A marine Klondike?

I’m deep in the Charlemagne building at the very heart of the European Commission in Brussels. It’s European Green Week and I was the warm-up act at the oceans session first thing this morning. A circular chamber with huge concentric rings of seats, translation booths, electronic gismos: cameras, fancy screens and microphones that really work. The eclectic audience ranged from senior EU officials to a busload of school kids; “keep it simple and visual” I had been told and duly obliged. The formula seemed to work and I’ve given radio interviews with Portuguese and Latvian stations and a slot with Croatian TV. Ahh, the wonders of Europia!

Yesterday I was in Gothenburg at the European Maritime Day; another presentation, a different topic and a different audience. This was followed by a quick 30 min shuttle flight to Copenhagen and a stampede of the Brusselcrats (not all from the EU) across Copenhagen airport for the connecting flight to Brussels where I got to the hotel at ten thirty to finish my presentation for today. I guess I’ll need an extra coffee after my flight back to Edinburgh tonight!

So what is all the fervour about? Europe really does seem to have discovered its seas. There are two sides to the coin however, and the two sides face in different directions though they depend on the same substance. The maritime side, represented by DG Mare (the Commission Directorate General responsible for marine policy), is focusing on blue growth; ‘sustainable growth’ is the catchphrase though by definition growth cannot be sustained for ever – and right now it’s feeling a bit wobbly. Let’s call it ‘growth from sustainable use of the sea’ (now I’m feeling happier). The other side is environmentalism, represented by DG Environment, largely under the banner of the Water Framework Directive and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive, two pieces of legislation that are transforming management of Europe’s aquatic environment. These two sides of the coin are like Yin and Yang; the softer, more feminine energy of ‘environment’ and the aggressive male energy of ‘maritime’. Like yin and yang, both are mutually dependent and need to seek harmony. No, I haven’t become a hippy; it really is like that; I even noticed that the male/female ratio was different in the two meetings, as was the kind of language employed. But I am digressing now…

The gist of the Maritime Agenda is blue growth and much of the excitement is about renewable energy and the technology needed to exploit it. The numbers flying around are pretty big - €10.4bn annual investment by 2020 - and the whole thing has the feeling of a vaguely orderly Klondike. Marine biotech and aquaculture are clear runners up. I attended a session on blue technology and this, disappointingly, turned out to be dominated by jaded shipbuilders behaving like kids who had their sweets stolen while they were squabbling over who had more. OK, I am being unfair but ships are hardly built in Europe anymore; lower costs and better lines of credit have swept the business to South East Asia and cooperation between builders in Europe is too little and too late. Worse still, given the current situation of international trade, there is a big overcapacity in the global fleet. The construction bubble has burst. Ships are still being delivered and orders so far in 2012 have plummeted to the lowest level on record. There are cash flow problems, risks of seizures by banks and no new lines of credit.

But this is where the blue-green agenda kicks in thanks to some yin mixing with the yang (a yin and tonic maybe?). The entire global fleet is out of date; hopelessly inefficient and pumping out dirty flue gases. This can all be resolved by better designs and modern technology leading to 30-40% less fuel use and, with scrubbers, very low emissions. Opportunities exist for technology development but the roadblock of credit lines remains. Even if the credit starts to flow, it would take 25 years to make the fleet more environmentally friendly.

So there is little cheer from traditional maritime industries, indeed there is a danger that existing knowhow will be lost in Europe. Nevertheless, there was huge optimism but much of this came from the ‘interface’ between the yin of environment and the yang of technology. But the sea is becoming crowded and there are many demands for exclusive access or property rights to sea areas for activities like renewables, aquaculture, fishing, transport, mining, recreation and conservation. There were many discussions about ‘marine spatial planning’ (MSP); the area where I contributed a short presentation based on our work from the EU KnowSeas project and its fellow projects MESMA and ODEMM. The MSP process has only been developed over the last decade; some 20 countries are actively engaged and four of these plus the USA have completed the first plans. Some 80-100 new MSPs are expected in the next decade, mostly in Western Europe, Australia and North America. A lot of new integrated science will be needed over this period.

