ARIANE BURGESS: Good management of our waters can benefit us all
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Some months ago, an old somewhat faded photograph of layers of fishing boat sails in Wick harbour caught my attention. It was so striking to see so many sails and boats packed into the harbour.
This photograph was from the days when herring fishing became a huge industry after Scotland successfully developed a way to salt herring for export.
Now the herring are all but gone and along with it many of the people.
Two hundred years from now, people will be looking at old images and films and reading records of the decisions we’ve taken at this critical time in history.
What do we want to leave for them? Do we want them to be shaking their heads in disbelief at our short-sightedness? Or do we want them to be celebrating us for taking action?
This is the time when we urgently need to take the long view and start putting into practice actions that support nature to regenerate and recover.
In my role as MSP, I very quickly learned that many Highlands and Islands communities are tackling population loss. In a recent conversation I posed the question: what are the employment opportunities for people living in coastal communities?
The sea! The sea is full of opportunity, came the response from my conversation partner.
When delving deeper into what the person was thinking, they talked about the opportunities for employment – harvesting a genuinely sustainable food from the sea – fish and shellfish, along with marine conservation and tourism. And if done right – leaving a share for future generations.
To reinstate that abundance, we must manage our inshore waters in a way that protects the precious marine ecosystems that evolved in our waters over centuries and millennia.
A marine ecosystem is made up of many species of marine life – animals and plants. They all co-exist in interdependent relationships, and all need each other to thrive.
Over decades the gear used in fishing has evolved, making it possible to harvest much more than could have been gathered in those old boats of the faded photograph.
The gear that causes the greatest difficulty for the inshore water ecosystems are dredgers that scrape and trawlers that bottom-tow nets along the seabed.
Both types of gear can transform a rich and abundant marine ecosystem into a “paper park” in a matter of minutes.
Nature’s ecosystems took a long time to develop and to provide habitats where fish make their spawning and nursery grounds. When they go so do the fish as they no longer have a habitat to spawn in or for juvenile fish to grow.
In Scotland we are legally bound through international and national commitments to manage our marine waters to good environmental status and to do that through an ecosystems approach. What does that mean?
An ecosystems approach is about managing an area to support the beneficial relationships different species and habitats have with one another.
For too long we have taken a single species or specific marine feature approach but just like in human communities, those species and features exist because of the relationships they have with each other.
Through our work with the Scottish Government, Greens have pushed for 10 per cent of our marine waters to become highly protected and to implement new licensing arrangements to increase the volume of fish caught in Scottish water to be processed in Scotland, increasing the economic benefit for coastal communities.
I’m heartened by this work. It gives me hope, hope that we will once again see abundant ecosystems in our inshores; hope that people can establish a relationship with the sea that supports nature to regenerate; hope that we can recover enough to share through the generations.
