Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, what recent assessment his Department has made of biodiversity in the South Sandwich Islands.

The South Sandwich Islands are remote and as a consequence data-poor in comparison to other Subantarctic regions. There is also a very real threat to the ecology of the South Sandwich Islands from volcanism, with recent eruptions from the volcanoes on Zavodovski, Saunders and Bristol.

Recent scientific work indicates that unlike penguin colonies on the Antarctic Peninsula, the penguin colonies on the South Sandwich Islands are stable. To further enhance our understanding of the South Sandwich Islands, the UK's Blue Belt initiative has funded a scientific expedition to visit the South Sandwich Islands in late January 2019, allowing information to be collected on a variety of topics, including on krill and on the benthic communities that inhabit the seabed. UK scientists are also leading work within international scientific research programmes to improve our understanding of this and the wider Southern Ocean region.