So back to Brussels where the environmental yin was accompanied by a little yang; lots of exhibits from companies offering products and services sporting words such as ‘environmentally-friendly’, ‘low-energy’, and ‘sustainable’. I attended a session on the reform of the Common Fisheries Policy which was predictably boisterous (yin and yang do not always meet in harmony). The fisheries sector speaker, Henrik Svenberg, President of the Swedish Fishermen's Federation, was one of the new generation of fishermen, keen on following an ‘ecosystem approach’  and open to dialogue. The big debate is on subsidies, discards and the regionalisation of fisheries management, enthusiastically supported by most of those present but controversial because it is splitting the EU Member States, roughly across a North-South divide. Watch this space; the debate is only just beginning! There were three of us from Scotland asking lots of questions. “Is there anyone not from Scotland?” said the chairman with a smile.

The great turn on

Yesterday (Thursday 17th May) morning at ten, in a steel container on the edge of the Tralee Bay Caravan site in Argyll (see left), a momentous experiment got underway. For several weeks, a team of engineers had been drilling a directional well from the site through several hundred metres of bedrock and into the sediment under the bay. Now, cylinders of carbon dioxide had been connected to the well liner and the process has begun to bubble carbon dioxide through the sediments into the overlying marine ecosystem.

This seems like a crazy idea at first sight; a lot of public money spent to expose a tennis court-sized piece of the bottom of Ardmucknish Bay to the gas that it responsible for acidifying the oceans and contributing to climate change. But this little patch of sea floor may help to decide whether or not we use ‘Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS)’ as one way of reducing the impact of our carbon dioxide emissions on the Earth’s climate and on our seas.

Carbon capture and storage is a technique to refill depleted oil wells with compressed and liquefied carbon dioxide. The engineering has already been tested and cost/benefit studies made but serious questions remain: How permanent is the storage and what will happen if the storage wells or pipelines begin to leak? Geologists and engineers can work out the risk of failure (we already know this to be rather low) but, as yet, there is no credible evidence of likely ecosystem consequences of a leak. It is really not safe to implement CCS if we don’t have the answer to the question and this is why the UK Natural Environment Research Council, the Crown Estates and others have invested in running this experiment. Over the next few weeks, a lot of scientific ingenuity, mainly from SAMS, the Plymouth Marine Lab, the British Geological Survey and others, will be poured into getting an answer.

Does this mean we are supporters of CCS? The answer is that we are neither supporters nor detractors; we see this as a legitimate test of a potential tool for mitigating the damage we are causing to the planet from our huge carbon dioxide emissions. There are other tools in the box too: renewable energy, nuclear energy, energy efficiency, localism, geo-engineering; all these need dispassionate scrutiny and evaluation from the perspective of costs and benefits including the costs to our stock of natural capital (see my last blog) and the relationship to human values. Some may prove to be unacceptable, some may provide a temporary relief and others may offer longer-term solutions. A careful evaluation that examines ‘hidden’ as well as obvious tangible costs and benefits is bound to provide some surprises and will certainly cause us to question some of the fundamental assumptions of many policymakers regarding the economic model that our society is following.

Perhaps this may sound like scepticism; I hope not - we are focussing on healthy enquiry. A rather positive article about our CCS experiment appeared in the Daily Mail; comments on the online version included the view that the whole thing is a waste of public money because there is no relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and our climate. This illustrates the difference between scepticism and denial. Sceptics have actually been helpful in driving our own inquiry and ensuring scientific rigour. We know more about the influence of solar cycles for example thanks to the insistence of the sceptics that this might be an important factor and we have to thank them for it. As a result, we now know that solar cycles have triggered global-scale events in the past but that their contribution to contemporary warming is far less than humanity’s emissions of greenhouse gases. One would hope that at some point, most of them accept the weight of evidence and we can move on to other pressing questions – because there are so many uncertainties in knowledge that science can help to reduce. But some, occasionally with vested interests, raise the drawbridge and prefer to enter into the obscure realm of denial. Then sometimes, the whole thing gets very nasty indeed.

