Examination of Witnesses (Questions 249-259)
Dr Clare Eno, Professor Colin Galbraith, Mr Mark
Tasker and Dr Tom Tew
2 APRIL 2008
Q249 Chairman: Could I start by welcoming
you to this morning's session and mention one or two preliminaries?
This session will be webcast; it means there is a possibility
that somebody might hear this session, but what that really means
is that it is in the public domain. A note of what is being said
is being recorded, you will be provided with a transcript and
there will be a possibility of looking through it and if there
is anything that you feel has not been properly taken down and
reported then there is an opportunity of correcting the transcript.
Mr Tasker, you are leading the delegation, are you not?
Mr Tasker: I have been co-ordinating the delegation
but I would like to pass over to my good friend and colleague,
Professor Colin Galbraith, to actually lead us today.
Q250 Chairman: What I would suggest
is that if you wish to make an opening statement we would be very
pleased to hear it, otherwise I believe you have a list of pre-prepared
questions which will be asked. Perhaps between you you could decide
who is going to lead on the answer to each question as that will
save me from going down the line and saying are there any more
comments to be made. Professor Galbraith, would you like to start?
Professor Galbraith: My Lord Chairman, thank
you very much indeed for the invitation, we are delighted to be
here, and I should probably briefly introduce my colleagues to
you. On my right is Dr Tom Tew, who is Chief Scientist at Natural
England, then Mark Tasker who is the Head of Marine Advice in
JNCC and Dr Clare Eno from CCW who is involved in marine and fishery
matters for them. Very briefly, just by way of introduction, it
is important that we say from the statutory agencies that our
aim is to manage the natural heritage and biodiversity around
us in a manner that ensures its conservation but also that ensures
its sustainability where that is appropriate, and that encompasses
the fishing interest and the fish interest in the seas around
the UK. It is important also that I say we recognise the great
economic and cultural importance of fishing to the UK and that
its future management is really at a critical stage now; we are
aiming to develop the sustainable management of the sea collectively
with others. The food from the marine environment is indeed a
key service that we get from that ecosystem. We will hopefully
return to the ecosystem word a little later on, but that food
is a key service provided by a healthy ecosystem, and that is
a service that requires careful management and planning. We note,
just in passing, that many of the global fisheries are actually
in decline or have declined over recent years and indeed we see
this as a critical time, and a real opportunity, to try to address
some of the management issues that are inherent in fishery management
within the UK, within Europe and globally. We should say also
that we are keen to continue to work with the fishing industry,
with government and with others to develop the way forward for
this important industry that we have around our shores. That is
really all we need to say by way of introduction, but it might
help if I explained a little bit briefly about our role in the
agencies. We are, as you know, Government-funded bodies, we are
advisers to the Government on the natural environment and its
conservation, and that positions us to advise on fish matters
and fishing is part of that; so we advise on land-based issues,
on agriculture, and on sea-based issues in relation to fish and
fisheries. We advise at the UK level to the UK Government, co-ordinated
through JNCC, and Mark Tasker is co-ordinating today, but we also
advise the devolved administrations in their own right on these
matters, and again we do that in a variety of manners. I should
mention also that we do have some international roles and, again,
my colleague Mark Tasker has an international advisory function
in relation to marine and fisheries management, so hopefully that
positions us, with our remit on biodiversity, our role in developing
marine protected areas through the Habitats Directive in particular,
to have a dialogue today and indeed beyond today. We are interested
in how the Common Fisheries Policy, for example, relates to other
directives—to the Habitats Directive, the Birds Directive—and
to other interests that are coming to the fore in the marine environment.
I hope that background gives you the position as to where we are
coming from.
Chairman: Thank you very much.
Q251 Viscount Brookeborough: You
said you were UK-wide, can I ask you why, perhaps, there is no
representation from Northern Ireland?
Professor Galbraith: Northern Ireland is part
of the Joint Committee. The Environment Department in Northern
Ireland is an agency of government, slightly separate from ourselves,
so it is closer to government than we are. Mark, you may want
to tackle the JNCC level.
Mr Tasker: That more or less answers the question
in that the Environment and Heritage Service, which we work with
most closely, is part of the Northern Ireland Government as compared
with our slightly offset roles as agencies, so we can give our
advice but they are actually part of the receivers as well as
the givers of the advice in Northern Ireland. We do involve them
in most of our discussions on fisheries.
Q252 Chairman: They are not excluded
it sounds then.
Mr Tasker: Not at all, they are very, very welcome.
Q253 Viscount Brookeborough: Poachers
and gamekeepers.
