Chickening out in Rio?

If you have ever flown to Santos Dumont airport in Rio de Janeiro, you will understand why I refer to it as a chicken run. The plane swoops across the blue waters of Guanabara Bay and the runway appears below the wheels at the very last moment followed by a shuddering reverse thrust and screech of brakes as the other end of the runway – and more blue water – loom ahead.  It’s not really as bad as it looks; it used to be incredibly short but, thanks to health and safety, bits keep getting added on.

Most of the thousands of delegates to last week's Rio + 20 Conference arrived at the larger Galeão International Airport some miles away and were saved from the usual traffic chaos by the well organised event managers. Perhaps an arrival at Santos Dumont would have been more appropriate as the press had presented the event itself as quite a chicken run: a breathtakingly short period of negotiations that could save the planet from destruction. Of course, the reality was nothing like that; most of the final text had been negotiated long in advance, expectations were low, no big countries pulled major initiatives out of the bag and the outcome was somewhat predictable. Reporters, NGOs and many independent observers were dismissive and labelled the event as the failure of a ‘once in a generation opportunity for action’. The pre-conference hype soon fizzled. Worse still, there is likely to be an increasing public antipathy towards international processes and even less trust in public officials; and no Plan B available to address real environmental challenges. But amongst the gloom and weasel words, was anything of value achieved? I will take a harder look at the final agreements on oceans and seas.

Before beginning, I have to declare an interest. I was one of the team preparing the Seas and Oceans text for the original Rio Conference twenty years ago; the biggest gathering of heads of state in the 20th century. I know how these processes work from the inside! The Rio + 20 outcome agreement can be found here and the Oceans and Seas occupy paragraphs 158 to 177.

The Wordle plot I made (see image) really gives the overall big picture. The first seven paragraphs mostly reiterate previous obligations including the ‘Regular Process for Global Reporting and Assessment of the State of the Marine Environment, including Socioeconomic Aspects’ which is obliged to produce its first report by 2014. This is a useful process but it will take a lot of effort to prevent it from becoming a ‘lowest common denominator’ report rather than a challenging and forward looking one. Significant however, is the commitment to develop an international instrument under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ie outside the 200 mile zone). The real battleground here will be on bioprospecting and rights over genetic material as well as the potential impacts of deep sea mining. There is also a commitment to take action on plastics in the sea and the importance of this was highlighted by a major international expert poll concluded days before the event that signalled it as the number one oceans issue. The agenda for action is painfully slow however; the wording is “We further commit to take action to, by 2025, based on collected scientific data, achieve significant reductions in marine debris to prevent harm to the coastal and marine environment.” More weasel words than commitment! This could be regarded as kicking the can down the street … and there was a lot of that in Rio.

The next three paragraphs are worth looking at in more detail. Paragraph 165 asks for “enhanced efforts” on sea level rise, an issue that keeps getting brushed under the carpet. Still no firm commitments though. Paragraph 166 is an extensive call for support for initiatives to understand and prevent ocean acidification. Richard Black from the BBC has already pointed out the irony of the wording; at this stage “the need to work collectively to prevent further ocean acidification” is pretty meaningless, given that this will only happen if we stop emissions of CO2 from rising … and nobody agreed to that. Well, at least acidification is on the agenda. So too is the thorny issue of concern about potential environmental impacts of ocean fertilisation. The real concern is not over the little experiments done by scientists but the companies following behind that already purport to offer a ‘quick fix’ to global warming by pumping iron into the sea. It is nice to see the precautionary approach being evoked in this context (well, we did get some things right in 1992).

Eight of the remaining ten paragraphs address fisheries. I have to share an anecdote about the original Rio conference, officially titled the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). A group of us, all ‘specialist officials’, prepared text that subsequently went to the Member State representatives at ‘Prep Coms’ … and usually came back in shreds. We wrote some carefully worded but bold stuff on the need for more concerted regulation of fisheries, given that most stocks would soon (in 1992) be exploited beyond sustainable limits. ‘If this is a conference about development and there is nothing to develop, fisheries should be removed from the document’ we were told. We wrangled a watered down version back into the text eventually but this gives you some insight as to what negotiators are up against. Don’t shoot the messengers.

