Natural England

An introductory speech to an evening reception by Helen Phillips. 7 October 2008

Nik, Many thanks for those kind words

After a long day it’s good to see so many of you here tonight – I promise not to keep you from the food for too long.

But I do want to a few minutes to share with you Natural England’s approach to marine conservation, particularly the emphasis we are putting on bringing people, stakeholders from industry and communities into the process of establishing a network of marine protected areas.

Recovering the state of our marine environment must be a priority in the 21st century. We continue to fish, to dredge, to drill, to build and to harness the power of the sea for energy, and today 90% of world trade is moved by sea. These are legitimate uses of the sea which we should not seek to end.

But unlike on land where we have planning laws and landscape designation, nature reserves and national parks, the overwhelming majority of the marine environment remains unprotected.

The sea in comparison to land is the wild wild west – the last unregulated frontier. Only 2.2% of England’s waters are protected for marine conservation, which is unbelievably double the worldwide average. As we have all seen from the posters less than 1% of our seas enjoy protection.

We believe that the only way to secure a network of Marine Protected Areas that are so urgently needed is to put the public at the heart of their establishment – making people central to any decisions and designations, monitoring and ongoing management.

It doesn’t matter if you are working in the most crowded country in Europe, which England now is, or more remote parts of the world – people need to be fully engaged in the process.

The English are never more than 70 miles from the sea. It dominates our history and our culture. But as a nation we know little of the complex habitats and huge diversity of marine life that lie beneath the waves, and understand less about the impact of our activities upon it.

Out of sight, our seas are being changed significantly. Many fish stocks are in collapse, here as across the world – some previously common species to our waters like the common and white skate are now rarely found.

Demands on our seas are not limited to fisheries. In the UK we have national renewable energy targets to generate 25GW from marine sites. But the impacts of the turbines and supporting infrastructure remain largely unknown.

So what is the answer? It is not to stop commercial activity – as the conservation sector we need to do better than to ‘just say no’.

We need to work with the fishing and renewable energy industries, among others, to find the right ways and the right places for these activities to continue, while allowing the state of our marine environment to recover and flourish again.

In the UK we have a Marine Bill which is just about to embark on its voyage through the Parliamentary process, offering politicians a once in a lifetime opportunity to deliver long term security for the marine environment.

But even if a Marine Bill with teeth is passed – and the jury I have to say is still out on that – it does not mean that job of conserving the marine environment is done.

In the UK we have had legislation before but never the level of pubic engagement that we need. The wider public clamour, beyond the usual suspects in the conservation sector, was missing – and crucially is still missing.

The problem is not that we don’t yet know enough – there is a remarkable collection of knowledge of the marine environment here tonight in this room. The real problem is that we are not communicating the vast knowledge and boundless enthusiasm for the undersea held by many here to the public at large – they do not appreciate what is at stake. I think that’s what makes some of the innovations we have seen today with Google and others so important because they are reaching out to new audience, reaching out to the ‘unconverted’.

The challenge for the conservation sector – marine and terrestrial – is to bridge the disconnect that has grown between the majority of people and the natural environment. In England despite all our losses we still have over 10 000 species in our seas – we have basking sharks, and sea horses; porpoises, whales and dolphins; soft and hard corals and over 800 species of algae.

But our survey and polling work showed that nearly half of our population thought that their local patch of sea was ‘barren’; the overwhelming majority thought the sea was murky and dirty; and many felt sad and ashamed – not an emotion that inspires people to action.

We are investing resources in a public outreach campaign to connect people to their local undersea landscape. You will see a short film about this is just a moment.

On land people can see, feel and touch the natural environment – the challenge for everyone in marine conservation is to bring the undersea world to the people.

We recently ran events across the country where tens of thousands of people came to learn about wonders of the undersea world. The message we had played back to us time and time again was ‘I never knew so much life was out there’.

Along side the public awareness programme we are implementing an inclusive programme to identify where the network of MPAs should be designated. This programme is learning from successful processes in California and Australia.

We have been trialling this process in the south west of England - here our ‘Finding Sanctuary’ programme is bringing the public and stakeholders into the decision making process.

The programme being implemented is ground breaking and, I hope, will enable us to protect and recover all of the diversity in our seas rather than a few selected species.

I hope then that we can work together to build that vital constituency and wider public support for our work across Europe and further afield to create the wide-reaching network of Marine Protected Areas by 2012 that are so urgently needed.

I am delighted to continue this theme by welcoming National Geographic to launch the new edition of the Atlas of the Oceans.

Our speakers from National Geographic will need little introduction to many of you. Sylvia Earle is an Explorer in Residence and John Francis is the National Geographic’s Vice President responsible for Research, Conservation and Exploration. And I believe that John is going to lead off...