If the UK’s network of Marine Protected Areas is designated and properly managed it will inevitably have both costs and benefits for different individuals and sectors. Trying to add these up on a level playing field is fraught with difficulty.
Money is the metric that generally holds the most sway when it comes to decision making and an Impact Assessment is a tool that tries to objectively present the costs and benefits. For economic activities such as commercial fishing or aggregate extraction it is relatively straightforward to determine its value to the economy. On other hand, we know that there are a wide range of benefits from a healthy marine environment, but when it comes to putting a figure on them we struggle to obtain the necessary data and certainty to provide a credible counterbalance.
It is great to see that Defra, Marine Conservation Society, Angling Trust, British Sub Aqua Club and Aberdeen University (amongst others) have collaborated on a new study that looks at the value of potential MPAs to divers and sea anglers as part of the National Ecosystem Assessment. ( http://bit.ly/13zb4SJ)
The value placed by these sectors for these sites is considerable, with use and non-use values running into hundreds of millions of pounds. The benefits from anglers and divers alone effortlessly outweigh the costs of designation. This study is now one of a number that overwhelmingly show that there are overall benefits of MPAs to our economy. So why the foot dragging?
Well, the more opaque component of decision making is also politically driven, and to a certain extent that is how it should be-you can’t just use numbers to make a decision, you also have to use good judgement and common sense. But there is a culture within Government and society that places much more of an emphasis on commercial activities that are generating revenue now. Many of our economic indicators are geared up in this way, a concept encapsulated in 1968 by Bobby Kennedy’s speech, you know, the one about GDP measuring everything except that which is worthwhile (you can find it here http://bit.ly/1bNK89z)
We should continue to improve our ability to value and quantify the benefits of marine biodiversity so that it can punch its weight in decision making. Ultimately however, there is a more fundamental ethical question about whether our natural environment should even be judged on the same scale as the consumption and production of goods; a concept neatly expressed by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, ‘some things have a price, or relative worth, while other things have a dignity, or inner worth’