In November, Ed Miliband will travel to COP29 in Baku, to represent the UK. This is an excellent signal of the government’s leadership intentions on climate change. However, it has said little about tackling the catastrophic environmental disaster afflicting the oceans, the planet’s life support system.
The seas are threatened not only by global warming, which is causing acidification, shrinking ice caps and rising sea levels, but by extraordinary pollution from plastics, “forever chemicals” and other toxins, nuclear waste and the debris from industrial exploitation of marine resources, including fishing and offshore drilling for oil and gas.
In 1982, under the UN’s Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the UK gained jurisdiction over 2.6m square miles of sea, more than 27 times its land area. Yet while there is a green politics, there is not a blue. Most marine matters are handled separately by the four countries that make up the UK, and divided between government departments. In England the Marine Management Organisation comes under the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra)—the title itself indicating that Marine Affairs have no priority—while the Maritime and Coastguard Agency is part of the Department for Transport. There is no integrated approach to marine matters.
In addition, successive governments have turned over control and management of the seabed around Britain to the Crown Estate which, among other profit-making activities, has been auctioning the seabed and exporting millions of tons of sea sand, without democratic oversight or approval. The government is intending to extend this by linking it to the new Energy Fund, which will inflate the already huge income gained by the Crown Estate from our sea. This surely should be reversed, but is indicative of chaotic governance.
This fragmentation impedes an integrated approach, scatters inadequate resources and prevents the seas from receiving the attention so urgently needed. Instead, Britain needs a full-time high-level minister for the sea, able to tackle energetically and authoritatively issues such as climate change and pollution of the sea, both at home and in international fora. Britain’s sea, seabed and seashore should be treated as “the blue commons”, that is, belonging to all its citizens, with government acting as a steward responsible for preserving it for future generations.
Immediate priorities for a new Secretary of State for the Sea should be developing a marine agenda for COP29; backing tight curbs on plastics in the upcoming negotiations to conclude a global treaty scheduled for November in South Korea; and preparing ambitious proposals for the UN Ocean Summit in Nice next June.
Domestically, the minister should overhaul Britain’s fish quota system. Quotas, the share of the total allowable catch (TAC) of each species fisheries are allowed, are mostly allocated through producer organisations (POs), supposedly democratic bodies representing all fishers in various fishing grounds. In reality, most POs are run by a few big firms. One result is that just 25 industrial fisheries have been gifted over two-thirds of the total quota, while the thousands of small-scale fishers scramble for tiny shares.
Furthermore, exceeding quotas—if discovered—is treated as only a civil offence, punishable with modest fines but no loss of quota. Marine crime pays. The minister should make such law-breaking a criminal offence and any firms caught illegally fishing or overfishing should lose all or part of their entitlement. It is overfishing by fisheries with legal quotas that is chiefly responsible for collapsing fish populations around Britain.
The minister should also tackle the crisis of our ports. Privatised by Thatcher, most are now foreign owned, beyond democratic control. In 2021, Teesport, owned by a Canadian asset management company, dumped 250,000 tons of dredged sediment into the sea. Shortly afterwards, hundreds of thousands of dying crabs and other crustaceans turned up on 43 miles of coastline. The company denied responsibility, the fishing communities disagreed; Defra investigations were inconclusive. Whatever the truth, the governance process was wrong. Independent environmental impact assessments and consultation with local communities should be mandatory before any such action. The new minister should take back control of our ports.
Another issue is pollution from ships in ports, especially the huge cruise liners which keep their engines running continuously, using the most polluting diesel fuel. Pollution around ports such as Southampton is linked to higher rates of throat and lung cancer and respiratory diseases. A heavy tax on use of such fuel should be introduced, in addition to tough regulations.
Internationally, the oceans rarely take centre stage. Although the sea contains 80 per cent of biodiversity, governments meeting on biodiversity in Montreal last December merely reiterated a vague commitment to protect 30 per cent of both land and sea. But marine protection is largely phoney. Britain sets a bad example. Bottom trawling, the most destructive form of industrial fishing, has been systemic in 71 of 73 of its offshore marine protected areas (MPAs). Globally, besides ecosystem destruction, stirred-up sediment from bottom trawling is estimated to release more CO2 than global aviation and shipping. The government should ban bottom trawling in all its MPAs.
The bodies set up to regulate global fishing, regional fisheries management organisations, are mostly institutionally corrupt, and need revamping. The minister should first target the North-East Atlantic Fisheries Commission, which meets annually in London (the UK is a member) to agree on the total allowed catch (TAC) for herring, mackerel and blue whiting, before handing out quotas to fisheries.
It is a travesty of good governance. At every meeting, there are far more representatives of commercial fisheries than civil servants. Predictably, the negotiated TAC is always far above levels recommended by scientists. Sadly, North Sea mackerel is now endangered. As the UK provides the secretariat, the minister could insist on excluding lobbyists and on respecting scientific guidelines.
There are countless other international issues that Britain could pursue, if it had the dedicated ministerial expertise to do so. It could push to restrict the use of “flags of convenience”, when flying another nation’s banner enables ship owners to ignore ecological and social norms, and for a clamp down on fuel and other subsidies that enable rich countries’ long-distance fishing fleets to plunder fish populations in the developing world.
The minister could take a lead in preventing the start of deep-sea mining for minerals, such as cobalt and nickel. While they are key to the transition to renewable energy, scientists believe deep-sea mining could have a catastrophic impact not just on ocean biodiversity but on the climate, by disrupting the ocean’s role as a carbon sink. Despite 30 years of trying, the International Seabed Authority (ISA) has failed to draw up agreements for mining to take place in line with UNCLOS rules. Although the Conservative government belatedly joined other members of the ISA in calling for a moratorium on mining, there is pressure from some members to go ahead regardless. Britain should take the lead, and not repeat what the Conservatives did in handing out illicit mining licences.
Finally, the minister should demand a review of UNCLOS, which was drawn up in the Cold War era and never ratified by the United States. Developing countries were induced to make binding commitments, for instance on fisheries, in return for vague promises of benefit sharing that have never been honoured. The Global Oceans Treaty adopted in 2023 has similarly vague language on the “fair and equitable sharing of benefits” from marine genetic resources (MGRs) that have many potential uses including new drugs. There are over 13,000 MGR patents, three-quarters of which are owned by just three countries—Germany, the US and Japan. Britain is missing out.
In sum, we need a cabinet minister capable of taking an integrated approach to vital issues that are marginalised today. However, there is another potentially transformative role. The minister could launch a programme of sea allotments in selected harbours around Britain, emulating what is being done in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, and enabling nearby residents to cultivate, for example, mussels and kelp. These could evolve into marine cooperatives, reviving the British attachment to the sea in a nice progressive way. One only needs a little imagination—and a minister to make it happen.
