January 30, 2025
We don’t need a review to know bottom trawling has no place in marine protected areas
I have been reflecting on yesterday’s speech by Minister for Water and Flooding Emma Hardy at the Coastal Futures conference, and her statement to parliament. With the shadow of the wider drive for growth, it marks the first major intervention to unlock the expansion of offshore wind, while protecting and recovering nature at sea.
The minister discussed welcome measures, such as noise limits to protect whales and dolphins when building turbines, and new marine protected areas (MPAs to compensate for the impacts of wind farms. But also included some concerning elements, like a UK Marine Strategy to bring our seas back to healthy status, which is five years after the legal deadline to do so has passed, and provides no clarity on the actual plan. There is also a mysterious ‘review’, of the MPA network in England, which appears to be designed to provide certainty for the fishing industry.
Any answers?
Notably, the headline announcements failed to answer key questions, to provide any assurance on effective management for the MPAs we already have, or to fill in the critical details on how new ones would be designated and managed.
Make no mistake: the extent of the climate and nature crisis demands radical, new ideas to accelerate the green energy transition and bring our seas back to life. The government is rightly recognising there will be fundamental trade-offs in hitting our energy and environmental goals, and looking for solutions to move forward.
But let’s also be clear: we don’t need a MPA review to tell us our safe havens for nature are still being polluted by dirty oil and gas or destroyed by bottom trawling. We don’t need further reviews to tell us less than half of the protected features in England’s MPA network, from seagrass to seabirds, are healthy.
And yet yesterday we got no further commitments to continue the process to protect English offshore areas from the threats of bottom trawling and no indications of a timeline for that process. Instead we heard from the minister that the MPA review is intended to provide certainty for the fishing industry, and that government wants to avoid “blanket bans” in MPAs. From beyond the walls of Coastal Futures, we’ve also heard ongoing attempts by the Chancellor to portray nature as a blocker to growth, a narrative which is as misguided as it is deeply damaging.
A chance to thrive
Our seas, and the protected areas that are so vital to their health, have not yet been given a chance to thrive. MPAs free from trawling will be more resilient to any future challenge – beacons of hope for wildlife in the climate crisis. Yet what we actually see is more delay to action that would actually deliver this recovery.
As we seek to deliver solutions to the climate crisis with the equally urgent task of recovering wildlife, it is vital that government doesn’t lose sight of crucial work already underway that could finally get the most damaging threats out of our supposedly protected sites.
Let’s hold the oil and gas industry to account for their ongoing pollution, while ending new oil and gas once and for all. Let’s deliver whole-site bans on trawling. Let’s deliver a just transition for coastal communities and a cleaner, greener, and more nature-filled future for all.