This review, which is quite important, was published on World Ocean Day two weeks ago. It gained a lot of acclaim at the time and this was pretty well-deserved. The group (which I said at the time it was set up, back in July 2019, looked like a good one), chaired by former Environment minister Richard Benyon have made a string of recommendations which look pretty good to me. Now let’s hope that DEFRA get on with it!
There are 25 recommendations and these are the ones that caught my eye the most:
1. HPMAs should be defined as areas of the sea that allow the protection and recovery of marine ecosystems. They prohibit extractive, destructive and depositional uses and allow only non-damaging levels of other activities.
2. Government should introduce HPMAs in conjunction with the existing MPA network. In many instances, sections of existing MPAs can be upgraded to HPMAs.
3. Government must set conservation objectives for HPMAs that allow full recovery of the marine environment and its ecological processes.
4. Government must take a ‘whole site approach’ to HPMAs to conserve all habitats and species within the site boundary. This includes mobile and migratory species that visit or pass through the site.
6. Government and local authorities should seek to maximise the direct and indirect social, economic and cultural benefits of HPMA designation.
7. Government should acknowledge displacement in its decision making during HPMA designation. It should put strategies in place to support marine uses and avoid creating new problems from moving pressures to other parts of the marine environment.
8. Government should plan the sustainable and equitable use of the marine environment. This includes ensuring that Marine Plans are sufficiently spatially prescriptive to address competing demands on space, alongside the need to allow nature to recover.
10. Government should use ‘best available evidence’ to designate HPMAs and should not use a lack of perfect evidence as a reason to delay HPMA designation.
11. Government must introduce and manage HPMAs using quick and pragmatic legislative approaches.
12. Government should identify sites for HPMA designation using the principles of ecological importance; naturalness, sensitivity and potential to recover, and ecosystem services. Social and economic principles are a secondary filter.
13. HPMAs should be located within existing MPAs as the existing site will act as a buffer zone to the HPMA. However, in the future alternative locations could be considered, such as co-location with existing and emerging marine industries.
16. Government must issue guidance on permitted activities within HPMAs, underpinned by a simple categorisation approach aligned to International Union for Conservation of Nature categories.
22. In the longer term, government should reconsider existing marine governance to ensure current structures do not hinder the introduction of HPMAs.
25. Five pilot sites are the bare minimum and to cover different environments and activities, the number of pilot sites should have sufficient geographic spread to cover nearshore, inshore and offshore areas and different regional seas.
I think the recommendations are good but they are hardly surprising. Well, they are a little bit surprising because one has got accustomed to hoping for the best and getting something below par, but these recommendations are pretty much what you could have written down quite near the start of a review process. If government is serious about marine nature protection, and it remains to be seen whether or not it is, then the test will be how quickly things swing into action. Will we wait for months, years, before government responds to this report? And then what will the response say? And what will the action look like?
I’m impatient for action. I expect Richard Benyon and his group are impatient for action. If the fish, molluscs, plankton and echinoderms in the sea knew that they might get better protection they would be impatient for action too. It remains to be see whether government is eager to act.
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Mark,
7. Government should acknowledge displacement in its decision making during HPMA designation. It should put strategies in place to support marine *uses* and avoid creating new problems from moving pressures to other parts of the marine environment.
Uses or Users in original please? Makes quite a difference.
But good news overall, I hope it doesn’t just get buried in the graveyard of new ideas called Defra.
jbc – if you follow the link to the original you’ll see that it is as the original.
thanks Mark 🙂
This is definitely a big step forward from what’s happening in the USA. In a recent trip to Maine Trump signed a proclamation to remove protected status for a marine area. A move to get cheap votes from the commercial fishing sector no doubt, but as the original proclamation was an Obama era one very hard to believe vindictiveness driven by intense jealousy wasn’t an element as well. I only found out about this from a late night American talk show host and it’s worrying how this received so little media attention, hope this total pratt gets chucked out in November, and we can make progress in securing more protection for marine life here, there and everywhere – https://redgreenandblue.org/2020/06/08/quietly-putting-hundreds-species-risk-trump-opens-marine-protected-areas-commercial-fishing/
As in so many situations like this it is actions that speak louder than words. In this respect I am afraid I have no. confidence what so ever in this West Minister Government and their puppet nature organisation, Natural England. Therefore whether they will produce anything meaningful from this review on a worthwhile time scale is very doubtful.
Let’s hope for the best but not be surprised if nothing happens in a meaningful amount of time.
The concept of HPMAs, or ‘Reference Areas’ as they were referred to then, was included in the Ecological Network Guidance (2010) which provided the scientific rationale and evidence base for completing the MPA network in Secretary of State waters. The Benyon Review recommendations are consistent with the ENG – no surprise there because the lead scientist on Defra’s Benyon Review support team (Dr Jen Ashworth) was one of the lead authors of the ENG, and one of the expert members of the Review Group (Prof Callum Roberts) was a member of the then Ministers’ Scientific Advisory Panel for MPAs back in 2010. So we have been waiting 10 years for HPMAs while vast areas of sea in UK Overseas Territories have been designated de facto HPMAs by the Foreign Office – time Defra got the job done at home!
In Scotland the MPAs are no more than virtual parks. Scallop dredgers have been reported breaching the boundaries 115 times in the last 3 years, and that was only when they were spotted. The fines are derisory e.g.£2000, and no deterrent. Divers have videod seabed damage but Marine Scotland will not act on it. You can have all the MPAs or HMPAs you want, without policing they are meaningless.
Another report. Another day. Continued damage to the seabed. Government in the pocket of industry. All the while that ’10 years to save our biosphere’ winds down to nought. R Benyon as marine minister in 2013 had 65 areas recommended to him. That was the chance then. Current minister Eustace has stated he doesn’t want them. There are around 50 large offshore paper park Marine Protected Areas in place. If we made them highly protected some fishers would lose out but millions of people would gain.