Back to the present. There is a strong commitment to meet the 2002 Johannesburg target to achieve Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) by 2015. This is a very strong statement that reflects the need for stock restoration, science-based management plans, ecosystem protection, reducing effort where needed and managing discards. Great stuff, but can it be achieved, given the target in the EU’s Marine Strategy Framework Directive to achieve MSY by 2020 and that lack of effective governance frameworks in many regions of the world? The next two paragraphs, on responsible fishing and IUU fishing (Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated) get closer to the heart of the problem; existing agreements aren’t being implemented properly and governance systems are too weak to do more than merely recommend.

This problem is addressed to some extent by the measures in the subsequent two paragraphs. Firstly, the 2009 FAO Agreement on Port State Measures should keep tabs on vessel movements and the source of their catch. Some 14 countries had ratified it or were close to doing so by February this year but it will require 11 more to enter into force. International legal agreements move very very slowly but this one is worth pursuing. Secondly, there is a clearly expressed need to improve the transparency and accountability of regional fisheries management organisations, some of which have been, at best, passive observers of the pillage of their ecosystems. Performance reviews are being implemented but nobody really has the power to insist that the recommendations in the reviews are adopted.

There is a general consensus amongst fisheries scientists that harmful subsidies are helping to drive overcapacity and the unsustainable exploitation of stocks. Paragraph 173, addressing this issue is the longest in the oceans section and gives me the mental image of a cat crossing a muddy bog. It refers back to the World Trade Association Doha Development Agenda, badly stalled since 2002 and the need to treat developed, developing and least developed countries differently and transparently. This is hugely contentious and may take years to resolve … but don’t tell the fish. Two further paragraphs deal with the complex issue of equity and equal opportunities for least developed and small island states and the access rights to fish stocks, markets and conservation measures by small scale fisherfolk. This is another minefield expressed with political correctness but with an unclear agenda. This doesn’t need weasel words, it needs a clear set of actions such as poverty reduction strategies, concessions by developed countries that are buying (or corruptly negotiating) third party access rights to the waters of developing countries, and help to develop fit for purpose local management schemes.

Oh dear; I’m getting a headache and there are still two paragraphs to comment on! The first is a nicely written but toothless statement about coral reef and mangrove systems and the second is on marine protected areas. This is the sting in the tail; full reverse throttle from the 2002 Johannesburg Declaration where some observers claimed that the Oceans were the only beneficiaries from another failed process. Jo’burg set a target of 2012 for a globally coherent network of marine protected areas. Hello, wake up world, we’ve arrived! But no network. No problem, we’ve moved the date to 2020 so everyone should be happy now (and some can go back to sleep).

Are you getting the feeling that I’m ever so slightly depressed about all of this? Fortunately it is mixed with a measure of anger because cynicism would tell me it’s time to quit and hide in a cave somewhere. As it happens, the oceans and seas fared ever so slightly better than other areas. The sad thing though is that we have not come to grips with the fact that our global governance mechanisms are woefully inadequate and unable to keep up with the pace of change, let alone to be proactive and take control of our future. That is the real and important lesson from Rio. It is shocking to think that the combined wit of six billion people can only come up with 19 paragraphs of caveated reaffirmations on our future seas with some words of hope but few lines of responsibility and hardly any milestones. Surely we can do better than this?

White nights at the Terminus

My week begins at the Institute for Social Anthropology of the University of Bergen; a two day indulgence in my KnowSeas research. It’s ‘white nights’ in Bergen, briefly getting ‘sort of’ dark about one or two in the morning. Bergen is incredibly busy in summer and it was difficult to find a hotel room. Eventually my Norwegian colleague Stale booked me into the Terminus: a historic mid-town railway hotel.

Have you have ever had the experience of returning to a special place after a very long absence? I last stayed at the Terminus 33 years ago in 1979. I was twenty eight; a young Brit given the extraordinary responsibility for the construction of Mexico’s first ocean-going research vessel, the $6 million 1000 ton ‘El Puma’. We had a year from design to presentation to the Mexican President in the Caribbean port of Cozumel and I worked with a British-trained Mexican naval architect and a retired Spanish shipbuilder who had built Mexico’s first tuna boats. The specialist family shipbuilder Mjellem and Karlsen won the contract and our job was to design the superstructure, internal layout and arrangements, procure all scientific equipment, conduct sea trials and get the ship over the Atlantic to Cozumel, and eventually though the Panama canal to her home port of Mazatlan. During my many visits to Bergen, I came to know and admire the extraordinarily skilful, warm spirited and adaptable team at the shipyard. Their management system has been an inspiration in my later career. The Norwegian crew during sea trials were the design team that we had worked with ten months earlier. As head of the team, Anders Grimstad switched from the drawing board to overalls as the Chief Engineer. “I like to see my designs working”, he said.

