Supplementary memorandum submitted by
Professor John Gage
1. The Strategic Environmental Assessment
(SEA) process as operated by the Department of Trade and Industry
aimed to strike a balance between promoting economic development
of the UK's offshore oil and gas resources and effective environmental
protection. As a proactive stance, managed so that historical
knowledge (such as that gained by SAM's scientists from the 1970s)
informs new wide-area survey, it has been widely admired. Particularly
in poorly known deep-water areas of the UKCS this has achieved
a much higher level of resolution of the seabed landscape and
its associated biology than available before. New features of
conservation interest, such as the Darwin Mounds, were discovered
the latter having already achieved protection.
2. These areas addressed by SEA were deliberately
chosen as relevant to past and future hydrocarbon licensing by
the UK Government and have left a very large proportion of the
offshore UKCS unexplored. Areas un-surveyed include seamounts
and submarine banks which might, from knowledge gained from off
Australia and the United States, be expected to have high conservation
potential and yet probably are already subject to significant
and ongoing impact on fish stocks and seabed habitat such as cold-water
coral reefs from deep-sea trawling.
3. The overall uncertainty of what is there
and what might already be damaged, and general concerns over depleting
marine resources and the health of marine ecosystems, was emphasised
in my written and oral evidence. Such uncertainty elsewhere has
accelerated the development of ecological classification systems
for marine waters. This has been accompanied by realisation that
we should be identifying and conserving representative spaces,
rather than individual species. The rationale is that if
we can identify the appropriate representative spaces to be protected,
then these will contain the species we wish to conserve. This
is particularly true for the marine environment in deep waters
whose openness and lack of barriers to dispersal of larval stages
makes inappropriate the concept of MPAs in the terrestrial sense
based around particular species at risk. Wide-area seabed mapping,
by associating resolved landscape to predicted species inventory
and ecology, can achieve the necessary systematic identification
of marine communities, and delineation of their boundaries, within
a consistent classification that can ensure that representative
examples of the UK's marine areas, particularly those offshore
such as seamounts, are properly identified and protected.
4. In order to fulfil the UK government's
obligation to the EU Habitats Directive and commitments to the
UN Convention on Biodiversity and Sustainable Economic Development,
I recommend that a revised version of the SEA process over the
entire UKCS should be undertaken as a matter of urgency using
new tools of landscape mapping, along the lines proposed by the
British Geological Survey (BGS). It is important that biological
interpretation from acoustic multibeam seabed imaging is `ground
truthed' by traditional sampling combined with high resolution
photo survey using seabed cameras towed behind the ship to provide
a seabed photomosaic over selected areas and particularly targeted
to "hot spots" such as seamounts. Use also might be
made of the NERC's expensive new ISIS deep-water remote
operated vehicle (ROV), currently under-used. The pilot landscape
mapping exercise undertaken by JNCC in the Irish Sea
(http://www.jncc.gov.uk/marine/irishsea—pilot/pdfs/consultation—Sept2003/Marine—landscapes.pdf)
indicates what can be achieved in coastal waters although work
in deep water will be more expensive and should engage the additional
tools and methodologies mentioned above.
It has been shown that such seabed imagery (photos
and side-scan sonar) is able to map marks left by trawlers over
the seabed so that an historical assessment of impact can be made.
5. Landscape mapping is already being undertaken
or planned by the Canadian, Irish and Norwegian Governments over
their respective territorial seabed in deep water. The United
States government is considering a comprehensive survey to inform
marine resource management and marine stewardship in its waters.
These have helped provide a model for the proposal to the Committee
for new seabed survey based on multibeam or swath mapping technology
from the British Geological Survey.
6. The BGS proposal is to engage ships of
opportunity such as fishing boats taken out of fishing for these
surveys. Apart from employing more productively existing funding
for fishing vessel transition and decommissioning, this would
make good use of fishermens' extensive knowledge of seabed landscape
and biodiversity (not usually available or appreciated by scientists)
while making use of manpower and boats otherwise facing redundancy.
Survey tools such as state-of-the-art multibeam sonars and GPS
navigation lend themselves well to use on fishing boats of even
modest size, while leaving more specialised scientific ships to
undertake the more specialised groundtruthing by sampling, seabed
photography and ROV survey.
7. I strongly support such an initiative
that would represent a potentially productive partnership between
marine scientists of different disciplines and backgrounds.
16 December 2003
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