 Yn ymdeg, wrth gwrs, wrth gwrs, wrth gwrs, yng Nghymru yng Nghymru, 29th ysgol yng nghymru. Mae'r hynny'n Peter Spuna. Yn ymdeg, rwy'n gwybod yng Nghymru ar y cwrs yng Nghymru, ac rwy'n gweithio gydag yng Nghymru. Yn ymdeg, rwy'n gweithio'r lle, Dr Helen Scales. Helen yw yng Nghymru, wrth gwrs, ac ymdeg. Mae'r hynny'n gweithio ar y llwyth Cymru, rwy'n gweithio'r llwyth yn ynghylch. Mae'r hynny'n gweithio'r llwyth yng Nghymru, a hynny mae gwrs hynny ymdd dechrau ac ymdeg yn gweithio'r llwyth ynghysig, rydyn ni'n gweithio'r llwyth, ac ymdeg, rydych chi am eu cyllidau? Mae'r hynny yn ymdeg ar websud yr unigol. Mae'r hynny'n gweithio ar y Llwyth Cymru, yn rhan iawn i ymddig o ysgrifennid, rydych chi ymddangodau a rhaid o'ch drwsgwag ein chynnw iawn. Er mwyn i'r llwydd y mae'r llwyth, Ie ddod y panel a'r ddysguffwn. Dothan roi, Peter, ddod yn fwy o'r ddwylo'n ddysguffwn. Felly ydych chi'n ddiddordeb llwyddo. Mae'n gwybod i'ch ddydigol iawn i chi'n gwybod i'r ddysguffwn. Felly dydych chi'n gwybod i ddysguffwn peirurau o ddiddordeb llwyddo dim, fyddion i'n fwy o'r ddysguffwn, i chi'n fwy o'r ddiddordeb llwyddo, maen nhw'n digwydd i'r ddysguffwn. felly byddwn yn amlwg rhai o'w'r cael eliminate a pham yno'r buswedd. Mae'n dod i'r hyn yn dweud i'n rhaid i ni'r dal i'r ddweud ei ddaeth Cymru. Prydd气on ni'n fan ni'n gallu rhaid i'r gwleidiu atlu gyda'r panellydd am rhaid i ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r draedd 아니야. Felly, allan'i ddysgu'r ddwy'r ddwy, a ddiwy'r gwaith a'r glasau a rydyn ni wedi cael ei ddweud ddweud. Felly, rydyn ni'n ddweud y ddwy'r gwaith i ddweud. Felly, allan'i ddweud i ddweud o nad o'r ddwy'n eich ddwy, a ddod o'r ddwy i'n ddweud i ddweud. I'n rydyn ni'n ddweud i'r ddwy'n eich ddysgu'r ddwy. Mae'n ddweud i… a we are going to do a bit of talking about the topic tonight, which is fishing and marine protection. In particular, I think what we want to do, if we can, is have a very positive discussion about finding solutions to the problems of the oceans, the problems the oceans face and the problems that fishing industry faces as well, rather than maybe just dwelling on those issues and problems. But what can we do to help? How can we look forward to a future of good fishing and healthy oceans as well? Because I'm sure many of you know, seven-tenths of our planet is covered in sea water and that ocean matters to us in many, many ways. From my perspective, as a marine biologist turned writer and broadcaster, I spend a lot of my time thinking about and talking about the oceans and the things that live there, and I'm especially fascinated by the connections between people and the oceans. For most people, most of the time, the oceans and the creatures that live there are out of sight and out of mind, but there's so many ways that they do matter, and all of this matters to us on a daily basis. They range really from the practical, direct benefits that we take from the oceans, one of which we're talking about tonight, fishing and food, but it ranges all the way through to really, I think, much more intangible, perhaps more whimsical connections that we have to the seas. In fact, one of my favourite quotes from another writer who's written about the oceans, John Steinbeck, said that an ocean without unnamed monsters would be like completely dreamless sleep. I love that. It comes from a book he wrote called The Log of the Sea of Quarters when he went with a marine biologist, Ed Ricketts, and surveyed invertebrate life in the Gulf of California, and he wrote a lovely book about these explorations, and that was one of the things he wrote about. So this idea of there are monsters in the sea inspires us. That's the sort of thing I love to think about quite a lot, including in my latest book, Thank You Peter for the Blung. I have a few copies if anyone's interested. It's called Spirals in Time. It's a book about seashells. One of the main reasons I chose seashells as a topic is because it encapsulates, for me, this breadth of the connections between people and the seas. On the one hand, seashells are these objects of wonder. They're beautiful things. We find them on the beach, and people have pretty much always wondered what they are when they found them in this strange place, where have they come from. Really, for thousands of years, instilled great meaning in seashells. Going back to seven and a half thousand years ago, there were Europeans who were buried with wonderful jewellery made from shells. Even further back, maybe 100,000 years ago, the first-shell bees were made. So I love all that whimsical connections and the beliefs we have in things like that, people burying themselves with whole shells miles and miles from the sea. But seashells are also the animals that make them. We eat them. Shellfish is a huge source of protein. It's an important source of income for lots of people, and has been for a long time. There's evidence now that maybe 125,000 years ago, early humans migrating out of Africa were perhaps eating giant clams from the Red Sea. We've been eating shellfish and mollusks and seashells for a long time, and still today we are. They're really important. Clams, mussels, oysters are all being farmed and fished from the oceans and eaten in huge quantities. So that's where the book for me was. It is this mixture of human uses, and I think many other aspects of our connections to the oceans is captured in this idea of a seashell. But coming back to fishing and food, that's what we're here to talk about tonight, and that I think really is the most tangible use we have of the oceans. It's the food we eat. It's the jobs that create, and it's a big, big issue, and it's something that we can all find a connection to, because most of us do eat some kind of seafood. One in five people around the world rely on the oceans for their primary source of protein. A lot of us just like eating seafood because it's tasty, I certainly do. But fishing is historically one of the most convoluted and troublesome relationships we have with the oceans. In recent years we've become increasingly aware of the problems the oceans face from overfishing, declines in certain species, from the impacts of certain types of fishing gear, and then you've got the added complications of things like climate change and pollution and so on. But at the same time, and I think perhaps the focus of tonight will hopefully be, that we're actually in a better place now than we ever have been to deal with those problems. That we have a suite of solutions that are getting ever better, a better idea of what we can do to tackle these problems. So I think we are at a really interesting point of time at the moment with knowing what's going wrong, but also really getting a better idea of what we can do to make it better. So to discuss these issues, which are very huge, we would say beforehand in the green room that this discussion could go in all sorts of directions. So it would be really interesting to see what you would like to talk about afterwards, but we'll get the ball rolling with some introductions to what our panel are interested in and what they've worked on and some of the main issues. And we'll see where it goes, I think it's going to be great. So we have gathered a lovely panel, and I think first of all we're going to have Callum Roberts, Professor of Marine Biology from York University, who's going to kick things off. And like me, you've been obsessed with coral reefs for a very long time. I think if any of you have ever been lucky enough to visit the tropics, you'll notice how wonderful these places are and how easy it is to fall in love with colourful, beautiful reefs. But you've since then devoted your career to understanding how protection in protected areas and marine reserves can affect ocean life and you've worked a lot in figuring out how to make protected areas work as well as they can and as well as implementing them. A lot of work on high seas protection, various other things. You've advised the ICN, the World Conservation Union on assessing the threat to various different marine species and how they were doing. But Callum doesn't only talk to an academic audience, he also writes various articles for the public and some other lovely books about the state of the oceans, so you definitely catch those too if you want to find out more. But other than that, I shall hand it over to you. Callum, thanks. Thank you very much, Helen. It's a pleasure to be here. What I want to do to give you a sense of the challenge in terms of marine protection and management