14 August 2012
Is the fishing industry the victim of double standards? We have become accustomed to offshore projects such as wind farms and aggregate dredging receiving planning consent based upon an official assessment that individual projects have minimal environmental impacts.
Even when a cumulative impact assessment is undertaken it usually only concerns the immediate region of the development. Where the extent of an impact is unknown, licence conditions are often applied to require a developer to monitor potential effects so that science can be better informed. Precautionary management in these cases is not applied to rule that the development cannot go ahead unless there is a clear evidence based threat to a biological community of interest – birds in the case of some offshore wind farms. Yet the scale of marine installations, particularly for renewable energy, is set to grow massively over the next few years, and not just in UK waters, but also in the waters of neighbouring marine states such as Germany, the Netherlands and France.
Fair Treatment
The same rules do not seem to apply to fishing. In contrast to marine developers, it is the entirety of fishing activity that is now the focus in driving policies that would potentially limit its extent. It is commonly claimed by environmental campaigners and their supporters in the media that the fishing industry has free access to all sea areas, and moreover that as a minimum the vast majority of seabed is subject to regular disturbance by bottom trawling; at its most extreme, bottom trawling is likened to felling rainforests annually by some of the more excitable campaigners, when fishing that returns to the same grounds from year to year can offer no comparison.
The campaign for MPAs has been thinly veiled surrogate for limiting the activities of the fishing industry. Many people, when presented with “heat” maps of fishing activity data graded from blue to an “alarming” shade of red have automatically concluded there must be a problem. Last year the Federation, its members, and others in the industry battled multiple stakeholders on the English Marine Conservation Zones (MCZ) regional projects to prevent those who had drawn this conclusion from allowing the projects to make erroneous recommendations on MCZ site conservation objectives and management measures. In the interests of participatory decision-making, broad stakeholder groups had been given the latitude to make such potentially influential recommendations.
As anyone in the fishing industry knows, you can’t gain a perspective of actual fishing pressures by simply viewing charts of fishing activity spanning huge areas; the scaling of data is completely out of context. Even vessel monitoring system (VMS) data is typically presented as data units categorised by the number of hours fished within a unit area, a necessary generalisation due to the two hourly ping of data points that characterise the underlying raw data. It can easily mislead the lazy and uninformed and form useful propaganda material for those unsympathetic to the fishing industry.
The Truth
The truth of the matter is that we do not yet have a definitive scientific answer over the extent to which the seabed is subject to contact by bottom gears in terms of intensity and extent, let alone whether it is significant for wider ecosystem functioning. One study that has attempted to apply science to the issue have estimated a fishing footprint of as little as 5 – 21% for English and Welsh waters1, standing in stark contrast to environmental campaigners claims that the industry is scraping the barrel of an empty sea. Whilst more work is needed to give more certainty to estimates, it is already clear that nowhere near the whole seabed is subject to fishing contact and the scientific consensus is that it is patchy at both fine as well as large scales of analysis. The Federation is working with scientists to unearth the truth.
Evidence Free Policy Hijack
It is now emerging that the evidence free campaigners are again seeking to influence policy makers. The Commission’s proposals to phase out deep sea trawling represents one disproportionate knee jerk response that would have serious economic and ecological repercussions from displaced fishing effort into the Celtic Sea.
Closer to home, in a recent consultation on setting targets to achieve good environmental status (GES) under the Marine Strategy Framework Directive, Defra had first identified a need for further work to better inform the extent of fishing pressures upon UK seabed sediment habitats and acknowledged there was an absence of conclusive evidence to inform the UK targets. Having no new evidence, it is now in danger of substituting this position for the kind of “expert judgement” that is misinformed by the presentational bias of fishing activity data that the public in the MCZ planning process were subjected to. The outcome would be to no longer question whether fishing seabed pressures should be curtailed, only by how much.
Fishing on Sediments
It is no surprise that sediment habitats form the bulk of where bottom fisheries are located. However, many of these habitats, particularly in shallow seas, are subject to natural variation and disturbance from waves and currents that mask the significance of fishing effects. The patchiness of fishing activity at the fine scale is a function of fishermen’s actions to avoid seabed obstacles and follow established fishing tows know to provide good returns. It is also important to take into account that the act of fishing itself is not wholly negative upon ecology. The disturbance of sediments offers some potentially positive functions such as nutrient dispersal and the promotion of food availability for some species that may be of benefit to fisheries. Certainly, highly fished areas continue to be productive fisheries despite the levels of disturbance, demonstrating they cannot be having dramatic damage to fish production. In contrast, in some areas where bottom trawling has been limited such as the North Sea plaice box, for example, the industry has witnessed a decline in fish and the seabed has become dominated by brittle stars and urchins. A question remains unanswered by science over whether a patchy distribution of fishing activity may contribute in some ways to biodiversity due to the variety of levels of disturbance, with some areas not fished at all across a given area.
A Clearer Headed Policy
As with some species of birds and wind farms, there is a case for specific and particularly vulnerable, rare and unique habitats (such as cold water corals or eel grass beds, for example) receiving protection from damaging pressures. However, concluding whether or not towed bottom gears should be curtailed upon sediment habitats in general should first be based upon understanding its extent and its ecological implications. Extent can be derived through the corroboration of various sources of data on fishing activity, and an understanding of gear metrics and seabed contact. Ecological implications need to be better informed through experimentation and monitoring, and its significance reliably linked to ecosystem level functions. In addition, an audit should be undertaken to better understand the economics and practicalities of seafood capture to inform the dependence of sustainable levels of production upon the levels of pressures exerted.
From a global perspective, there is no point, even from an ardent environmental campaigner’s point of view, of preventing maximum sustainable production from our fishery resources, and this even includes deriving sustainable yields from slower growing deep sea fish stocks. There are no viable alternatives to bottom towed gear fisheries for some species (try diving for scallops in 50 metres of water) and even fewer options if economic efficiency is a factor. Significant curtailment of trawl fisheries will only lead to a displacement of food production to other seas with fewer management constraints, or to other food sources which have far higher levels of comparable environmental effects to wild capture fisheries. Most agricultural food production systems are far more energy intensive and are derived from areas that bear no resemblance to the natural habitat that would otherwise occupy the area. By contrast, wild capture fisheries form the largest self-renewing food resource on earth.
Systematic, evidence based, and clear headed approaches to policy making are a pre-requisite for sustainable development. The government’s own sustainable development policy emphasises the responsible application of sound science. It is time that government refocused its attention upon its application of scientifically sound policy making, rather than bend to the alternative hysterical and evidence free nonsense that is emanating from environmental doomsayers.
ENDS
- Eastwood, P. D., Mills, C. M., Aldridge, J. N., Houghton, C. A., and Rogers, S. I. (2007) Human activities in UK offshore waters: an assessment of direct, physical pressure on the seabed. ICES Journal of Marine Science, 64: 453–463.