Bergen today is very different from that of 30 years past. Sadly, the shipyard, which operated from 1891, was replaced with a modern office block following closure in 2002. It suffered the same fate as most shipbuilding in Europe. But Bergen and the whole of Norway are hugely prosperous. There is a buzz of positive energy in the air and I do not see the wearied and burdened looks on people’s faces that characterise many cities across Europe. Norwegians have embraced change without trashing their culture and heritage and enjoy their leisure as well. But there are game changers: down near the fish market, some of the same restaurants that were around in 1979 are still open, some still selling whale steaks, but the prices of all seafood are astronomical. It wasn’t like that then. Norwegians pay more for their fish but set high standards in sustainable fishing, are world leaders in aquaculture and have a coherent network of protected areas that puts us to shame. And Norwegians are marketing the sustainability image. On the flight over from Aberdeen, I spotted a quarter page ad in The Observer with smiling Norwegian fishermen reminding us that they had enforced a ban on discards since 1987 (see my last blog). The slogan ‘Fisk Førever’ with the Norwegian flag attached says it all.

I am not identifying Bergen as Shangri La (the uncomfortable business about the whale steaks certainly rules that out!) but there are many lessons to learn. For a start, Norwegians did not hand the ‘family silver’ - their oilfields - over to international private companies. They used the revenues very wisely, maintaining a tough tax regime but investing funds into public works, education and industrial development. A fixed proportion was spent on research to maintain a competitive edge. Norwegians are quite circumspect about their achievements and there is much introspection about the tragedy surrounding the Brevik massacre and its social meaning.

Back to the Terminus. It is a carefully preserved 1920s hotel that is the backdrop for a nearly forgotten tragedy. The story unfolded exactly seventy four years ago, on 17 June 1928. A few weeks earlier, the Italian polar explorer, airship-builder Umberto Nobile had passed through Bergen on an expedition to the North Pole on his new craft, the Italia. On reaching Svalbard in foul conditions, the airship smashed into a rock with most of the crew, including Nobile, left on a Glacier in the smashed gondola and six members swept away on the balloon, never to be seen again. A number of uncoordinated rescue parties set off to find the stranded expedition members. One of them was the famous polar explorer Roald Amundsen who had beaten Scott to the South Pole and, in 1926, led the first expeditionary flight to the North Pole in the Norge, another airship designed and piloted by Nobile.

For the rescue, Amundsen had recruited the services of the French naval command and a Latham 47 flying boat from the factory in Rouen. The Latham, a steel, wood and canvas affair, was quite a powerful machine but wildly inappropriate for an Arctic expedition. It couldn’t land on ice and there was an expectation that enough clear water would be found for a safe landing. Amundsen agreed to rendezvous with the French crew in Bergen and booked them all into the Terminus on the 16th. Amundsen arrived next day and dined with the crew but was eager to push on with the mission; his bed at the Terminus was unused. They set off for Tromsø, travelling all night and arriving safely next day with just enough time to refuel, have food and a smoke and then set off again for Ny-Ålesund (Kings Bay) on Svalbard. But they never arrived, no trace of Amundsen was found, only pieces of wreckage from the Latham. Nobile and the survivors from his expedition were picked up a few days later.

The story of Amundsen reminded me of how much things had changed in recent history. It’s an easy matter to take a commercial flight to Svalbard nowadays. SAMS is a consortium partner of the international Kings Bay Marine Laboratory in Ny Ålesund. Our undergraduate students can take an optional year of Arctic Studies at the University Centre in Svalbard opened in 1993, a facility that has recently expanded into a modern teaching and research establishment. This year, five of our undergraduates will take the trip to Svalbard to join Norwegian and international students in this exciting adventure in the polar landscape. Nobile spent his latter years as a University lecturer, lived to old age, passing away in 1978 but even he could not have imagined anything like this!

