The West of Scotland Marine Protected Area came into force on Friday 9 October 2020. The park will cover an area of 100 000 km², making it the largest Marine Protected Area in Europe and the northeast Atlantic. The park covers an area off the Western Isles of Scotland covering an area containing deep-sea Coral banks and seamounts, and providing a home to numerous protected species. This means that 30% of Scotland's territorial waters are now covered by Marine Protected Areas, compared to an EU average of 1.8%, and considerably in excess of the 10% target for all maritime nations laid out in the UN Convention on Biodiversity.
Whilst this is in theory good news for marine life off the western coast of Scotland, a number of problems with the project have been raised. Firstly, the Marine Protected Area is crossed by three telecommunications cables, and maintenance work on these will be allowed to continue. The Scottish Government has indicated that it would be willing to consider applications to carry out oil-and-gas exploration within the area on a case-by-case basis. Finally, and perhaps most seriously, the UK still allows both dredging and trawling within its Marine Protected Areas, with such sites regularly being visited by industrial fishing fleets from the UK, the EU, and Russia. The UK Government claims that it is prevented from implementing controlls on such activities by EU regulations, although the legal basis for this claim is unclear. This has environmental group Greenpeace to describe the UK's Marine Protected Areas as 'paper parks', while marine scientist Callum Roberts of Exeter University has accused the government of 'misleading the public, wasting resources, [and] protecting nothing', while ocean charity Blue Marine Foundation has threatened to take legal action if the situation is not improved.
See also...
Follow Sciency Thoughts on Facebook.
Follow Sciency Thoughts on Twitter.
