Examination of Witnesses (Questions 96-99)
DR EUAN
DUNN
7 DECEMBER 2004
Chairman: Welcome, Dr Dunn; you are the
Head of Marine Policy for the Royal Society for the Protection
of Birds. Can I thank you for the evidence, which is very clear,
and since you took the recommendations topic by topic and gave
us your reaction, which of course, inevitably as an environmentalist
is different to the industry's reactions, it was very helpful
to us. I am going to turn you over now to the birdman of Committee
Room 15 to begin the questioning!
Q96 Alan Simpson: You are very keen on
supporting the concept of Strategic Environmental Assessments,
but you use this intriguing phrase that talks about recognising
that there are "challenges" in applying this to fisheries.
Do you want to take us step by step through the challenges?
Dr Dunn: I think the history of
Strategic Environmental Assessment is that it really originated
as a land-based system of assessment and it applies to plans and
programmes, and there has been some question about whether it
can be suitably applied to fisheries at all, but I think it is
fairly explicit, if you read the detail of the European Directive,
that it is applicable to fisheries and should be. I think the
challenges are that it has never been done before. It was not
given much of a billing in the Common Fisheries Policies Reform
and neither did it make any requirement for Environmental Impact
Assessment, except in aqua culture projects. So it has not had
much policy development, far less operational application and
that is basically why we are really starting with a blank canvass.
But I think that in so far as the reformed Common Fisheries Policy
asks for a progressive development of an ecosystem- based approach
I think Strategic Environmental Assessment is absolutely at the
core of that. I think it also fits very well with the growing
thinking about spatial planning in the marine environment generally,
because we have SEA in the offshore industry, oil and renewables
and gas, and it seems very appropriate now that we should begin
to think about SEA for fisheries in conjunction with SEA for other
offshore activities so that we can actually plan how we use the
marine environment in a coherent and logical way. So I think it
is in its infancy, that it is a new science for fisheries, but
I think it is absolutely essential and I think we have a mandate
for it.
Q97 Alan Simpson: How do we do that,
though, because oil and gas do not move around in the same way?
The consequences of the extractive industries in oil and gas can
be assessed but you have a fixed point to work on. How do you
see this applying in relation to fishing?
Dr Dunn: The previous witness
had a question of at what scale should we apply that, and I think
that may be a starting point. In my view, it would be an appropriate
scale to look at SEA at a level of regional SEAs, and in that
case I would think that Strategic Environmental Assessment was
a highly appropriate and suitable activity for the emerging Regional
Advisory Councils to take on board; I think they would be the
proper strategic overview to look at an SEA. So to answer your
question more specifically, it would be informed by what kind
of things would be tractable by an SEA process and one thing one
could look at, for example, would be deep water fisheries, which
came up this morning in the Royal Commission report. Deep water
fisheries are a complex mix of bottom trawling, bottom gill nets
and long lining, and it would have been very helpful if, at the
start of deep water fishing many years ago, we had had an SEA
to look at the cumulative effects of these different methods and
how they could be mitigated and how they relate to environmental
impacts; to look at the fishing methods in the round so that you
could arrive at a balanced view of how deep water fishing should
be conducted. That would then help you with Environmental Impact
Assessment if you wanted to look at sub areas. So that is the
kind of thing where it would be helpful.
Q98 Alan Simpson: Is this the interface
then that you see us being taken into, that it is to move from
the question of the fishing quotas to fishing methods; that you
just do not treat the extractive part of the marine economy separately
from the sustainable part of the marine ecology?
Dr Dunn: Quite so. And it has
a fairly wide application. You could use an SEA to look at the
impacts of closing an area of the sea which has hitherto been
open for fishing or vice versa, of opening an area which
had previously been closed; that is also the sort of thing you
could apply an SEA to.
Q99 Alan Simpson: You mentioned this
Royal Commission report, and just as a backcloth to that, in terms
of SEAs, do you feel that we are already at the point where that
sense of closure has to be a starting point, a presumption in
at least part of the seas around the UK that the environmental
damage is already on a scale that requires complete closure of
parts of the sea?
Dr Dunn: I think the starting
point for this discussion is that it is not an option for us,
it is actually an obligation that the UK has already signed up
in the OSPAR Convention and also the Johannesburg Agreement, 2002,
both of which require us to set up in the North East Atlantic
and globally respectively a network of Marine Protected Areas.
In the case of OSPAR this is to be achieved by 2010 and for the
Johannesburg Agreement it is 2012. This is not something that
has parachuted in from nowhere; there is a big political context
to this, both in the North East Atlantic as a region and globally,
and a lot of people have put a lot of thought into this. I think
it is time to start thinking about how we actually implement this
and I think we should start it on an experimental trial basis
because unless we do we will forever have this debate. We can
get a great deal of information from some of the precedents. It
is often argued against Marine Protected Areas that their track
record is very much in the tropical seas, for example the Barrier
Reef and other coral reef areas, to protect sedentary species
in coral reefs, but the Georges Bank closure is a very, very helpful
precedent in the northern temperate waters. The Georges Bank closure
is now ten years' old, it covers 17,000 square kilometres embracing
four closed areas. The fishermen themselves, very much in a Regional
Advisory Council sort of way, have been very much the instrument
of their own management decisions. They have voluntarily increased
mesh sizes, accepted bigger Minimum Landing Sizes, reduced effort,
and they have agreed the parameters for the closed areas and they
are seeing benefits, not only in scallops but also in some of
the ground fish species, which some people argue are likely to
be more migratory and therefore less likely to benefit from a
closed area approach. I think that we would be silly to dismiss
this as just a symptom of wildly thrashing around for what we
should do next. There is a serious set of scientific facts out
there which can help us to inform us how we might add this, as
Jim Portus said, into the "toolkit of management". It
is not a silver bullet, it is not a panacea, but neither is it
a red herring; it is a serious and useful tool in the toolkit
and deserves close study.
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