We recently wrote to Gillian Martin MSP, the Scottish Government’s Cabinet Secretary for Climate Action and Energy about our ongoing concerns around the protection of Scotland’s seas.
For years the members of this coalition have been concerned that the Scottish Government has purported to lead on ocean conservation by confusing ‘designation’ of marine protected areas (MPAs) with the actual protection of Scotland’s seas. Recently the Government continued to repeat this problem by stating (in response to previous correspondence): “37% of our seas are now designated as MPAs, exceeding the global biodiversity target to achieve MPA coverage of 30% of global seas by 2030.” And yet, at the same time, many of these supposedly ‘protected areas’ have no fisheries management in place – just 5% of Scotland’s coastal seas are protected from methods of fishing that can degrade the seafloor, namely bottom-trawling and scallop dredging.
Alongside Scottish Environment LINK’s Marine Group, we have therefore asked that the Scottish Government “is more transparent in communicating progress towards a well-managed network of MPAs and avoids conflating the extent of designation alone with the achievement of the 30×30 target” as well as requesting publication of the Government’s “interpretation of the 30×30 target in the marine context, including the specific criteria and indicators it will use to assess whether area-based measures at sea genuinely contribute to this commitment under the Global Biodiversity Framework“.
This coalition wants to see management of our seas that protects inshore habitats to secure wider ecosystem recovery, so that well-managed, sustainable, low impact fishing can once again thrive in our coastal seas: more protection, more fish, more jobs.
You can read the letter in full here.
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