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Tom Hooper

37 potential MCZs for English waters are being put forward by Defra. They are keen to use the next nine months (before the formal consultation starts) to build up a dossier on the ecology and socio-economics of each site. I suspect that this pre-consultation phase is also about a managing our expectations and we should not expect that all of these 37 will make the final cut.

These 37 sites have been designed to fill the big gaps in our MPA network and are a positive step towards our goal of an ecologically coherent network. Broadly this means that they need to be protecting a full range of our marine biodiversity and are spread around our coasts and seas in a sensible distribution.

Which of these MCZs ultimately go through to designation will depend on them having an adequate evidence base and enough conservation benefit to justify the economic costs. We’ll need to keep a careful eye on this. We know that it is much easier for industry and commerce to put forward balance sheets to show what an MCZ might cost them; whereas the enormous benefits provided by the marine environment are much harder to quantify and qualify. It is good to see Defra investing more money in data gathering, but we also don’t want to have disproportionate benchmarks for what should be known about a feature before it is designated.

To help ensure that this pre-consultation process is more informed, Defra will be providing some more clarity on what the management might be. The vacuum of management information for MCZs has been challenging for sensible debate - rather like organising a town-hall meeting for a new development, but not telling the audience whether it is going to be a golf course, housing development, park or pet food factory. In the previous tranche of MCZs some stakeholders opposed sites because they feared that even their more benign activities would be curtailed.

In the meantime, we will also need to keep watch to ensure that effective management is put in place without delay for our sites already designated. Over the next couple of years, enforcement agencies and statutory conservation bodies will be looking at a whole new range of fishing activities and making recommendations on whether restrictions need to be introduced to protect conservation features. Ultimately the test is whether the integrity of the site as a whole is being protected through effective management of the overall combination of features within it.

We will have a final MCZ tranche in 2016. This is likely to be the ‘mopping up’ tranche that will fill any last gaps and gather in any habitats or features that have been missed out. Mobile features could be included where there is ‘good evidence’. We will be trying to establish exactly what this means so that we can ensure that MCZs can be used where appropriate to protect critical feeding or spawning grounds for species such as seabirds, dolphins or fish that otherwise might be wide-ranging.

Here’s the full list of sites for tranche 2:

  • North Sea: Coquet to St Mary’s, Farnes East, Fulmar, Runswick Bay, Compass Rose, Holderness Inshore, Cromer Shoal Chalk Beds, The Swale Estuary,
  • Channel: Dover to Deal, Dover to Folkestone, Offshore Brighton, Offshore Overfalls, Utopia, Bembridge, Norris to Ryde, Yarmouth to Cowes, The Needles
  • South West: Studland Bay, Western Channel, Mounts Bay, Lands End, North-West of Jones Bank, Greater Haig Fras, Newquay and the Gannel, Hartland Point to Tintagel, Bideford to Foreland Point, North of Lundy, South of Celtic deep, Celtic Deep, East of Celtic Deep
  • Irish Sea: Mid St. George’s Channel, North St. George’s Channel, Slieve Na Griddle, South Rigg, West of Walney, Mud Hole, Allonby Bay.