Professor Galbraith: Yes.
Q254 Chairman: You have really answered
the first question which is to outline the role of the agencies
with respect to the CFP. Perhaps I could move on to the ecosystem-based
approach to fisheries management. One of the general objectives
that you are striving to achieve in fisheries policy and management
is the implementation of this ecosystem-based approach to fisheries
management which was introduced in the 2002 CFP reform regulation.
We heard last week from the RSPB that the concept is rather loosely
defined, this ecosystem approach, and we would as a Committee
be grateful to hear how you interpret it and also how you feel
that something of that nature can be delivered.
Professor Galbraith: I personally have a background
in ecosystem management and in ecosystem thinking. By way of introduction,
for me ecosystem management really means five things: one is about
scale, so it has to be a large enough scale to be meaningful and
an ecosystem could encompass that; secondly, it has to be holistic,
so it has to take on board not just one species or two, not just
one habitat or two, but as much as we can together, in a way of
thinking; thirdly, it has to be long term, and that is an important
part in today's discussion, it is about planning for the long
term, for sustainability; fourthly, it has to involve people and
behind that are the economics and the services that they get from
the ecosystem, so the people dimension, getting them involved
in the planning, is absolutely crucial to the ecosystem approach;
and then, fifthly, it is the environmental processes behind it.
It is not just about looking at numbers of animals, of fish or
anything, it is looking at how they interact. Getting that understanding
on all five categories may appear complex, but we can hopefully
simplify that in the years ahead. The key point for me though
is leading all that to an agreed outcome; we have to get an agreed
outcome on how to manage any ecosystem, and when you apply that
to the marine environment you can see the difficulties in terms
of the scale and in terms of the complexity, but taking that together
is the way that we would like to see things progress. You could
then say "what does that actually mean"? Take any one
of the words, take long term, there are issues that we could develop
in terms of long term planning: we could look to see how the people,
communities and others are built into that planning system, so
the ecosystem approach is fairly well worked through. Applying
it to the marine system in particular is tricky, it is difficult,
but it is a sensible way to progress and I do think that much
of what has happened in the past ten years or so takes us towards
an ecosystem style of management and the marine environment should
be able to cope with that.
Q255 Chairman: How far do you think
we have got down the road on that?
Professor Galbraith: There is a long, long way
to go. There is an information base that we have got to address
to get an understanding of what is happening in the marine environment;
to understand people's involvement and people's perception is
important as well, and what they think is happening in the environment,
so there is a long way to go but it is possible to take that approach
forward. If you are looking to develop a sustainable and healthy
ecosystem you have to adopt the wider approach, the longer term
approach, and one that does look at the processes as well as the
individual populations. It sounds complex, but there are bits
in there that can be adopted in years to come. My colleagues may
want to add to that.
Dr Tew: I would just add some context around
why it is difficult in the marine ecosystem and compare it with
terrestrial habitats, because on land we tend to manage the big
primary producers called trees and therefore you end up managing
the habitat, in effect, and how the herbivores and carnivores
fit into that is intuitive to us because we manage habitat, whereas
at sea we are effectively always trying to manage the top of the
food chain, the predators, the single species of fish. It is not
intuitive for us to understand that their production depends on
the healthy marine ecosystem, and that is why I think we have
a long way to go. There is an increasing body of evidence from
around the world that healthy ecosystems, indeed straight measures
of biodiversity, are actually well correlated with a range of
other services such as the amount of fish or other ecosystem services,
so that evidence is growing but I do not think it is intuitive
to us as humans as to why that is important.
Mr Tasker: My Lord Chairman, if I could come
in too, recognising that Professor Pope is here, and who has written
several good papers on ecosystem approach, the question relates
particularly to an ecosystem-based approach to fisheries management,
and the fisheries management bit is perhaps the bit that we need
to drill down into in relation to the CFP. I have always felt
that we are trying to run, we are trying to get too complex too
early. One of the fundamental things that we are still not doing
very well is taking account of what effect the ecosystem has on
fish stocks and then taking account of what effect fishing is
having on the ecosystem. Both of those things are getting more
tractable in terms of scientific understanding, but building those
into the science system and building them into the advice system
still is proving quite challenging. If I can give an example,
if you have a very cold winter many young sole are killed; we
do not have a system by which shortly after a very cold winter
you actually decrease the amount of fishing going on in the sole
fishery, so there are some fairly simple mechanisms, in my view,
that can be brought in. I should actually say on the positive
side that there are some approaches where this is working—and
I again refer to Professor Pope who used to be a professor at
Troms' University in north Norway—there they are responding
in fisheries management with a rather simple system to temperature
changes. Changes in sea temperature change what they decide to
do. That could be applied much more widely, but the drive has
not really been there to do it and it is partly because we may
have over-elaborated this view of what the ecosystem approach
is and, rather than taking it step by step by step, we have gone
a bit too complex too early. That is an answer to how we would
like to implement, or how can we deliver, the interpretation that
was given by my colleagues.
