What’s missing from this edition of “positive ocean news” you might ask? Given the media headlines perhaps you were expecting Jersey’s decision on Marine Protected Areas as part of the Marine Spacial Plan to be considered good news?
Given we are a signatory to the #30by30 pledge (protect 30% of our territorial waters by 2030) you might have expected this once in a generation plan to target that. Or even close to it. However our newish environment minister has scaled back the MPAs from the original plan from 27% to 23%. Including removing the proposed protection for over 50% of our Maerl beds.
To be clear, an MPA isn’t a “no take zone”. You can fish and boat in MPAs, you just can’t dredge fish or tow mobile gear. Because this method is hugely damaging to marine life, the seabed and has issues with by-catch and the loss of fishing gear into the sea causing hazardous pollution. So the passing of the Marine Spacial Plan was not the good news it could have been.
When this subject came up with a friend in the industry, these are some of the reasons given as to why the protection shouldn’t be provided:
⏱️ those fishermen have always fished there/dredged there
🪦 it’s all dead already
🚜 it’s like ploughing a field, it’s necessary for growth and getting oxygen into the seabed
💰 it’s only 6 boats from Jersey, you can’t take away their livelihood
🇫🇷 the French boats do it
It’s really hard for me to gently educate and challenge this kind of thinking, where we think we have a god-given right to damage the planet, take what we want and deprive future generations of natural capital. It’s hard to present the science on blue and green carbon, the damage of existing practices on sea and land and the long term economic unsustainability of this activity.
Yet not 5 minutes later we were talking about the catastrophic decline in abundance of fish and seafood, the species that have vanished from our waters and the invasive species getting a foothold in an unbalanced system.
So it’s not great news for our territorial waters this month and I just hope the MSP paves the way for further protections and that those it has guaranteed are enacted very quickly to protect what we can.
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#PositiveNews #OceanOptimism #ConservationNews #MarineConservation Nat Geo, Mongabay News, The Conversation UK, Phys.org, Schmidt Ocean Institute