is to tell you a little story about a particular place in the sea that many of you may have heard of. That's the Dogger Bank. George Bernard Shaw was a renowned wit and he said, we learn from history that we learn nothing from history and that's one of my favourite quotes. Undoubtedly true. But I want to try and give you a little bit of history about the Dogger Bank which we can learn lessons from and that we should learn lessons from. Now the Dogger Bank is a remarkable place. It's a low hill in the middle of the kind of central North Sea and it's the marine that formed at the end of an ice flow during the last glaciation. It's an incredibly productive place year round because cold nutrient rich water comes in from the Atlantic around the north of Scotland and upwells across the bank. It's lifted up into nice warm water of the bank, relatively speaking warm water. There it forms these fantastic plankton blooms that drives a whole food web which is extraordinarily rich and because it's extraordinarily rich people have been fishing there for a very long time. So if you go back to the 18th century, people used to take boats out there which had pool, swimming pool size pool in the middle of them which they would fill with fish alive and then they would carry them back to various ports and they would keep them in cages and then cull them when the market was ready for their fish. So principally they would catch things like cod and halibut which were pretty hardy fish for putting in pens and selling in places like London. The catch rates were absolutely extraordinary and in 1840 there's a quote from the bank which said that eight fishermen fishing with hook and line for ten hours were able to catch 80 score of cod in a day. 80 score, 1600 fish, 200 fish per person, ten hours, that's one fish every three minutes during the whole course of the day. And you can imagine that it must have been a case of baiting the line, dropping the hook and pulling up the cod immediately and you had to keep doing this all day as fast as you could. The average sort of weight of a cod at that time on the bank was between 14 and 40 pounds and so if you take the 14 pound end of that, that's ten tons of cod for a boat in a day. Now that's an extraordinary number and it's going to be at the high end of the success rate for the doger bank. But there are many other accounts of things like catching halibut and a typical catch of halibut from a line boat in the 1830s and 1840s would be something like a ton of halibut per day which is a lot of fish. I mean a heap up over this stage they would be enormous too, many of them greater than a meter long, meter and a half long, big hefty fish. Sometimes they would need to be hauled by two people to get them into the boat because they were that large and heavy. Now if you look at the history of the doger bank, the line fisheries were replaced into the mid 19th century by trawl fisheries. So bottom trawls swept the seabed and they caught enormous catches of fish and so a sail trawler could catch something like two to three tons of fish in a three hour trawl. Across about five miles of seabed and that is far, far greater than any fishing vessel can manage today from the same swept area. So it was a very, very productive place through the 1860s into the 1870s that increased as the fishing power increased so they were catching five or six tons of fish per toe ten years on as the technology of trawling developed. And then they saw things starting to change and so by the middle of the 19th century at a time when they had the first fisheries inquiry because of perceived problems in the fishery and worries about the destructive nature of bottom trawling, people began to worry about the fall off in the abundance of halibut and skate on the doger bank. And halibut in particular, the catch rates indicate that there was something like a 90% decline in the halibut population from 1840 to 1860 or so and continued to decline as fishing pressure built. The skates as well followed much the same trajectory, they were landed into ports on the east coast of the UK by the cartload and then in ones and twos and then not at all as we moved through the 19th century. So the nature of the bank was changing dramatically and many common fish were also being depleted as well by the fishery. Now towards, well a few years ago, 2006 to 2009, the doger bank has once again come to prominence because it was declared a special area of conservation and so the Joint Nature Conservation Committee embarked upon a study of the doger bank and looked at what the habitats were like, what the fish were like in order to decide the conservation objectives for this area of seabed and what they found was that in the years that they were studying the average catch of halibut on the bank was two tonnes per year. That's from everyone. Remember one ton per boat per day in the 1840s, that's the scale of the difference. I mean the halibut has declined more than a thousand times in the in abundance on the bank. So have the skates, they've gone extinct from that bank. There are many other fish species that have been completely depleted. So the Congareels for example, wolffish, these were fish that were once a mainstay of catches around the UK which have subsequently become very scarce. The JNCC report looks at the conservation objectives for it and bases them in their entirety on the last ten years. Now that is the wrong thing to do. If you want to have good conservation around the UK seas you can't base things on a heavily depleted, completely changed ecosystem and say that you're going to base your management on essentially maintaining that sort of structure which is what they have done. It's woefully inadequate as a conservation strategy and it essentially elevates worms to the top conservation value above all of those things that have disappeared. There's no ambition to get any of that life back in this conservation zone or in fact in pretty much any other conservation zone around the UK. If you look at the proposed management measures for Scotland's new marine protected areas, there are 30 of them. They were established in 2014. They proposed to leave most of those marine protected areas open to scallop dredging and bottom trawling. So essentially what is the point in calling them marine protected areas if you're going to admit the two most destructive fishing methods of all in the bounds of those protected areas. The English marine conservation zones at the moment nobody knows what they're going to be protected from but looking at the experience with special areas of conservation I don't think you can be reassured that there's going to be a high level of conservation ambition. So there's a lot to be fought for in terms of getting marine life the protection that it needs around the UK and I think that protection needs to be implemented alongside management for fisheries but one thing that's clear you can't have fisheries management deliver the recovery of these species that have departed and have been depleted because there is no ambition to bring these species back. There are productive fisheries in that place and so if we want to have protection for what are now endangered and some of them critically endangered species, we are going to need to embrace the concept of strictly protected areas that are off limits to exploitation. So I shall leave it at that. Thank you. Thank you, Callum. So I think we've set the bar, made the case very strongly for ambitious conservation in the oceans. I particularly like the visuals you've given us of how big some of these fish used to be, trying to imagine standing next to a meter and a half tall halibut and also watching a fish come out every three minutes on a boat. It's quite a vivid image you've painted of how things used to be and perhaps started the discussion about protected areas and what they might do. But let's move over to Barry, next to me here. Barry is the chief executive of the National Federation of Fishermen's Organisations, which is a group that gives a voice to fishermen across the UK. If I'm right, I believe that's no matter where they are, what size their vessels are, where they fish. So this is the voice for the fishermen. And as an advocate for fisheries, Barry does various things. It seems that you are a man of many jobs that you provide evidence to the government, write articles for the press, appear in debates like this this evening. Thank you very much for being here and also on television. So I don't know if any of you are viewers