Q256 Lord Cameron of Dillington:
Just to follow up on that for a moment, do you think it is challenging
and very difficult because we are not funding the research enough?
Is it a matter of putting more money into more complex research
and do you think that it is possible to bring the scientific research
perhaps closer in agreement to the fishermen?
Mr Tasker: There are two good questions there.
Are we funding science enough? It is difficult to judge. If you
ask any scientist they will always say no and it also depends
on what you spend it on. We are doing a lot of almost knee-jerk
tracking of things that we have been doing for many years, which
maybe we could simplify a bit and divert that money into some
of these other interfaces of how the ecosystem might be changing
that may not have gone through the system. I have now forgotten
your second question.
Professor Galbraith: We would welcome a trial
of the ecosystem approach; there is work on land, if you like,
and it would be very good to have a parallel in the marine environment
to take what we might now hear as a way forward, to perhaps put
it into practice and then monitor that very carefully, so in that
regard, yes, it would be appropriate to fund this.
Q257 Chairman: Perhaps we need Richard
Attenborough to do a television programme.
Professor Galbraith: That would be very
helpful.
Q258 Lord Cameron of Dillington:
My Lord Chairman, my other question was do you think that the
scientists can be brought perhaps closer to the fishermen in terms
of understanding each other's business?
Professor Galbraith: I have a particular view
on that, I believe they can, and when you look at many of the
issues that we have dealt with over the past ten or 15 years you
start at opposite ends of the spectrum, on the poles as it were,
and the only way forward is to bring people towards the middle,
so I certainly have a very clear hope and optimism that we have
to come together. Again, whether that is a land-based problem
or whether, in this case, it is the marine fisheries then it is,
in a way, the only way forward.
Dr Tew: Can I just add a comment which partly
addresses both questions. To me a large part of the answer is
to do with scale, because work on doing research in the marine
environment is complicated and expensive and difficult so you
end up doing small-scale experiments, and the fishermen can see
that you cannot extrapolate. So the science needs to be done on
a bigger scale and that will bring the scientists closer together
with the fishermen's understanding because the fishermen understand
how the marine ecosystem works. When you do a small-scale experiment
over a seabed perhaps the size of this room, then you will get
colonisation from species simply walking in, you will not replicate
the real damage to the ecosystems or the real ecosystem processes
that are working, so for me scale is an issue. The second issue
really is the mix of science between near shore and inshore research
and offshore research, and we do need to be careful how we balance
those two because there are a lot of large sums of money being
spent on very sexy and innovative deep sea research and we are
all in favour of that, but we are sometimes at risk of ignoring
some of the things which are literally closer to home, about which
we do not have much information—I do not want to paint a
picture that we are ignorant of what is happening out there, but
we could do a lot more.
Chairman: Thank you very much for that; that
is really a look at the future and we ought to seek your views
on the current issues and the current management. Lord Plumb.
Q259 Lord Plumb: It is encouraging,
My Lord Chairman, to hear that there is a possibility of science
and practice working more closely together, and one hopes soon,
and it is also encouraging to hear comments moving towards simplification.
It all sounds complicated and if you had been with us yesterday,
listening to the debate on the Lisbon Treaty, you would have heard
several times the importance of working alone rather than the
reverse and the word subsidiarity was continually arising and
so on; nevertheless, we are dealing with a European policy and,
reading your five points under "Management tools", they
are quite interesting but you do seem to be a little cautious
over management tools and we would like you to expand perhaps
on these, as to how you see the future. The RSPB was strongly
in favour of capacity and effort limitation, arguing that TACs
are too blunt a tool, and then a witness we had from CEMARE insisted
that efficient management should be via outputs and not inputs.
Everything surely depends on the management tools and the acceptability
of those management tools, both by the scientists and by the operator,
so it is important from our point of view that you give us factually
the benefits of your advice on how this can be done.
Professor Galbraith: I will ask my colleague
Dr Tew to lead on that.
Dr Tew: My Lord Chairman, if this does get too
complicated please stop me and I will try to explain it in a better
way.
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