On October 3, 2019, the UK government announced a ‘call for evidence’ from the public regarding the potential implementations of five new Highly Protected Marine Areas (HPMAs), which closes at the end of the month. These HPMAs would be the toughest form of marine protection in the UK and would expand upon the 220,000 km² of areas already designated as Marine Conservation Zones.

We spoke with Jean-Luc Solandt, specialist on UK and EU Marine Protected Area (MPA) policy, ecology and delivery and principal scientist on MPAs for the Marine Conservation Society to find out his thoughts regarding further marine protection in UK waters.

Beth Finney (BF): Many members of the public trust that, once an MPA is established, it’s out of our hands and it’s being managed in the right way. But that’s not the case?

Jean-Luc Solandt (JS): No, sadly that’s just the first step. The easy step.

BF: Do you think that the UK government has relied on that public assumption?

JS: Of course, they’re politicians. That might be cynical, but they want to spread the idea that they’re being green when they’re not. Getting the MPA assigned is the first stage in a very long process. If they were assigned with management measures (as they are in California, New Zealand and Australia) already built in, then perhaps I’d be less cynical. But marine protection management is a very difficult thing to get agreed, especially when you’re trying to set up so many MPAs in a relatively short time, when there’s a huge network being established over the course of around 10 years, it’s a much bigger task. So I’m sympathetic to a certain extent.

BF: Do you believe the HPMAs will be more effective than MPAs in achieving the necessary marine protection in the UK?

JS: They would if they were being designated over large areas. I think we need large areas of protection offshore, whilst inshore areas can be set up by communities. You can’t get these things to be respected if communities don’t want them. We’ve got more than 350 designated MPAs currently, but we’ve calculated that only 7% of those are protected from bottom trawling. So, in my opinion, only 7% of our MPAs are actually protected, and even less are designed as complete no-take zones. We’ve got a long way to go with the ones we’ve already got and I don’t want this consultation to be a distraction from that bigger message.

If we’ve got 25% (approximately 150,000 km square) of the seas in so-called MPAs, I’d rather get them working first, rather than start something new could be a distraction.

BF: If there’s such limited management of our current MPAs, how would introducing HPMAs alter that?

JS: It wouldn’t much – initially as there would be so few, and they’re likely to be miniscule. Government are thinking of setting up five ‘pilot’ sites, not 355. So they can put some budget towards an area that is going to be no-take, and then in that zone – this has happened all around the world where they are a bit more advanced than us,  like in New Zealand, Australia and California – you can then see what the impacts of your other activities are both in other MPAs and in ‘open’ seas. They act as ‘reference’ or ‘control’ sites because as the biomass and the natural species diversity builds up in them, you can refer to them compared to areas outside where extraction and dumping happens. They then set that against another adjacent areas where there is varying levels of human activity. It gives us a good idea of what is going to happen to the sea. That’s been used as an argument for the last 15 years. In 2012-2013 the government had an opportunity to set up approximately 60 no-take zones, which were recommended by some stakeholder groups, but they didn’t even designate one. We think the government was pressured by the fishing lobby at the time. There’s a lot of kickback from industry.