World Oceans Day 2021

Olivia Blake Excerpts

Tuesday 8th June 2021 Westminster Hall

[Olivia Blake (Sheffield, Hallam) (Lab)]

In is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mr Hosie. I congratulate the hon. Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby) on securing this important debate on World Oceans Day. As she, my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) and the hon. Member for Ynys Môn (Virginia Crosbie) highlighted, the world’s oceans cover 70% of the planet and could be one of the most effective carbon sinks if they are looked after properly. Oceans not only host an abundance of biodiversity, known and unknown, but they absorb 25% of all CO₂ emissions—50% more than the atmosphere—and store more carbon than all the rainforests combined. Closer to our shores, coastal waters in the UK store an estimated 205 million tonnes of carbon, as several hon. Members highlighted.

Protecting our oceans is fundamental to our fight against the climate emergency. We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) about the action by local volunteers to keep beaches clean, and from the right hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers) about the greater efforts needed to tackle plastic waste to protect marine mammals, birds and fish. The hon. Members for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double), for Truro and Falmouth (Cherilyn Mackrory) and for Strangford (Jim Shannon) spoke about our fantastic coastal communities and the horrific threat of damage from sewage and waste. Will the Minister set out what actions and plans there are to address and end the pollution of our seas by plastic and sewage waste?

Protecting our oceans is fundamental to our fight against climate change, and it is really important to look at this globally. Salt marshes and seagrasses are a huge carbon store, holding almost 450 million tonnes of CO₂ per year—half the emissions of the entire global transport system. Experts believe that rewilding key marine ecosystems is absolutely necessary and that around the world they could lock away 1.8 billion tonnes of carbon each year—5% of the savings needed globally to avert climate catastrophe. However, in the UK we have lost 90% of our seagrass meadows to pollution, dredging, bottom trawling and coastal development. If we continue business as usual, our sea shelf sediments could release 13 million tonnes of stored carbon over the next decade.

We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East about current protections being paper parks—a sentiment with which I wholeheartedly agree. We should be protecting and restoring seagrass, salt marshes, oyster reefs and kelp forests at the same urgency with which we are calling for the protection of rainforests and our own woodlands and peatlands. Ministers recently—perhaps belatedly—published their trees and peatlands strategies, but we have heard little about specifically restoring our marine environments, despite campaigners at the Marine Conservation Society and Rewilding Britain calling for the Government to kick-start a programme of ocean rewilding. So far, their calls seem to have been ignored.

We urgently need an ocean rewilding strategy that, unlike the recent peatlands and trees strategies, is ambitious and detailed enough to meet the scale of the crisis we are facing. When will we see a plan for the restoration of our marine environments? That must also include a sustainable plan for fishing. Evidence shows that over-fishing and practices such as bottom trawling can have disastrous effects on ocean habitats. It is good that the Government have signed up to the UN pledge to protect 30% of our waters, but full protection means implementing no-take zones, as the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Patricia Gibson) mentioned. If the Government are serious about this pledge, for the sake of our own coastal communities and fishing industry they should outline where these no-fish zones will be, explain the plan, and set out what consultation there has been with the fishing and maritime communities up and down the country and the fishing industry.

I would be interested to know what lessons the Minister has learned from the designation of Plymouth Sound as a national marine park—a designation that my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard) campaigned hard for. We need to learn from the experience of Plymouth, where the UK’s first national marine park has just been established, so that we can further protect our oceans. This sort of designation builds on the success of the post-war Labour Government’s creation of national parks, and sends a clear message that these waters are important, valued and should be protected for future generations and for our own.

Finally, the Government have made it clear that they intend to amend the Environment Bill to set out targets on species abundance, which will be announced after COP15. I am afraid the pun is too hard to resist: this sounds a little like a cop out. The UK Government should not just reflect the consensus, they should lead the charge against the nature and biodiversity crisis. I am keen to hear the Minister set out what proposals they intend to take to COP15 to protect marine habitats and biodiversity. The Government Front-Bench team has given us a lot of exaggerated rhetoric about the nature and environmental credentials that they hold, but so far the rhetoric has not yet met the reality. Without a clear strategy and with matching clear targets going into the UN conference on biodiversity, I am concerned that we will see more of the same and the UK falling behind on the protections that we need.