of BBC's Newsnight, but last year you took to the studio to discuss the issue of discards and by-catch with Hugh Fennie Wittingstall and did a very good job of a live television interview, which must be absolutely terrifying. But over to you, Barry. Thanks very much. Thank you very much. And thank you for the invitation here in such august surroundings and people. I should draw a line around my competence, which I'm only really experienced enough to speak about the common fisheries policy and the Northeast Atlantic a bit. But a couple of years ago in my office, so I'm not claiming any great scientific authority for it, but we did a back of the envelope exercise and we calculated that since the end of the Second World War, the British fishing fleet landed, constituted the basis for 200 trillion meals and it's a big number. I don't know if it's right, but it's a big number. I think the point is that it's a reminder that fishing plays a fairly fundamental role in the nation's food security and I think that's a point that often has got lost in the debate about the impact of fishing. The key issue, as I understand it, is about how we can continue to make this contribution, this social good, if you like, whilst minimizing the impact of fishing and there is no denying that it has an impact, just like every other form of food production. And of course it's important to note that how we achieve this takes place within the context of changing societal expectations, so in some sense the industry gets very frustrated at the constantly moving goalposts, but that's just part of the world that we live in and we have to deal with. Mistakes have certainly been made. The common fisheries policy for most of its life has been a top heavy, top down and largely ineffective management system for our fisheries and to a significant degree I think it has caused the problems that we now as an industry have to face. The problems with North Sea cod were caused by a fleet of a capacity. There was something called the Gadoid Outburst in the 1970s and 80s where there was a big explosion in the population of the Gadoid species cod had it quieting etc. And you saw the fleet responding to that. Ships were built to take advantage of this abundance. That was then supercharged by EU grants and we had an over capacity issue and that really in a nutshell was the problem with North Sea cod. The Commission's solution, the Council's solution, the EU solution gave rise to large scale discards and we're just having to deal with that now. But despite the shortcomings and mistakes and certainly achieved in a more painful way than was necessary, if we look at fishing pressure, fishing mortality right across the North Sea, the North East Atlantic, so we're talking about Norway, Iceland as well as the common fisheries policy and we're talking about all of the main species groups. So we're talking about the pelagics, the demersals, the benthics, so that's your herring and the mackerel. You've quite had a quieting in your flatfish. All of the main species groups, you have seen a dramatic reduction in fishing pressure from around about the year 2000. And that is of the utmost significance. There's about a 50%, 50% reduction in fishing pressure. And you're seeing stocks responding. North Sea Place in particular, dramatic increase in the population. North Sea Place is now above anything that's previously been seen in the scientific record. Historical record is something different we can argue about that. But in terms of the scientific record, you have a dramatic increase and there are other stocks hake, for example, following the same pattern. Others are more slow, as you would expect, but you see this as the pressure has been lifted, you see this recovery going on. And we now have to deal. Fisheries management now has to start thinking about who eats who. Predation is so much more significant. In the North Sea, natural mortality in terms of predation is much more significant than fishing mortality. And we are now having to think, well, if we set this quota at this level, who's going to eat who and what's going to be left for who. And that type of mixed fishery multi-species management is now going to have to come to the forefront in our thinking. One of the interesting points, it's kind of counterintuitive in a way, is that the fishery with the largest discards, so we're talking about the flatfish, the bintral fishery for place and soul. The discards count in the thousands. And yet this is exactly the species that is booming that has increased so dramatically. So there's no obvious correlation between high levels of discards and conservation status, which I think is an interesting point to ponder on. A callum has spoken eloquently, as usual, about marine protected areas. And I think we would say that marine protected areas have an important role to play in protecting habitats and biodiversity. And there's a process both at the European level and the domestic level for implementing them. No doubt not fast enough for callum, but there we go. But from our point of view it's very important that their location, their shape and size and purpose are based on sound knowledge. Otherwise it becomes a tick box exercise in gesture politics. They have been sold, oversold as a fishery's management tool. If you want to increase commercial species, there are other tools in the toolbox for my money. Getting the fleet capacity right through publicly funded decommissioning is the single most important thing that has happened in the last 20 years to turn things around. We have got a rough balance between the capacity of the fleet and the available resources. And you've seen other things work. Quota management can work. Profitability in the industry can work. Technical measures can work when you've got the capacity imbalance. Closed areas, restricted areas can have a role. There's an area off North Cornwall that travows closure. It's a seasonal closure that we have supported. Because it's there for a purpose. It's there to protect cod during the spawning season. And I wouldn't say it's welcomed enthusiastically by the industry, but it's accepted by the industry and it serves a purpose. But closed areas are not the panacea that have been claimed by some. There are better tools in the toolbox. So if we look around, what are the general lessons of the last couple of decades? I think we would say that broad brush measures, they may be politically and administratively easier to introduce, but they will usually fail and cost more in the long term. So targeted measures, measures that are well thought through rather than blanket knee-jerk reactions. The point I made earlier, if you don't get fleet capacity aligned with the available resources, nothing else will work. Thirdly, the Nobel Prize winner Eleanor Ulström demonstrated that bringing resource holders, the people involved in the fishery, into the design and implementation of management measures is absolutely critical to their success. That would be the third point. So I think the issue then becomes what are the institutional forms in which this can be achieved. And for my money, if you have the scientists, fisheries scientists, fisheries managers, the policy people and the fisheries stakeholders in the room, that is the institutional form that will deliver effective management. And we are moving very slowly, glacially slowly, you might say, towards that in the shape of regional advisory councils and regional management. Thank you. Barry, thank you very much for that. Very honest and balanced view from the fishing industry. Mistakes have been made, but we can look forward. And I think you've given us a really nice recent overview of what's been going on in the last couple of decades. I'm certainly going to be using gadoid outburst as a phrase whenever I get the chance. That's fantastic, but you make a couple of really important points, things we might want to pick up on, but generally introducing the ideas of things like the importance of decommissioning, so essentially taking boats out of the water to reduce the fishing pressure, the amount of fish being caught, the number of people out there doing this. And also I think really important there, you mentioned the involvement of stakeholders, the users of the ocean. And I'm sure that's something that really is a common feeling with many, whether it's from the fishermen themselves or from the conservationists and everyone else, that that should really be part of the picture. And it is being brought in more and more in