Safeguarding seas key to climate crisis

The climate crisis isn’t just about burning forests. It’s about safeguarding our oceans as well.

That’s because the ocean is the world’s largest carbon sink, holding 50 times more carbon than the atmosphere. The UK can play a vital role in protecting our marine environment, by expanding its Marine Protected Areas (MPAS) and by making sure they’re properly protected from over-fishing.

Right now, not only are we actually damaging the ability of the sea to absorb our carbon emissions, we’re also diminishing the UK’S key fish stocks, with two-thirds now over-fished and severely depleted.

Giant supertrawlers are the highest intensity fishing vessels on earth, capable of catching and processing hundreds of tonnes of fish in a day, with nets up to a mile long. Incredibly, they’re currently allowed to spend thousands of hours fishing inside UK MPAS every year. What sort of protection is that? At the same time, UK fishing boats today have to work 17 times as hard for the same size catches as 120 years ago. The intensive fishing methods being used, such as bottom trawling (dragging heavy weighted nets across the sea floor, in an effort to catch more fish) release more carbon each year than the global aviation industry, with the UK having the fourth highest bottom trawling emissions worldwide.

The Prime Minister has committed the UK to being a world leader in ocean protection. To do that, we need urgent action to make sure our MPAS do exactly what it says on the tin. That means extending and fully protecting them, and ridding them of supertankers and harmful fishing practices.

It would not only protect our seas as a carbon sink, but help revitalize fish stocks and our fishing industry as well.

Geoff Allan