Yesterday the EU announced that nearly 25,000 km2 of invaluable natural space on land and water have been added to the Natura 2000 network this year. Every square kilometre helps protect our wildlife, so every one added is a bit of good news!
This means that Natura 2000 now covers more than 217,000 km2 of Europe’s seas. This is approximately 4% (an improvement, but still not enough to make an ecologically coherent network of protected areas – our ongoing target).
The single most significant addition this year is the UK’s designation of Dogger Bank (12,330 km2), a name first vaguely familiar to me as a child, through sleepily hearing the shipping forecast, and later I became aware of its importance to fishing - and marine wildlife.
Dogger Bank was primarily chosen for its sandbanks, which are important spawning and nursery grounds for many commercial fisheries. Together with adjacent sites from Germany and the Netherlands, this creates a vast site covering over 18,000 km2.
Careful management of areas like these is essential to make sure our marine wildlife and fishing industry have a productive future.
Trawler: Chris Gomersall (rspb-images.com)