conservation and fishing management. It's the people who are out there on the ocean, people who are making their livings from it. They should be involved in these discussions and it makes it more effective in the long run. So thank you very much for that introduction to things from your perspective. I think we'll move on to our final panellist before you can all go off and get some of mine. So I'd like to introduce you to Alistair Harris, another marine biologist who has a big fondness for coral reefs, like two of us already. I don't know if you didn't actually ask Barry about how he feels about coral reefs, but that's for you. Excellent. Alistair is the founder of Blue Ventures, an organisation that works with local communities in various countries, particularly Madagascar, with the aim of rebuilding tropical fisheries, working with local communities, and with the big aim of making conservation economic sense, I think, might be fair to say. As well as being executive director of Blue Ventures, Alistair seems to keep himself incredibly busy, working in various aspects of fishing and conservation advice, including a member of the, he's a member of the World Commission on Protected Areas, and he's on the stakeholder council, that word against stakeholder, the users, for the Marine Stewardship Council, so a group of the eco-labeling for sustainable fish. And I believe you're off tomorrow to Paris to talk about aquaculture to the World Conservation Union. So a man with many hats and very busy indeed, but over to you Al, thanks. Thanks Helen, and it's a great privilege to be here, to be able to share my thoughts with such an august audience. I'd like to take, shift our focus a little bit beyond the Northeast Atlantic, beyond the UK, and take a more global perspective on the challenges that we're facing. Global demand for seafood is absolutely rocketing. From the mid-90s when we were consuming about 75 million tonnes a year to today, we're on 160 million tonnes, and with global populations set to mushroom from 7 billion today to 11 billion by 2050, this demand is only going to increase further. Given this soaring demand, I think it's fair to say that at a global perspective, most fisheries are in serious trouble. 90% of the world's fisheries are either fully exploited or over exploited, and compounding these problems, of course, we have huge challenges of data deficiency, particularly in the developing world, in the global south, weak management, very weak traction of market-based incentive mechanisms, particularly again in the south. So the situation is, as far as overfishing is concerned, is bleak, and it's not evidently getting any better. Compounding these problems, of course, we have global climate change, local environmental degradation, ultimately leading to the collapse of the resources that we're talking about. We are living in the sixth mass extinction event, and this is not just a biodiversity issue. It's about the economies of coastal communities. It's about food security, as Barry said, and it's crucially about food security for some of the most vulnerable people on the planet. Who are these people? Seafood is the primary source of animal protein for about a billion people worldwide. Anywhere between 600 and 800 million people, that's around 12% of the planet, depend on fishing for their livelihoods. And this is overwhelmingly concentrated in the global south. 97% of the world's fishers are in the developing world. Also in the developing world, we see a much greater dependence on seafood for food, much higher vulnerability to the impacts of a very, very rapidly changing ocean climate, the impacts of which we're already seeing in many tropical and subtropical countries from increased cyclonic activity to massive-scale coral bleaching. With population growth ongoing, of course, most of this is going to take place in the south, and climate change is not going to make the challenge of managing these fisheries any easier. Most of the fisheries that we see in the developing world are what we call affectionately small-scale fisheries, but I would argue that the only thing that's small about these fisheries is the size of their boats. They act largely under the radar, they're not recognised adequately by national or international policy frameworks, and they comprise largely subsistence, artisanal and traditional fisheries, and yet they number 97% of the world's fishers. This is a global issue, it's far too big to ignore, it is not so small-scale fishing. I want to relate that situation with where we stand today in marine protection. Globally, we're currently fully protecting less than 1% of our seas within fully protected, no-take zones. Most of those, many of those, suffer serious management challenges because of a failure on the behalf of the conservation sector to adequately engage the needs, the resource needs of coastal communities, particularly fishermen and women. Science tells us that we really need to be protecting about 30%, a third of our oceans, and we need to get there within the next generation if we're going to be able to safeguard our seas from the impacts that we know we're unleashing with global change. Funding for conservation is stagnant at best, and our sector remains fairly marginal relative to terrestrial conservation, relative to other areas of global development. Given the mounting pressures, how we are going to get from 1% protection to 30% protection in the next generation is without a shadow of a doubt the single greatest issue affecting the marine conservation sector today. How are we going to get there? I personally believe that the way we need to start thinking about this is to turn the challenge of engagement of fishing communities into the solution that we're looking to bring to bear on the problem. Fishes are the solution to this problem. They shouldn't be seen as a barrier to conservation success. The great irony of marine conservation and marine protection is that fishing communities are the people that have the most to gain from marine protection. But these benefits are often seen as diffuse, they're often long term, and the opportunity cost to reap the dividends, the returns on a closed area, are often too much for fishing communities to bear, and so fishermen become adversaries rather than advocates for conservation, because the opportunity cost is too high. We as conservationists urgently need new tools to address that opportunity cost issue. How can we remove the opportunity cost, bring it down so that we can catalyse interest at the grass roots, engage coastal communities in showing that marine conservation can work to enhance fishing productivity? The good news is that the windwinds do exist and the solutions are out there. I'll opt for a bit of self publicity here, but we just published a study last week in the Open Access Journal, plus one that shows that the use of periodic fisheries closures, similar to what Barry was referring to, in the island of Madagascar, which is one of the poorest countries on Earth, this is a system of community-based fisheries management in which communities are closing about 20% of their fishing grounds for two to three months. It's been going on for the last decade in Madagascar. This study shows that these communities are increasing their catches for a month after these closures by 87%, and that translates to a monthly IRR of 92%, internal rate of return. That means these guys are doubling their money in a month through fisheries management. That's higher than any investment product on the market. Investing in fisheries recovery makes real financial sense. But what's most interesting to us is that these communities are now embarking on conservation efforts, permanent marine protected areas that were absolutely inconceivable before they saw the economic benefits of fisheries management. Today, as a result of that model, 11% of Madagascar's in-shore seabed is within locally managed marine protected areas, all driven as a result of that model that's catalyzed local interest in conservation by showing economic benefits. I think this offers a great shine of opportunity of hope here in the UK to see that communities in one of the poorest countries on Earth that depend overwhelmingly on fishing for survival are fighting for conservation. All too often, I think, we engage, our fishing sector engaged, fights against conservation because we haven't got it right as conservationists. It's our obligation to show the economic benefits of the marine protected areas that we know we need to