Marine Protected Areas

Ranging from Marine Parks to No Take Zones to Highly Protected Marine Reserves, MPAs probably have more names and flavours as there are organisations promoting or resisting them around the world.

And those promoting them range from fanatics who just want to see all creatures of the sea, and the marine environment left totally alone, to those who recognise that productive seas are essential for the purpose of providing sea food in an overcrowded world.

In the simplest terms (but once you start digging, there are few marine issues more complex), the theory is that all other methods of restraining overexploitation of marine resources have failed and that the only hope is to close large areas (up to a third of fishing grounds), allowing the marine life and environment to recover and to generate spill-over for harvesting in less protected areas.

On first sight, from an angling perspective, closure of areas to commercial exploitation would seem to be a good idea. Certainly nothing else seems to work very well.

But a few moments reflection will start to reveal some fundamental flaws in the thinking.

The most obvious of these is; if you are going to take out large areas of fishing grounds, unless you reduce the size of the fishing fleet and/or fishing effort then the same sized fleet will be seeking to take out the same amount of fish from the remaining area.

(Reducing the amount of fish that comes to market and destroying more productive boats is going to be politically very difficult to achieve).

So, although there might be advantages to the areas under protection, there will be increased degradation to the remaining unprotected areas.

There seems to be a hope amongst proponents of MPAs that ignoring the problems of fishery displacement will simply sort itself out, or that the spill-over benefits will go some way to compensating for the fishing activity in unprotected areas.

Another problem is that MPAs have gained most of their reputation for increasing the productivity of the marine environment in tropical reef areas, or where sedentary or semi-sedentary creatures such as shellfish and crustaceans can benefit.

Unfortunately there are relatively few such sites around the UK where the marine environment and fisheries are dominated by migratory species, moving from area to area (although it has been recognised that a network approach might be useful in protecting spawning and feeding grounds etc)

This illustrates just a couple of the many complex issues that surround this subject.

The truth is that until there are firm proposals for particular sites, with both the benefits and the downside fully explained, it is difficult to wholeheartedly support the concept of MPAs, even though instinctively most anglers would be in favour of any proposals that might promise a greater abundance of fish, and in particular, allow fish to grow bigger than modern efficient harvesting of available fish currently allows.

But what would be disastrous from an angling perspective is if the dogmatists win the argument and all forms of fishing, both commercial and recreational are unnecessarily excluded from areas previously of importance to Recreational Sea Anglers.

RSA has taken the approach that such a dogmatic approach is both unfair and unnecessary.

For a start, it has not been recreational pressure that has bought some species and some areas to their knees.

And if recreational pressure on residual stocks is not significant, then simply banning recreational fishing for dogmatic reasons alone would be untenable.

(And the same might be said for some commercial forms of fishing that will have no real impact on the overall objectives of a particular area).

(It is also recognised that there is a valid argument that unless some sites are designated total no catch, those monitoring the performance of MPAs under different conditions will not be able to tell what difference is made when a site is left totally undisturbed by anything or anyone).

With commitments both on an international and European level to introduce protected areas, and a strong lobby for their adoption from the powerful ‘green’ lobby, RSA needs to be very aware of both the opportunities and dangers that the inevitable introduction of widespread MPAs is likely to present, and to be involved fully in the many discussions now under way that will shape the way forward.

But it won’t be until firm proposals are presented for defined sites that anyone will be able to say one way or another whether any individual proposal is to be supported or rejected (or at least substantially modified) by strong RSA representation.

All that anglers can do now is to be aware of the many issues that need to be considered and to work to build the strong RSA representation that will be needed in future, or else be prepared to be steam-rollered out of some recreational fishing areas by more powerful voices for no good reason.

More Information at:

http://www.sacn.org.uk/Articles/Marine_Protected_Areas_and_Angling.html