Healthy seas

The public should demand that our politicians:

Appoint a Minister for the Seas, overhaul Scotland’s outdated legislation to manage our seas and coasts better and introduce ‘regeneration areas’ to restore fish stocks and wildlife.

Why?
Healthy and well managed seas and coasts would sustain employment in fishing communities, generate jobs in tourism and provide protection for Scotland’s internationally important marine wildlife.

Background
Scotland’s seas hardly leave the front pages of our newspapers: crashing fish stocks, damage to ancient deepwater corals, pollution and escapes from salmon farms, radioactive hotspots and sewage-littered beaches. Human over-exploitation and treating the seas as a rubbish dump has become a problem of crisis proportions. With no safe havens for fish to grow and mature - even the Scottish fish supper is endangered.

Historically, our seas have been managed terribly, with little or no co-ordination between relevant government departments and statutory organisations, and no single Minister responsible.

Seas and the economy

Every job at sea supports four jobs in fish-processing and handling on land.
Scottish cod fishing could be up to five times more profitable if stocks were allowed to recover.
Between 1983 and 1999 farmed salmon production in Scotland increased from 4,000 tonnes to 127,000 tonnes while the wild salmon catch decreased from 1,220 tonnes to less than 200 tonnes. Despite this leap in production, there are no more jobs in salmon farming now than there were 10 years previously.
Tourism - Scotland’s biggest industry - trades on the quality of the environment. People like clean beaches. Tourists expect an unspoilt environment and are put off by litter and pollution.
Whale watching alone is a £7.8 million industry in Argyll & Bute, West Highlands and Western Isles. Whale tourism is the largest employer of young people under 30 on Mull.
Oil exploration, shipping and aquaculture should not jeapordise a healthy and well-managed marine environment. When any of these activities go wrong the economy suffers as well as the environment.

Seas and health

8% of Scottish bathing waters failed European safety standards in 2002.
Scots flush 340 million items of debris down the toilet every year.
In Scotland in 2001, 14% of beach litter came from our own homes, twice the UK average.
Radioactive and toxic pollution of the seas has a clear link to health: We eat the produce of the sea, including wild-caught and farmed fish; divers and surfers immerse themselves in it; even our children paddle there.

The number of major and significant sewage pollution incidents in the UK increased by 54% in 2001-2002 from the previous year and has been rising since 1995.
The health impact on communities suffering the decline of fishing can be dramatic – drug abuse, depression and removal of local schools due to depopulation all damage healthy coastal communities. Between 1993 and 2000, Buckie suffered a 62% decline in fisheries employment, Fraserburgh 30% and Peterhead 24%.

Sea facts…

18 out of 21 Scottish fish stocks are outside their ‘safe biological limits’ – meaning their populations are in danger of never recovering.
Scotland is home to ancient coral reefs as incredible and important as anywhere else in the world. These reefs are being broken up by trawlers chasing deep sea species like the Orange Roughy which has seen its numbers crash by 70% in just a few years.
Scotland is home to internationally important seabird and marine mammal populations – 23 species of whale and dolphin patrol our shores and we have the largest Gannet colony in the world at the World Heritage Islands of St Kilda.
Oil tankers navigating the biologically sensitive waters of The Minch are not legally obliged to report their movements. A tanker accident - like that of the ‘Prestige’ currently affecting Spain’s coastline - would devastate valuable coastal habitats and fragile economies.
Escapes of farmed salmon more than quadrupled between 1998 and 2000 (440,000 in 2000 compared to 95,000 in 1998). Farmed salmon escapes now outnumber wild salmon by more than 1000 to 1.
The estimated nutrient pollution discharged from Scottish fish farms in 2000 was equivalent to almost twice that in the annual sewage discharged by the entire population of Scotland.

Sources: Scottish Coastal Forum, SEPA, SEERAD, WWF, FRS, HWDT, DEFRA, MCS, Scottish Water, ICES, Scottish Executive, Maritime and Coastguard Agency, Aberdeenshire Fisheries Bulletin