create. There are very encouraging signs of success here in the UK. The community of our seabed trust is a really good example in Scotland of what can happen through local engagement in marine management. I'll try to end there. I've got lots more I'd like to say, but that's my flavour from the south. Thanks ever so much, Alistair. That's great. I'm sure we'll have lots more to discuss after the break. But just quickly to say, it's really interesting that you've put people back in that picture really clearly. I think that echoes what Barry was saying as well about the importance of evolving the people, the fishers who are there, and drawing us the global picture, which I think we've gone from Doggo Bank to the Northeast Atlantic to the whole world. We've got a nice basis, I think, for going forward with discussions. So I think it's time for us all to stretch legs, grab some more wine, there's plenty at the back. And then if we would like to, yeah, ten minutes, should we say half past, half past seven? Should we sit down and carry on the skin? So over that time, think of lots of questions and things you'd like to discuss and bring out with our panel. Thank you all very much. Thanks. I hope you're all well topped up and ready for a discussion. My name's Richard Scrace. I don't belong to any particular group. When I was at school about 40 years ago, doing my A-levels, we had an exercise in how our country was overfishing, and how fisheries had been declining for many years. And the science then and the science since has said that we needed to reduce our fishing efforts so that the fish could recover. And I could never understand why the combination of fishermen, policy makers, politicians seemed to ever listen to the science. And yet then I had the good luck to be drinking in London one night, and it just so happened that a group of people came in, civil servants, who'd just come back from fishery negotiations in Brussels. And I overheard the conversation and jumped in and said, why is it you can't achieve your job? Surely fishermen don't have that many votes. They said, well, the things we're going to negotiate for a week, and by the end of the week, we're fed up. We want to come home and the fishermen will stick it out. And so they end up winning. Now that sounds to be like a rather gross simplification of what happened over a week. But Barry, you talked about the glacial process. Can you tell me why that process is so glacial? Yes. Great to begin. Well, things are changing. I mean, start with the science. Let's talk about this in terms of science and then talk about policy. We used to have one meeting a year with the scientists. That's when they told us what their recommendations were for the coming years quotas, which were invariably heading in a downward direction. And those meetings were horrific, a blood bath. You scroll forward maybe 15 years to now, and it's a much, much better relationship. We have things called fishery science partnerships where fishermen and scientists collaborate on projects that are suggested by the industry, funded by government with declining budgets. And that not only provides useful data, but also has transformed the relationship between fishermen and scientists. Science is provided within the Common Fisheries Policy by ICES, the International Council for Exploration of the Sea, based in Copenhagen. At one time, somebody described it as a black box that emitted smoke, and we weren't allowed to look into that black box. Well, scroll forward, and we don't have the human resources to be able to attend all the meetings that we're invited to. There are strategy meetings, there are data compilation meetings, there are benchmark meetings. So there's a huge change, and I think that helps fishermen understand the science. I think the science benefits from the dialogue with industry. On the policy side, progress is slow because the European Union is slow. And if you take as your premise that the fundamental problem with the Common Fisheries Policy is trying to manage a huge number of diverse fisheries across 40 degrees of longitude or latitude, it's an enormous area. And there's a recognition that that model just doesn't work, and reform has accepted that a degree of decentralisation is required. Trouble is that that has taken from the original concept in the late 1990s. It's taken to 2013 to come around. In the other direction comes co-decision making, where the European Parliament now has involvement. And an indiscreet commission official said, well, we've moved from a situation where 23 people who didn't know what they were talking about make the decisions to a situation where 674 people who don't know what they're talking about make the decisions. And there's an element of truth in that. Regionalisation means that we have the advisory councils, which are the stakeholders, including the NGOs. We also now have, although it's very much in its infancy, we have a situation where member states co-operating at regional seas levels, so North Sea or Northwest Waters, can make recommendations, joint recommendations, that all other things being equal go through the process and become law. That is a much more flexible system. It's a step in the right direction. I'm an advocate for going much further for decisions to be made in the wheelhouse of the vessel within a system of supervision. So fishermen sign up to a vision, a more of a kind of contractual relationship about how they will fish sustainably. And that gets you away from all the micromanagement that has really not had a great record of success. So it is a long, slow job. It's very complex. There are things that are moving in the right direction. There are some countervailing influences, but I don't think we've got much option to keep pushing. Thanks. That's great. Briefly, Jared, if you have other comments on the pace of change, or should we move on to more questions? I can make one comment on pace of change. There has been change, and those of you who might have been keen viewers of Hughes Fish Fight will have noticed that there has been legislation to reduce discarding from boats. I say reduce, not eliminate, because a common misperception is that the discarding is being ended, but only for the species which are managed by quotas. So you can still throw away half your catch if it's made up of things which are non-quota species. So, you know, that includes a lot of these threatened species that I was talking about earlier. So it's not far enough. Another of the reforms of the common fisheries policy recently was that we should be fishing at maximum sustainable yield for fish stocks, and that therefore we would end over fishing within Europe by fishing at maximum sustainable yield, which is a move in the right direction, but there's a couple of problems with maximum sustainable yield now. Number one is that the Commission declares success in fishing at maximum sustainable yield, not when the stock has recovered to the level that will achieve maximum sustainable yield, but when they reduce fishing pressure sufficiently that eventually, given enough time, the stock will recover to that level. So in other words, it's, you know, trust me, the stock will recover if we fish it at this level, and there's no guarantees on that, frankly. There are many examples of reducing fishing pressure and things haven't come back. The other problem with maximum sustainable yield is that when I started my career in fisheries, it represented half of the weight of an unexploited stock. So in other words, you could fish down half the stock and you'd hit the maximum productivity, and that's the maximum sustainable yield level. But if you want to achieve maximum sustainable yield in more fisheries, the simple thing to do is to downgrade that target, and that's what's been happening underneath the radar over the years, is that we're now down to maximum sustainable yield being calculated as when the stock is at 25 or 30% of its unexploited size. So that's something which hasn't really been discussed very much in the open, and I think it needs to be, because what we're seeing is far less precautionary targets being introduced now. So there is progress. I accept that. I think there's been good progress. The industry is engaging with scientists to a much greater extent. It's not yet engaging enough with conservationists, I'll say, and Barry's comments earlier about marine protected areas were all very much made from within the context or from within the assumption that everywhere should be fished because the sea