We should not be afraid of conducting socially and environmentally responsible experiments in the natural environment as well as in laboratory conditions. Lack of evidence from experimental sites is also delaying the development of a meaningful network of marine protected areas. The pace of global change is quickening (and I refer to biodiversity and habitat loss as well as climate change) and we need a short, medium and longer term strategy to deal with it.

Banking on marine natural capital

I’m on a train speeding through the green fields of England, not all of which are green because some of the rivers have burst their banks in the recent rain. I seem to spend a lot of my time in trains, partly because my job takes me to meetings all over the place and partly because I want to ‘walk the talk’ of minimising my carbon footprint (not that trains have zero impact). My last blog was written on the sleeper train from Euston to Inverness and I’ll shortly be hopping on the Eurostar to Brussels. ‘Walking the talk’ also involves a lot of video-conferences and Skype calls and this is revolutionising the way we communicate though, in my experience, calls to UK Government Ministries are usually the most difficult as they seem to be years behind with the ‘new’ technology and can sometimes (rather often) only handle ‘face to face’.

Last week, I spent three days in the University of East Anglia at a NERC-funded Valuing Nature Network meeting. VNN is a big step out of NERC’s usual comfort zone of natural science and into the blurry interdisciplinary interface with economics and other branches of social science. The issue in question is the way we use our natural capital to generate ecosystem services. For those of you who are already losing the plot with this terminology, I should explain that Natural Capital means a stock of natural assets (a forest, fish and their supporting ecosystem, a coral reef system, a wetland, etc) and ‘Services’ refers to the things they supply to humans such as the fish we eat, the landscapes we enjoy, the waste we make them assimilate, the raw materials we use for food, fibre and energy, etc. Up to a point, natural systems can supply services without becoming depleted and ideally, we try to live on the interest from natural capital rather than mining it down. We value the services we enjoy; perhaps explicitly through monetary value; indirectly, because they are used to produce something else that we pay for (or should be paying for); or in a non-monetary way because, for example, they are important to our psychological welfare.

So VNN isn’t just a matter of putting a price tag on everything, though monetary values are extremely important. Last week we were exploring such things as ways and means to devise new kinds of balance sheets to help policymakers to consider all of the kinds of values that natural systems produce without falling into the trap of ‘double accounting’ or rejecting things than cannot be given a short-term price tag. This information is vital in order to ensure the optimal flow of services and not to take more than the system can actually provide. All of this is particularly important for the marine environment because there are so many new demands on it and in some areas there is already plenty of evidence that we are extracting more services than can be provided sustainably. Some systems are already beginning to collapse. We also tend to take some services for granted as ‘free’ particularly when we use marine systems to deal with our effluent. This is more than just ‘spending the family silver’, this is like the old cartoon where someone is sitting, feet dangling, on a tree branch with a saw and cutting it off next to the trunk; the consequence is potentially sudden and just as inevitable.

VNN is also examining how to value marine conservation – including marine protected areas – and rehabilitation. In some ways, this can be seen as a way to invest in natural capital as well as to exploit it. Considering our dependence on ecosystem services and our reliance on natural processes within the diminished stock, it makes sense to invest in the future. We are not doing particularly well in that respect. Ten years ago, at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, most maritime countries agreed on a pact to create a globally coherent network of marine protected areas by 2012. Well, 2012 has arrived and the results don’t look much like a network. To be fair, there are some impressive announcements like the entirety of the Kiribati Archipelago, the smaller islands in the Hawaiian chain and the controversial Chagos Archipelago, but these are exceptional and there are lots of question marks about their management – and management means investment.

Unlike the human economy, we can’t cheat nature with a bit of natural capital ‘quantitative easing’. Not everything we are doing in the environment is toxic to it however. We are altering it in many ways and some of these ways may be creating new opportunities to enhance habitats. Windfarm sites create artificial reefs for example. These new habitats may – or may not – be a good thing. Close to SAMS, we have created Europe’s largest experimental artificial reef to help provide some of the experimental evidence on the implications of these changes. By engaging in big experiments of this kind and in a new genre of interdisciplinary science, we may be able to cast a few pearls of wisdom at a time where they are very badly needed.