take, the strictly protected and marine protected areas. So a study from California, a 40 year study on their NPA network. One of the findings from a study was that kelp are more resilient to heat waves when they're in highly protected, strictly protected, marine protected areas. So I think this speaks to the beyond fisheries to maintaining the whole trophic food web intact. So I think that's another important benefit of strictly protected areas is they provide what a control looks provide. Tell us what good looks like for the marine environment. And they are more resilient in the face of climate change. So that's another benefit beyond the sedimentary storage of carbon and the sequestration that goes on. Thank you for that, Ms Bramley. And I have one final question and it relates to other human pressures on the marine environment outside of fishing. And that could be development of offshore renewable energy. It could be surveying work, drilling for oil and other and gas, indeed shipping. And indeed, in littoral areas, water pollution from rivers, particularly in bays and estuary areas. So how does the marine protected areas, in your experience, Professor Costolo, deal with those? So again, like taking the focus a little off fishing and looking at other areas of human pressure. Yeah, marine protected areas are designed for one purpose. And these other activities, you know, perhaps they shouldn't be causing harm anywhere, like sewage pollution or eutrophication from farming into rivers and then into estuaries. So I think these are all problems caused by people in a way, and they may and may not be a problem in certain situations. Some oil and gas has a very small footprint on the seabed. So as long as it's done safely and doesn't spill, it may have very limited impacts. Similarly, with wind farms, you know, it also we want to advance thinking. And sometimes, you know, for example, aquaculture might increase productivity and employment in an area with less environmental impact than what was happening before, especially if there was dredging or trawling, which was basically scraping the whole seabed in the in the area and reducing the marine life. So I think it's a difficulty for marine planning is that we tend to take past practices as established and OK, but make it difficult for new things to happen that may be much more environmentally sustainable, like wind farms, for example, and using marine reserves to generate the spillover benefits, which may be a much better solution in the long run because there you're protecting the whole population. And Linda mentioned this, other studies, too, which show that more healthy populations survive extreme events like storms and heat waves better. Thank you for that. And Ms. Short, a similar question. In the south of England, you're probably the most densely populated part of the island of Britain. What again, those human pressures, and I'm particularly thinking about in the immediate coastal areas from pollution, what impact has that had, if any, on the maritime environment there? And what have the marine protected areas, if anything, been able to do to mitigate that? Yeah, so I think this is another case of where we failed can be a key learning, and that is our NPA network in English waters doesn't take automatically or the policy doesn't support it taking automatically an approach of consideration for other pressures. So there's a key example in Sussex waters that there is a protected area designated for fisheries management, but there is still dredging disposal that occurs within that protected area. So unfortunately, that protected area isn't achieving its goals for recovery because there are really low water quality. And again, in a similar way to what was just described, those licenses were already either granted or kind of recurring on a periodic basis within that area before it was designated. And that hasn't been reassessed. So I think a key learning is to link up the licensing systems for other activities in those areas with the marine protection and for a consideration at the point of implementation for the activities either need to be mitigated in that area. And similarly linked is that it will be helpful to have links between the marine protected area policy and any net zero policy because of the links between carbon emissions, specifically from trawling and the fact that the carbon in the seabed is released from that practice even following years after that has kind of occurred in situ. So having those policy links between what might seem like somewhat separate and dispersed departments, and they're certainly dealt with like that in the English system that has been an issue with marine protected areas now not achieving what they set out to do so. So, yeah, that's definitely a learning. In our area, we are, as you say, in one of the most densely populated areas and in the busiest shipping lane in the world. And there is an enormous amount of work that we are trying to now do to essentially backpedal and collect data to understand those other pressures to push more effective policy around water quality issues, for example, in our area. But what I would say is it's very rare, and this goes for pretty much all concepts in marine protection, it's very rare that we have adequate data of how things were pre-pressure. So I'd say it's OK to look at international examples of where these pressures, it's an accepted concept that this particular pressure affects this species that you're trying to improve the spillover of or this particular group. If it's an accepted concept elsewhere, a precautionary approach is that that pressure is probably impacting the fishery that you're trying to sustain or the area that you're trying to recover. You may never have the baseline evidence that enables you to prove that it's having an impact in situ, but that doesn't mean it's not having an impact. Thank you. Ms. Bramley, the same set of questions. I may be looking at examples in other countries as well. So with regards to human pressures and particularly in coastal areas. Yes, and I think this speaks to the importance of effective marine spatial planning or coastal zone planning as well. And, you know, our experience from the MPA Europe project is that rarely across Europe have good examples occurred. And we certainly heard about the example in Denmark where marine protected areas were the last areas to be designated after the needs of renewable energy had been met. And the fisheries organisation there were very articulate about the squeeze felt by the fisheries constituency in particular. So unfortunately, we don't seem to have got a good balance of participation in marine spatial planning processes so far in the European process. And obviously, some countries have much less space than others with which to deal with all this. So I think it's really important that marine spatial planning is fully participatory of all the constituencies and tries to achieve this delicate balance. There will always be trade offs, but parties need to be invited to the table to begin with. And then we're going to have to look more at the actual data, as George said, is really sorely lacking in a lot of countries in Europe, particularly in the UK. And so this, I think, marine protected area management is actually looking at typically looking at pressures outside the marine protected area, particularly when you're talking about the coastal zone. Most of the pressures are coming probably from land. And this is a learning, certainly, that we have from the coastal communities that we're starting to work with in Scotland and also in England. It could be leisure vessels that are mooring over seagrass. It could be water quality concerns potentially linked to aquaculture, as I mentioned previously. So I think Ireland could learn from these in thinking about good buffer zones wherever possible around marine protected areas, because our seas are getting busier. That doesn't help with the diffuse issues of water quality, water pollution and noise pollution. But again, we need to think about good practices or potentially statutory measures to think about the shipping lanes and vessel rerouting, because I think increasingly corporates are aware of their footprint on climate and on biodiversity and are interested in taking voluntary measures. But again, they may not have the data to know what kinds of species are in the water. But increasingly, marine vessels are taking on board NGOs that are educating passengers if it's a ferry about the marine life that is abundant in various waters. So this is useful intelligence for the companies to take voluntary measures, even if government hasn't endorsed official measures to reroute shipping vessels. So I think there are opportunities to learn from where we've made mistakes. Thank you for that.