is there for fishing, whereas I would say that's not the case. There is a good case for putting areas off-limits to fishing to give nature space alongside fisheries and to use the environment in a balanced way, and so we're coming at it from different directions here, I think, and different underlying assumptions. OK. Perhaps I could add one more theme on the review of the common fisheries policy in 2012-2013 that was overlooked was the fact that the food security that Barry refers to here in the EU and the UK on EU fisheries, the seafood that we consume is not just from the EU. The EU fleet operates far beyond the borders of the EU. The distant water vessels which are paid for by us, the EU taxpayers are fishing in the coastal waters of other nations, third party nations, distant water fleets, we call them, under access agreements. Now, often these agreements are signed with states that very much need the revenue and don't have the capacity for monitoring control and surveillance of their territorial waters. If I could perhaps use the same country as an example that I referred to earlier, Madagascar has one of the largest tuna fisheries in the southwest Indian Ocean and the largest tuna fleet in Madagascar's EEZ, Madagascar doesn't have a domestic tuna fleet, is the EU which has about 124 vessels or something there about the last agreement and pays 1.3 million euros for the right to fish, a fishery whose landed value is probably about 60 to 80 million euros. So, there is a global right to food issue tied up with the CFP that has been massively overlooked in the context of the reform. Yes, fisheries are incredibly important for food security in this country, but they're seriously undermining the food security of some of the poorest people on Earth and we're paying for that. Great, I think we should take some more questions. Right, okay, let's send a microphone to the lady there and how about another one to the gentleman down here and we'll get going. Thank you. Hi, my name is Matilda Evans. I actually worked with Coast on my Master's thesis last year so I'm quite familiar with the situation. My question was for Alasdair, I was going along the lines of what you've just mentioned, I was going to ask in terms of, obviously you were developing really successful schemes with the local fishermen and they now have their locally managed marine areas and I was wondering in terms of official protection if some commercial venture was then to come and get involved and think, ooh, I've looked at your article, I've seen your production increase and all of those great numbers that you've published which is fabulous for the local fisheries and for the environment. Where's the risk with a government like Madagascar which obviously is prone to corruption and the economic problems that they have? Have you faced any of that yet? I would argue that the success of fisheries enhancement-based conservation strategy hinges on the engagement of the private sector so that's, I would see as an opportunity if we're seeing increased value from more sustainable fisheries management up the supply chain then that's exactly what we want to be working towards. I would certainly never suggest that locally managed marine areas which work very well in a very poorly governed marine environment like the western Indian Ocean are a panacea. It's illegal in this country. You can't go and sacrifice a cow and declare an area closed to fishing for very good reason here. But I think it needs to be part of the solution and certainly it's in the hands of the small scale fishers in the developing world that we really need to put the scaling of conservation because we can't get to that 30% without them. They have to be the agency through which we operate. The models that I've referred to have been effectively implemented through what one might call top-down approaches in other jurisdictions. The government of Mauritius took on board that same model and implemented it through fisheries legislation. So I think one has to work within the context of the jurisdiction and the governance setting in which we're operating. One of the things that I guess I've noticed in my career spending most of it working with fishers in the tropics is how closely the enormous psychological awareness that small scale fishers have far greater than me as a marine biologist with degrees and things. They're totally irrelevant in comparison to the scale of this really, really strong knowledge. It's just another example of the need to engage with communities in a leadership role. Fantastic. Let's go to the next question over here. Okay. Is this on? Yes. My name is Geoff Meaden. I'm employed by the FAO of the UN as a consultant. My present unenviable task is to develop a marine spatial plan for the Persian Gulf. I'm amazed that the whole concept of marine spatial plan wasn't actually mentioned here as people on the panel will know places like the Irish Sea and the Baltic Sea and the Coral Sea of Australia under Sea of California have marine spatial plans. You wouldn't imagine that the terrestrial areas of the earth could be managed without planning. It would be impossible. It's only with planning that things are all going to work sustainably. The marine areas are used by fishing industry over the list here, shipping, recreation, building development, oil, gas and wind, military, conservation, aggregates, et cetera. Well, if they were to have a free for all, which it doesn't quite as bad as that at the moment, but it could theoretically be. If we had it all planned out nicely, then things would happen sustainably for all of the activities. At the moment, things are not happening sustainably for fisheries because all the other people have much more power and influence than fishermen have. So I would like to see marine spatial planning developed even in our English Channel or North Sea we don't have this type of management. Could the panel comment on where we are at with MSP? Thank you. Would anyone like to just give in a nutshell, give a lovely introduction to marine spatial planning but perhaps sort of underline what that is? Well, there is a move towards marine spatial planning in the UK under the Marine and Coastal Access Act and the marine management organisation is in charge of developing marine spatial plans and it's doing a trial area at the moment. Essentially, we mean deciding where different activities can happen in the ocean, mapping it out physically. Yes, let's just make sure we're all up to speed on that. Marine spatial planning, great. So you've given me a very good exam question for next year. If we had marine spatial planning, we would have all of our activities sustainably operating in the sea. Discuss. I fear that that will not be enough and it all depends on what your aims are and one of the aims in the waters of Europe is to achieve good environmental status by 2020 under the Marine Strategy Framework Directive. But if your definition of what good environmental status is is based on five or ten years of data on what the sea looks like at the moment, then you're setting yourself up for low ambition in terms of recovery of the sea. So I think you have to also think about providing protection which will enable the sea to tell you what is enough protection, to do it experimentally to develop management that will lead you in the right direction in terms of recovery and rebuilding of stocks and habitats. And that way, rather than assuming the answer and saying it's fine to trawl in all of our marine protected areas and never finding out that actually you could have had something completely different in those protected areas if you'd really protected them from that impact. It's got to be experimental and developmental, I think. And sustainability has to be the aim that you're waiting for sustainability for all the state countries? Well, sustainability is a little bit of a misused word and if I might just add one point here, which, or rather, it's a weasel word. It's a weasel word because some of our most destructive fisheries are our most sustainable ones. And that surprises people when they think about it. Surely a sustainable fishery is one wherever the hunky-dory and everybody's happy, the wildlife is happy, the crabs have all got smiles on their faces. The answer is not, actually. And if you look at the species that have come to dominate in heavily exploited ecosystems, on the Dogger Bank, major fisheries today are for nephrops prawns, for damps, place and for sandeals. And these are things which breed prolifically. They