Marine Protected Areas

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd May 2023 Westminster Hall

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

As always, it is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Sharma. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) on securing the debate. I know that he is passionate about this issue. I agree with everything that he said, except the little blip about the common fisheries policy being responsible for everything; he would not expect me to agree on that.

It has been a long time since the last Labour Government drew up plans for an ecologically coherent network of marine protected areas around our coast. Since then, I have served on the Environmental Audit Committee. We did really good reports into the fact that what we really had was a system of little more than paper parks, where protections were not properly enforced. It was far from coherent. Obviously, the Benyon review was important, but it seemed to me yet another way of kicking things into the long grass. We are still nowhere near the position in which we need to be.

I will focus on one specific point, and suggest one way of ensuring that marine protected areas are genuinely protected, not just now but in perpetuity, and not polluted or plundered for the sake of short-term gains. Rather than looking at what we should not do in those areas, I will look at positive interventions—what we can do to create more value in these areas and give more people a vested interest. I hope that people would be motivated by the need to protect the planet and a love of biodiversity and our marine environment, but we know that financial interests can be powerful, too. We heard in some of the interventions a worry about the economic impact of marine protected areas. I will talk about how they could attract financial investment. In doing so, I will talk specifically about seagrass, which the right hon. Member touched on.

At the moment, we do not really value seagrass. The UK has lost nearly half of our seagrass beds since the 1930s. Globally, they are declining by 7% a year. They are the fastest disappearing habitat on the planet. We hear a lot from climate campaigners about rainforests, because we can see them—they are not hidden under water—but seagrass is just as, if not more, important, and I will come on to say why. Boats anchoring, fishing activity and sewage are all damaging seagrass. One problem is that boat users do not actually know where the seagrass beds are, which is another point I will come on to.

We think that 98% of carbon stored in the UK’s seafloor is in areas with no trawling restrictions, and the right hon. Member focused on bottom trawling. I come back to the value of protecting our marine environment, in terms of carbon sequestration and the importance of nature-based solutions to climate change, and creating nature markets.

Seagrass is 35 times more efficient at absorbing carbon than rainforest, alongside its biodiversity benefits. The Marine Conservation Society says that the UK’s salt marshes, which are very much part of the mix, and seagrass beds have

“the carbon storage potential of between 1,000 and 2,000 km² of tropical forests.”

Damaging that habitat comes at a huge environmental cost. According to the Climate Change Committee, the organic carbon stored in the soils of marine ecosystems is equivalent to around 17% of the UK’s total emissions. That was calculated in 2020. Damaging those ecosystems risks releasing all that carbon into the atmosphere. We need to protect our seagrass meadows and our seabeds, and we need to enhance them.

During the Easter recess, I went down to Plymouth and met the Ocean Conservation Trust at Plymouth’s National Marine Aquarium. Two weeks before that, I went to an event hosted by the Crown Estate on the launch of the blue carbon accelerator programme, which is really interesting. I met the Ocean Conservation Trust to hear about its seagrass programme, and what is needed to scale it up. It nurtures the seagrass plants onshore and then plants them on the seabed. Investment of around £5 million is needed to scale that up, of which the trust has raised £1 million.

My hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard) told me that a self-planting, self-replicating seagrass meadow has been discovered near his constituency, but the general feeling is that there is a need for onshore growing, followed by mechanical planting on the seabed—when I say mechanical, I mean divers going down and planting by hand.

In the first instance, creating more seagrass meadows would be about nature, such as creating breeding grounds for fish, and creating more biodiversity. That ties in with the points made by the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael). We will not have a fishing industry if we take all the fish out of the sea. That is common sense; the debate in the past has been quite frustrating. We have to fish sustainably. Seagrass meadows are a wonderful breeding ground for the fish stocks of the future.

In the short term, seagrass meadows are about nature and biodiversity. In the longer term, the carbon sequestration benefits could also be huge, but there is a difficulty in evaluation at the moment. The Climate Change Committee has said that there are currently no estimates of carbon accumulation rates in UK seagrass ecosystems, and that UK-specific data is urgently needed. We also need a seagrass code, so that it can be properly accounted for.

