'Grand plan' needed to ease sea pressure

Published on Tuesday 23 October 2007 01:04

FROM trawlers to fish farms, gravel extraction to renewable-energy schemes, recreational diving to whale-watching trips, yachting to impromptu jetski races, humans are using the sea as never before.

According to environmentalists, one of the main threats facing marine life is the sheer volume of activities taking place in some areas. This is a problem that could be alleviated if there was some way of organising our use of the sea.

Dr Sian Prior is an environmental consultant and author of a report called Tangle of the Forth, written for the environmental campaign group WWF Scotland to show just how much was going on in the firth. He said: "The population across all of Europe is so large and, within 12 nautical miles, the pressure on the sea is huge.

"It is the cumulative effect of everything taking place out there. Every activity has its own impact. The overall impact is a very gradual degradation of the habitats and environment the fish are dependent on.

"The use of the waters and coastline is so high we'll certainly be making some of the bird populations, some of the mammals - dolphins, porpoises, seals - move to areas of coastline that are less busy.

There are a number of animals very sensitive to disturbance."

Offshore wind farms and tidal turbines to create renewable energy and cut carbon emissions are the latest front in our exploitation of the seas, and it remains to be seen how they will fit in.

But other, more exotic schemes have also been proposed, such as building giant machines to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and "sequester" this greenhouse gas into the water column or seabed.

Currently, there is no grand plan to say where the best places are for all the different kinds of marine activities we want to do around our coasts.

Mark Ruskell, the former Scottish Green Party MSP and now marine and coastal policy officer for RSPB Scotland, said that this point was illustrated clearly by the ongoing row over proposals to transfer Russian crude oil between tankers in the Firth of Forth.

Mr Ruskell, a leading opponent of ship-to-ship transfers as an MSP, said Forth Ports made a reasonable point that if the application was refused, "then some company would do it at sea and that would be even worse for the environment".

He continued: "There isn't a plan; it's very much a free-for-all. A marine bill would sort it out. The seas are important economically. No-one is turning round and saying oil transfers and exploration are fundamentally evil and we shouldn't be doing any of it.

"But there is a commonsense issue about planning... that suitable sites are identified."