are the rats and cockroaches of the sea. And so they have very high population turnover rates. They can cope with the removals that we're doing by fishing. They can cope with very heavy destructive fishing gears impacting on habitats. They're quite happy with it just as rats and cockroaches are happy thriving in pretty heavily human-impacted environments. But we don't want those everywhere. And if we're going to have wildlife conservation in the ocean, then we need to curtail the footprint of those fisheries recognising that sustainability in itself is not an adequate goal. Do you like to add some thoughts? Dogger banks made of sand. Well, it is now. I don't think it's been a nephrops fishery for some time. Marine spatial planning has come in. It's on its way. As Khan says, the marine management organisations, this too is an eastern area and a southern area experimental. Co-existence is really what it's about. It's quite interesting that the fishing industry has developed ways of co-existing with oil and gas, renewables, cable industry, quite well through dialogue. So there are quite sophisticated arrangements in place already, but I suppose they'll be incorporated into it. But I think the issue of the discard ban, the landings obligation, is part of this picture of a sustainable fishing industry within the sustainable ecosystems being raised. My opinion at the moment is that the biggest threat to sustainable fishing and the direction that we've been heading in for the last 10 years is the landings obligation. It was badly drafted, badly conceived, panic measure brought in, no doubt about it, with the assistance of huge fish fight. And we are now facing, and the scientists are facing, fundamental changes which don't necessarily move in the direction of sustainable fishing. We have a top-down approach. For example, the North Sea place fishery, where we have a situation where the stock is going in the right direction, but it's a high-discard fishery. And that is probably something to do with the fact that the evidence suggests that it's quite a high level of survival. So for those species, the fish that goes back survive and contribute to the biomass. If you look at the roundfish fishery, so your cod had it quite in the North Sea, actually have a graph here, which I've walked along, that's 20 years of discards, and you can see there's something like a 90% reduction. So what we were doing over that period was reducing fishing pressure. We were reducing discards by 90%. The difficulty that we now face, and the scientists face, the relevance of their models, because all of that's going to change, the fishing patterns are going to change. In terms of spatial management, where fishermen fish is going to change. That is one of the challenges for spatial management. Where we fish now in order to have an economic fishery might be different under a discard ban. So marine spatial planning is where we've got to go. I think it's probably not a good idea to rush it, because there's so many different dimensions, not least of all how to deal with this piece of legislation, the landings obligation that is coming at us like a train. So maybe we need to slow that down to a speed. Thank you very much. I see that time is ticking, so let's get through some more questions. One, two, three, and then give our panel time to think about that. So let's go. Do you want to hand us to that gentleman there? And would you like to come in here to the lady in the green top? And we'll do those two and then we'll get a third one. So, yeah, go for it. Hi, my name is Will McCullum. I'm Head of Oceans at Greenpeace UK. And I guess we focus lots on the solutions aspect to it, the marine protected areas. And Alistair says 30%, and Greenpeace's position is 40%, but that still leaves 60% or 70% of the ocean that needs to be left for sustainable fishing. And it's nice in the UK, we're in a kind of, like Barry's organisation in Greenpeace, we might disagree on some things, but in a way we're in a luxury position of talking about solutions and kind of roughly aiming for similar areas sometimes, a lot of the time. But actually there are some fundamentally bad players out there that we're trying to tackle. There are trans shipments, there are long liners, there's IU vessels kind of all over the place. And we're stuck in this position, I'm not knowing really how to tackle this massive, you know, the 60 or 70% of the high seas that we need to have sustainable fishing in. And I just wondered whether you've got kind of thoughts or examples actually from your research of successful measures being taken to tackle some of those worst industry players who I think there will be no disagreement in this room but are doing some pretty horrendous activity out there. That's a great question. We'll hold that for a second. Let's have our next one. Oh, do we have, yes? Oh, yes. So my name is Amy McCourt. I work in finance and the charity and not profit sector. This is sort of a specific question. Talking about the increased trend and we've discussed place by varieties, specifically with that, if the status quo is maintained, will that be able to continue? And if so, tied in with Calvin Robert's point, what's, if not, sorry, what is the barrier of reaching the historic levels of biomass? And if we could, if possible, kind of tailor that to, as a consumer, my impact can be through supply and demand. So in my three areas, consideration would be perhaps is there a part of the food chain most concerned, so fishing plankton for fish oil for example? Is it habitat and style of fishing or is it just sheer quantity that would impact that? Okay, so we've got a few questions wrapped up in there. I think that was great. Shall we just, maybe we should stick with those two for now and see where we get. So our first question was about the big baddies. Illegal fishing, longlining, some of these really, really tough issues we've got to deal with in fishing. We haven't really touched on them so much tonight. Would any of you three like to comment on that at this stage? Perhaps Al, would you have any thoughts on, or have you thought of any positive cases in which those sorts of problems, illegal, unreported fishing have been dealt with? Well, I'll start off with a negative, if I may. Firstly, I would speak to your point about our sector being woefully ill-prepared to deal with the scale of this challenge. You refer to high seas areas beyond national jurisdiction. 50% of the planet, we don't know what's going on out there, transshipments, illegal fishing. There are some very exciting initiatives. The Port State Measures Initiative, which has been driven by Pew, keeping vessel IDs so that we can keep a track on where these reefers are going and the reefers are the vessels that are doing transshipment. So we should just say that transshipment is when fish is unloaded from one boat to another, essentially at sea, so it's hard to then track where it was caught and so on. And also, of course, the role that technology can play. Everybody's now looking to terrestrial and marine drones, and all of the new low-cost tech that could be used to help police the high seas. I would argue, though, that we can't even seem to get it right here in the UK, as far as the baddies are concerned. I mentioned in a chat earlier the French supermarket chain, Antelmashie, which runs the deep-sea trawl fishery that operates off the coast of Scotland and is hooking up large numbers of endangered species every day to feed French consumers being subsidised by the European taxpayer. There are a lot of baddies out there. I think fundamentally, from my perspective, our sector needs to grow. We have a role to play. You particularly have a role to play in championing this mission, in raising awareness of the fact that the high seas are 50% of the planet. We don't have long to act on these issues. There are good news solutions out there, but the scale of the challenges is enormous. Most of the developing world and the tropical developing world doesn't have the capacity to enforce fishing legislation within territorial waters, let alone in areas beyond natural jurisdiction. I used to live in Madagascar a million square kilometres of EEZ with three or four zodiacs to police it. It comes back to the MSP question. Is it feasible in these countries where capacity is so low? In the Persian Gulf, of course, they've got the capacity in some countries to double the length of their coastlines through coastal hardening. I think we need to be realistic. Kellan, do you want