Oceans and Marine Ecosystems

Debate between Kerry McCarthy and Andrew Smith

Wednesday 11th July 2012 Westminster Hall

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray.

This debate is important for the opportunity not only to highlight in Parliament the plight of our oceans but to focus more on the international dimension of protecting them, including the high seas beyond national jurisdictions. Thankfully, the issue is now coming to the attention of international policy makers—it was not even raised at Rio in 1992, but became one of the most high-visibility issues at Rio+20 this year. Although Rio fell a long way short of the actions identified by scientists as crucial, its decisions were, in the words of Professor Alex Rogers of the International Programme on the State of the Ocean,

“urgent, important and game changing measures which should be immediately implemented by governments as a direct response to the oceans text.”

I hope today’s debate is timely in focusing on the role that the Government should play in making progress. Britain can make a real difference. The United Kingdom, through its overseas territories, is responsible for the world’s fifth largest marine area after the US, France, Australia and Russia, amounting to nearly 2% of the world’s oceans. We are, therefore, a major player, with a duty to act.

I will outline the scale of the crisis facing the world’s oceans. Oceans and seas are of course critical to sustaining the earth’s life support systems and to our survival. Covering 72% of the earth’s surface, oceans and seas moderate our climate by absorbing heat and around 30% of global CO₂ emissions. They are the habitat of nearly 50% of all species and, as a result, are vital for global food security—providing 2.6 billion people with their primary source of protein—and for the well-being of many national economies, especially in developing countries.

The health of the oceans, however, is under threat. Organisations such as Greenpeace, with its “Defending our Oceans” campaign, the World Wildlife Fund—WWF—and many others have been campaigning to raise awareness of the findings of marine scientists, which I hope to give expression to in this Chamber. The findings in the IPSO report published last June are particularly shocking. It said that the seas are degenerating faster than anyone had predicted because of the cumulative effect of a number of severe individual stresses—from climate change and sea water acidification to widespread chemical pollution and gross overfishing. In particular, it said that the world’s oceans are facing an unprecedented loss of species, from large fish to tiny coral, comparable to the great mass extinctions of prehistory. Approximately 90% of the big predatory fish in our oceans, such as sharks and tuna, have been fished out since the 1950s. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that 85% of global marine fish stocks are fully exploited, overexploited or depleted, a subject to which I shall return.

Scientists are also discovering growing areas of the ocean that suffer from hypoxia—regions that are starved of oxygen—caused by warmer sea temperatures, which is also increasing sea levels and changing ocean currents. Whole species of fish are at risk due to the temperature rise. They simply cannot survive in the changed conditions. Pollution is also damaging our seas. Although oil spills from tanker accidents are among the more visible and more talked-about pollutants, their impact is less than that from other sources, which include domestic sewage, industrial discharges, urban and industrial run-off, accidents, spillage, explosions, sea dumping, plastic debris, mining, agricultural nutrients and pesticides.

Not only are there severe declines in many fish species, and an unparalleled rate of regional extinction of some habitat types, such as mangrove and seagrass meadows, but some whole marine ecosystems, such as coral reefs, could disappear this century in what has been described as

“a first for mankind—the extinction of an entire ecosystem”.

[Mr Andrew Smith (Oxford East) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this vital debate. I do not want to anticipate the rest of her speech, but does she agree that the evidence shows that rigorously enforced marine conservation zones can make a real difference in starting to turn things around? The lesson is that we, internationally, and the world need to be more ambitious about the scale of such zones and more rigorous in restricting the activity that can take place in them.

[Kerry McCarthy]

I shall come on to marine conservation zones mooted in the UK and what we can do internationally to persuade and join up with other countries to have larger zones.

One of the reasons why I am interested in the issue is that I am a keen scuba diver. At an anecdotal level, I have heard stories about the decline in coral reefs. I was speaking to someone the other day who has been running trips from Bristol for about 30 years. He said that the Great Barrier reef is now almost unrecognisable as the place where he used to dive 20 years ago, because of bleaching and reef damage and disappearance.