Fishing for compliments

Last night when most of us were asleep, fisheries ministers from across Europe were engaged in an 18 hour debate on the reform of the Common Fisheries Policy. I have talked about a few of the issues in previous blogs and just have my foregone coffee break time to update you. There are a lot of announcements on media web sites and on the news concerning the outcome of the discussions. There is a sort of muffled euphoria. We will not know the real outcomes until the red-eyed Eurocrats produce a written detailed draft of the agreement and it is cleared by the various parties. So what has really been agreed?

Firstly, for those that think the process as untransparent, there have been major advances in direct communication. If you want to see the press conference (at about 04:30) this morning, I recommend the following link (you can download Silverline from the same site; it takes 30 seconds):

http://video.consilium.europa.eu/webcast.aspx?ticket=775-979-11413

What you will see are the bones of the agreement; the hugely significant Danish chair (she is an amazing character – such energy, humour and focus) and the very measured response of Commissioner Damanaki. I will talk about the significance of the word ‘measured’ later.

Earlier in the negotiations, each delegation presented its view on the Commission proposal. These are all available on the video hyperlink at the end of this paragraph. I should explain that the country statements are in national languages (what a translation task!) so it is impossible to get a clear picture by listening to this unless you are the ultimate polyglot. If you click on the link, you will see little flags that take you directly to your own country’s position. The statement by Richard Benyon, UK Fisheries Minister is well worth listening to. This is an unequivocal call for reform including the banning of discards within a reasonable timeframe, the use of scientific information to fish within ecosystem limits, the regionalisation of fisheries policy and the strict control on funds that can be used to subsidise overfishing. Brilliant. I listened to the French and Spanish positions as well; both agreed on discard bans (with lots of caveats), avoided the issue of regionalisation, agreed to MSY (maximum sustainable yield) with caveats but, most importantly, focussed on exceptions for vessels under 15 metres. France even proposed extending inshore fisheries to 100 miles at one point. It is the exceptions that are particularly troubling because ‘inshore’ has plenty of interpretations (most of France’s fleet is ‘inshore’ for example) and the new Marine Strategy Framework Directive sets a MSY target for all fisheries and many countries want that changed or reinterpreted. The web link:

http://video.consilium.europa.eu/webcast.aspx?ticket=775-979-11427

So the Council agreed on a phased discard ban, MSY for offshore fisheries by around 2015 (though not fully implemented until 2020, but the dates still need clarification), an undefined move towards regionalisation and reforms in funding through a new Maritime and Fisheries Fund (potentially a major advance as it could lead to cross fertilisation of the maritime economy) as well as moves towards transferrable quotas. This looks like considerable progress; so why is Mrs Damanaki so cautious in her response?

The answer will be in the details. The agreement falls some way short of the Commission’s proposal and there are a lot of weasel words in the statement communicated by the ebullient Chair; after all, it is a compromise. There will be a huge amount of negotiation in the coming months; pull and push between the sector and environmentalists and between member states with hugely different interests and positions. The next step will be the European Parliament, now empowered to scrutinise Fisheries Council agreements. The Parliament is the new gatekeeper and this restores some of the democracy lost in the past. So watch this space. The agreement is a step in the right direction; it sets a frame for negotiation. The saying goes that ‘there are many fish in the sea’ but this applies to the stakeholders and Member States and not, unfortunately to our diminished shared stocks.

A unique new university is born

Shared diversity: Eight of the partner principals and directors at the Reception
L-R Mike Devenney, Moray College; John Spencer, Inverness College; Iain Macmillan, Lews Castle College, Stornaway; Boyd Robertson, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig; Laurence Mee, SAMS; Bill Ross, Orkney College; Michael Breslin, Argyll College  and Hector Morrison, Highland Theological College.

Last week’s newspapers were dominated by the Jubilee celebrations and turbulence; the economic kind hitting Europe and the jet stream unusually far south, soaking the thousands of people gathering to greet the Queen. Late on Wednesday, my daughter Annie and I were in our kayak basking in the warm evening sunshine, shimmering in the limpid waters of Ardmucknish Bay; the southerly jet stream is giving us a dry summer to remember. We were off to Inverness early next morning to participate in the installation of the Princess Royal, Princess Anne, as the first Chancellor of the University of the Highlands of the Islands. SAMS, a founding partner in the UK’s newest university, is one of the 13 hazel leaves on the new UHI coat of arms.

