UK Government Adds New Marine Protected Areas Nearly 8x the Size of Greater London

Seahorses are among the species that will benefit from the new protections. Andrey Nekrasov / iStock
The UK government has added 12,000 square kilometers (approximately 4,633 square miles) to England's "blue belt" of protected marine areas, meaning the UK now protects a swath of its ocean nearly twice the size of England itself, The Guardian reported Friday.
The 41 new Marine Conservation Zones were created by Environment Secretary Michael Gove Friday and cover an area off the coast of England that is nearly eight times the size of greater London, according to a government press release.
"The UK is already leading the rest of the world by protecting over 30 percent of our ocean — but we know there is more to do. Establishing this latest round of Marine Conservation Zones in this Year of Green Action is another big step in the right direction, extending our blue belt to safeguard precious and diverse sea life for future generations to come," Gove said.
We’ve introduced 41 new #MarineConservationZones 🌊 to protect #marinelife. They cover 12,000 square km – an area al… https://t.co/Ps5Cce7Zpi— Defra UK (@Defra UK)1559278276.0
The new zones range from the waters around the Isles of Scilly in the south to the Northumberland coast in the north, The Independent reported. They will protect species like rare stalked jellyfish, short-snouted seahorses, eider ducks, basking sharks and ocean quahog and habitats including ross worm reefs and blue mussel beds.
The Wildlife Trusts celebrated the occasion with a Twitter thread on the history of marine protections in the UK. In the 1980s, the group said, there were only three Marine Nature Reserves in the waters surrounding the country.
In the 1980s we only had 3 Marine Nature Reserves in the whole of the UK, and our seas were under serious pressure… https://t.co/LNjmj0P58B— The Wildlife Trusts (@The Wildlife Trusts)1559294374.0
"During this time, horse mussel communities were destroyed in one of the few marine nature reserves we had. There was an epidemic of seal deaths in the North Sea. We knew we needed a new approach," the group wrote.
In 2002, the group agitated for a bill that would better facilitate the protection of the UK's marine environment. They sent 250,000 signatures to Westminster, the seat of the UK Parliament, in a "Petition Fish" to promote the bill.
Finally, in 2009, the government passed the Marine and Coastal Access Act, which empowered it to designate and manage protected areas.
Finally, the Government announced the Marine and Coastal Access Act in 2009. What a turning point! It gave us the l… https://t.co/CgcUDc3XJw— The Wildlife Trusts (@The Wildlife Trusts)1559296364.0
Since 2013, the government has designated 91 Marine Conservation Zones off the English coast in three waves, bringing the UK's total number of all kinds of protected areas up to 355, The Independent reported.
Director of Living Seas at The Wildlife Trusts Joan Edwards called Friday's announcement "fantastic news."
"Now we need to see good management of these special places to stop damaging activities such as beam-trawling or dredging for scallops and langoustines which harm fragile marine wildlife," Edwards said in the government press release.
There is, however, debate about how effective the UK government's efforts have been when it comes to actually protecting marine life.
"These areas are poorly monitored and we have little evidence that wildlife is benefiting," WWF Head of Marine Policy Alec Taylor said, as The Independent reported. "We need proper management of activities within the boundaries of all marine protected areas and strict enforcement of safeguarding laws. Only then can we secure a future where people and nature thrive."
These new zones are key to protect our marine wildlife but they won't work if not properly managed. That's why we'r… https://t.co/I2aDnCf7Oy— WWF-UK (@WWF-UK)1559291401.0
But Edwards told The Guardian that the protected areas had made a real difference.
"They are not paper parks. Many of the sites here in Devon have had scallop dredging banned so the most damaging activities have been stopped," she said. "The pressure of fishing has been removed from a very large part of our seabed which is good for nature conservation, and good for fishermen because if you have areas that are left alone they will produce more fish."
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<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
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<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
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