Around one fifth of global coral reefs have already been damaged beyond repair, including catastrophic mass bleaching in 1998 when scientists watched between 80% and 90% of all the corals die on the reefs of the Seychelles in a few weeks. Professor Callum Roberts said that

“outside the world of marine science, this global catastrophe has passed largely unseen and unremarked.”

It is predicted that 90% of all coral reefs will be threatened by 2030 and all coral reefs by 2050, if no protective measures are taken.

That goes some way to outlining the scale of the problem, so I now want to discuss the solution. Although Rio was disappointing—I think most people agree—and it mostly reaffirmed existing commitments and promises, it marks a point from which countries should now focus on action and implementation. The High Seas Alliance and the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition have set out the key commitments that Governments now need to act upon. I hope that the Minister can make a firm commitment today to implement those decisions and to set out how the Government will do so.

The top commitment was

“to address, on an urgent basis, the issue of the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction”—

in particular through networks of marine protected areas—

“including by taking a decision on the development of an international instrument under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea”

before the end of the 69th session of the UN General Assembly.

More than 64% of our oceans are beyond the jurisdiction of any one country—the so-called high seas. UNCLOS, the UN convention on the law of the sea, provides the legal framework for governing such areas, but the current structure is highly fragmented and has huge governance gaps. It is widely acknowledged that an agreement under UNCLOS is needed to assist the creation and management of marine reserves; to set a framework for environmental impact assessments to be undertaken before damaging activities are allowed to take place; and to co-ordinate a highly fragmented structure of regional organisations that currently regulate human activities.

The Arctic ocean provides a strong case for reform of UNCLOS as it becomes accessible to deep-sea oil drilling and large industrial-scale fishing fleets with the melting of the permanent sea ice. Regulation of such activities is entirely inadequate. The Environmental Audit Committee has been hearing evidence as part of its inquiry into protecting the Arctic, highlighting grave problems with responses to an accident or major oil spill, which would have even more serious environmental consequences than a similar incident in warmer water.

The biggest disappointment at Rio was that an unholy alliance of the US, Venezuela, Russia and Japan blocked a decision on an agreement under UNCLOS for a maximum of two years, until the 69th session of the UN General Assembly in 2014. Although action is desperately needed now, that at least sets a deadline towards which Governments in favour of an ocean rescue plan can work. The 2014 deadline should not, therefore, be seen as a target date to start looking at how we protect and rescue our oceans, but rather as a deadline by which to have completely decided on the way forward for formal negotiations.

What steps will the UK now take, with the others that spoke in favour of an agreement—such as Brazil, Australia, the European Union, South Africa, India and the Pacific Islands—to move the agenda forward and to urge the UN General Assembly to convene, as a matter of urgency, a diplomatic conference to deliver a new implementing agreement under UNCLOS? What steps will the Minister take towards establishing marine protected areas and marine reserves, creating offshore oil and gas no-go zones in the Arctic, and agreeing a mandatory polar shipping code?

Marine protected areas, which have been mentioned, are underwater national parks that help areas to recover and rebuild, and help fish stocks to be replenished and marine ecosystems and coastal communities to have breathing space and better protection from the effects of climate change. Just before Rio, Australia announced its plan to create the world’s largest network of marine reserves, an area encompassing one third of its territorial waters, where fishing will be restricted and oil and gas exploration banned in the most sensitive areas.

In addition, all 1,192 of the Maldive Islands will become a marine reserve by 2017. The UK’s overseas territories provide an opportunity to designate large marine reserves, such as that created in Chagos under the previous Government. I would be grateful if the Minister reported on the progress the Government are making in supporting overseas territories in designating more large-scale marine reserves in the near future.

What discussions has the Minister and his ministerial colleagues in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office had with other nations that have overseas territories, such as France, about the creation of marine protected areas or about joint working with them to join up areas where our territories coincide?