The UHI is a remarkable federation of colleges spread across one of the most sparsely populated regions of Europe. It is not easy to devise an effective and inclusive governance system for such a heterogeneous organisation and this is a topic of intensive discussion at this time. As I sat on the choir stalls of Inverness Cathedral, watching the ceremony with my fellow academic partner principals, I began to reflect on the whole debate between centralised power, federalism and contemporary tribalism. This unresolved debate affects us at all levels: globally, whether or not we intervene in national conflicts (Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, etc) and to protect our shared environment; regionally, whether or not we move towards fiscal union to reinvigorate the European economy; in the UK, whether or not we maintain the Union; locally, the balance of authority between regional and local administrations; and in the workplace with monolithic, corporate and ‘cloud’ management structures. There is no easy answer to these dilemmas and they are deeply ingrained into our value systems and how we define the nature of civilisation.

Despite the lack of a black and white solution, we can employ hindsight for a better sense of when governance goes badly wrong. I remember when I was twelve being taken to the line of razor wire and minefields that snaked across Germany, dividing East from West. It had been constructed two years earlier to embody the ‘iron curtain’ and it divided towns, villages and families. As a self-styled ‘Democratic Republic’, East Germany suffered the hardships and stagnation of totalitarianism and Soviet hegemony whereas the neighbouring ‘Federal Republic’ was a hive of positive-spirited post-war ‘can do’ entrepreneurship. The image has remained with me during subsequent work in some 45 countries and triggered my interest in the diversity of political models that I was experiencing.

The federalist model certainly isn’t ‘one size fits all’ though and for some countries, unitary governance (a single country with low levels of devolution) works well. For success, cultural and geographic diversity needs to be reflected in the political structure but the threshold between unitary, federal and associate (a weaker form of alliance) is circumstantial and inevitably controversial. In my UN career, I facilitated discussions between countries with different political models and these were always complex. Discussions between Uruguay (unitary) and Argentina (federal) on environmental protection of bordering rivers for example, required some negotiations between the two central governments and some between a central government and the neighbouring state government (though this had to be sanctioned by the central foreign ministry). Scotland has responsibility for the environment of its offshore waters (devolved under the UK Marine and Coastal Access Bill) but fishing in these waters is controlled by legislation from Brussels (the EU Common Fisheries Policy, CFP) and Scotland is represented in negotiations by a UK government minister. It is not my purpose to comment on the logic of this process but the complexity is glaringly obvious. The UK and Scottish governments are united in their desire for a more regionalised CFP (a move opposed by several countries) and it remains to be seen whether or not this can be achieved and will lead to a more coherent approach to representation.

Another key facet of governance is public trust in the current political model. In their book Disaffected Democracies, political scientists Susan Pharr and Robert Putnam showed a huge decline in confidence in governments, political parties, and political leaders in Western Europe, North America and Japan during the 80s and 90s (and probably beyond). The UK exhibited the largest decline of all: almost 2.4% per year over that period. Our own surveys of trust in governments to manage the oceans have reflected this view. Why has this happened? Pharr and Putnam suggest three basic reasons: (1) the increased information available to the public (mostly from the media) about government performance; (2) the expectations for good governance have increased; and (3) the performance may have genuinely deteriorated. One of the reasons given for a perception of decreased performance is the “growing incongruence between the scope of territorial units and the issues raised by interdependence, reducing the output effectiveness of democratic nation-states”, in other words, disempowerment at a more local level because of the perceived inability to influence higher level decisions. This goes straight back to my point of getting the balance of decision-making right when setting up federative systems.

Back to the ceremony in a packed Inverness Cathedral. Princess Anne said that during national and international travels she had heard many positive comments about the work of SAMS – so now I’m smiling. Like all the other UHI partners, we are working hard to excel in our field but we can also see huge benefits in the alliance and some of the trade-offs this implies. UHI partners have sensibly rejected the easy route of establishing a unitary institution, probably for fear of losing the identity and local networks they had painstakingly established. But they are happy to be here to celebrate the new University based on their shared aspirations for the region and willingness to work together. These aspirations and local social capital are the glue. There is no convenient off the shelf model for the institution, it has to be invented and built on trust, transparently and with objectivity about failures as well as successes. In the words of the Spanish poet, Antonio Machado:

"wanderer, there is no road,

the road is made by walking.

By walking one makes the road,

and upon glancing back

one sees the path

that must never be trod again.

Wanderer, there is no road--

Only wakes upon the sea"

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.