Last month, we heard about the discovery of one of the UK’s largest seagrass beds off the coast of Cornwall, in St Austell bay. I was surprised—the seagrass bed is absolutely massive, it is not that far out from shore and it is not that deep; this is not like not knowing what is at the bottom of our very deepest oceans. The fact that it has remained undiscovered for so long shows how little we know about our marine environment, as opposed to what is on land.

Now that we have discovered that seagrass bed, we need to protect it. According to the joint report from the Cornwall Wildlife Trust and Natural England, St Austell bay currently benefits from only one formal marine protected area designation, a special protection area. The report notes that:

“Understanding the current legislative processes and that further formal designations are unlikely to be assigned to this site in the near future, Cornwall Wildlife Trust recommends that a whole site approach for the management of the SPA is considered thus protecting the associated habitats, in this case the seagrass and maerl, from damaging marine activity, such as bottom-towed fishing.”

The authors of the report said that a lack of funding limited their survey work, so what support can the Minister give people who are carrying out valuable work such as that and trying to discover exactly what we have around our shores? There is potentially a really big benefit from making the initial outlay, finding out what we have and then being able to place a proper value on it.

The Office for National Statistics conservatively valued the annual carbon sequestration of our marine and coastal ecosystems at £57.5 billion, which means that the UK seabed is more valuable as a carbon sink than as a source of fossil fuels and fishing.

A report by the Marine Conservation Society, Deloitte, and Whale and Dolphin Conservation—[Interruption.] I have a very on-brand cup here, from Surfers Against Sewage—contrasts the mechanisms and voluntary carbon markets that support investment in terrestrial nature solutions, not least the woodland code and the peatland code, with the

“significant lack of existing or scalable mechanisms…to incentivise or mandate private sector investment in ocean restoration.”

That goes back to what I said about the need for a seagrass code and the progress being made on the saltmarsh code. I have been told at events such as the one at the Crown Estate, which I mentioned, that there is plenty of private sector financing available for blue carbon projects. The problem is a lack of projects to invest in, a lack of data and a lack of certainty. We need to improve monitoring, verification and reporting. As the MCS report said:

“Without robust scientific data, creating investable ocean projects and markets is problematic.”

Last year, the Climate Change Committee recommended that saltmarsh and seagrass be included in the greenhouse gas inventory, and called for a roadmap to identify the additional data required to enable that to happen. In response, the Government accepted that there were

“significant data gaps surrounding emissions from coastal wetlands (including saltmarsh and seagrass habitats), activity data regarding extraction activities, and habitat extent which hinder the accurate reporting of emissions from these habitats.”

The Government said that such information must be collected before a decision on inclusion in the greenhouse gas inventory can be made.

As I understand it, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has established a cross-Administration UK blue carbon evidence partnership to make progress on the evidence base for blue carbon, and I hope that the Minister can give us an update on how that is going. I also remind her that she promised me a meeting when, at DEFRA questions, I asked how the Department was working with the newly created Department for Energy Security and Net Zero on nature-based solutions. I would like to gently chase her up on that, because it would be really useful to see how we can make progress.

I have talked about the positive side—the potential—and now I want to flag up something that is very worrying. This was contained in the briefing sent to MPs today by Uplift, an organisation that provides the secretariat for the all-party group for climate change. Some 900 locations in the UK’s oceans have been offered as sites of development for oil and gas extraction in the latest offshore oil and gas licensing round, and more than a third of them clash with marine protected areas. I do not expect the Minister to comment on the Government’s dash for more fossil fuel extraction—I know that is a matter for another Department—but she should be very concerned about the overlap with marine protected areas.

If this is approved by the Government, the UK’s largest undeveloped oil field, Rosebank, will have a pipeline through the Faroe-Shetland sponge belt marine protected area, potentially harming this fragile ecosystem. It is a shame that the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland is not still present, because he might have wanted to intervene on me on that issue. This habitat is already assessed as being in an unfavourable condition, and efforts should be under way to recover it, not to approve a new oil and gas development. Modelling shows that a major oil spill from Rosebank could risk serious impact to at least 16 UK marine protected areas, so I hope that we can hear something from the Minister on how the desire to protect marine protected areas—which I am sure she will tell us all about—squares with what another Government Department is seeking to do in terms of our future energy use.