to briefly mention the steps we're at at the moment in terms of the UN agreements on putting protected areas in the high seas? Perhaps just a brief introduction to what's going on at the moment. The high seas, there's no instrument present to create marine protected areas in the high seas. We're busy doing the science to try and identify places that are important, where wildlife is threatened. That's pretty much everywhere, actually across the high seas. Just within the last week, the United Nations General Assembly has voted to negotiate an implementing agreement for marine protected areas in the high seas. That's hopefully going to be completed within two years, and then we will be at a point where we can start to introduce marine protected areas. But I think we need to be bolder than that, actually, on the high seas. Because at the moment we have something like 18 regional fisheries management organisations, which are responsible for various bits of high seas management. They operate under the auspices of the United Nations and the Food and Agriculture Organization, and they are fundamentally flawed. Their constitutions are not sufficiently broad, to safeguard the environment and to make sure that the environmental quality is sufficient to continue delivering as fish. They promote sovereignty issues over any question of resource management. In other words, if a country disagrees with a measure to manage a resource more effectively, then that management measure doesn't get implemented in most cases. They are run under consensus rules, and so they're completely hopeless at protecting the high seas right now. Given that, I would argue we should stop fishing the high seas completely. We should introduce a moratorium on high seas fishing until those management organisations are reformed in such a way that they are capable of delivering good environmental management and long-term sustainability in fisheries, but at the moment what we have is a mining operation across most of the high seas, and it's benefiting a handful of countries that have geared up for high seas exploitation. So it's incredibly iniquitous. Most of the poorer countries of the world get no say in the high seas. It's all going to the big players, the industrial nations who are out there with their fleets extracting as fast as possible. So I can't help you with what we need to do. The port states agreement, if that measure was introduced and we start tracking boats on the high seas and catching the ones that are fishing in the most egregious ways, that will be good. And it's also about human rights and welfare issue that we need to do that, because those are also the places where human rights are being most soundly abused, I think, and there's all sorts of issues with slavery and bonded labour and appalling employment practices, et cetera, et cetera, which go with those illegal fisheries. So it's a weeping sore on the world's conscience, I think. OK, right. I'm going to whizz on to the next question. I think you had several parts, but if you may, if I may, I think I'd like to focus in on the idea of consumers and what choices consumers can make and perhaps sort of where they could best be focusing their efforts to try and take part in pushing for good and for more sustainable fishing. I think that sums up, hopefully, what you are asking. Alastair, do you have any thoughts on that in terms of perhaps Callum as well? I know you just ended the last question, but perhaps that is a good one for you to answer. Barry made the point that fish is a very important food source and I have no shame in saying that I still eat fish and I enjoy fish and it's good for us and it's healthy, but there is a dwindling supply of it in many places and Europe imports 60% roughly of the fish it consumes. So it's incumbent on us to make sure that it's not just our own fisheries that are better managed, but those from overseas. Having said that, my list of species that I can eat is pretty short. So I avoid things that are high in the food web, apart from the big predators, except for pole and lion caught tuna, where you've got things like skipjack and the elephant tuna being caught using essentially very selective methods. That is a good way of catching it, unlike persains which basically are catching a whole range of bycatch, turtles, sharks, dolphins, all sorts of things as well. And don't trust a dolphin friendly label because in the Eastern Pacific where a lot of these dolphin tuna interactions take place, they let the dolphins go, but every time they've chased down a school, a pod of dolphins and caught the tuna, the dolphins are stressed out, they've separated young from adults, so they're not reproducing effectively in the way that they were. So this is just, you're not seeing bleeding dolphins coming up in the winch very often anymore, but it's having an impact on them for sure. So I avoid things like dredge caught fish and trawl caught fish because they're so unselective and they do a lot of damage to the seabed. And in terms of aquaculture, go low in the food web, which is things like mussels and actually rope grown scallops too. That's a good way to eat scallops. If you can't bear to give up scallops, go for rope grown scallops in aquaculture. So there's no easy issues and it's hard to get the information. So if you want to make a difference, go and ask the people in your supermarkets what are you doing for sustainability and I think Barry will agree there's been a lot of improvement in the retail sector as to ensuring better sustainability of the fish that they're stocking and better traceability of where they're coming from. That's what's been very under time. I think the first thing to say is that yes, 60% of fish consumed in Europe is imported. But look where it's coming from. There's a million ton TAC of barrancy cod from Norway. There's more than half of that, 500,000 or something from Iceland. Most of them are coming from the north. Tuna would be the exception. So it's important to realise the most important third country agreement that the EU has is a reciprocal arrangement with Norway. As to consumers, well, consumers might when they're asked fill in a questionnaire and put the environment high on their list, but when they choose what they put in their trolley, it tends to be price and value. And that's just the reality. And so I'm always a bit sceptical of the impact that certification has. I think that fishing industry organisations, individual vessels are interested in MSC accreditation primarily to keep their market open. It's about market access rather than any premium that they receive. The other thing is the degree to which certification schemes reward low-hanging fruit. But do they change anything? That would be my question. It's very indirect if they do. I think the most, as I said earlier, the most direct way to put yourself on track for sustainable fishing is to get your fleet in line with your available resources and other things can work. Perhaps certification does play a role, but in my list of items it would be quite low down. My name is Emma McLaren. I work with Sustainable Fisheries Partnership. We are a charity, global charity, and the retailers that have just been referred to. My hand went up really quickly because you're talking about the individuals and the companies that I work closely with. I like that Callum has actually noticed that there is actually an improvement because that is true. There has definitely been a bit of a change. A lot of that is because of the certification. So pushing fisheries towards certification and improving them through projects and different ventures actually does improve things in the water. We're currently researching and conducting some deep research on how that is and why that is and to show the validity of improvement projects working towards MSC. In terms of the consumer, I think a lot of us have the privilege to make that choice of rope-grown scallops, and most of the people in the world don't. It's a good price and a good quality product, and it's nice to work with other NGOs to try to get these companies across the board and even intermashay if we can get to them across the board so that the consumer doesn't have to think about whether this fish is caught by slaves or killing the sea bottom or anything like that. It's across the board. So just a quick comment, I guess. Thank you very much for that comment. I'm sorry we didn't get through everyone's questions. I think certainly it's obvious to me that this is a huge topic and we could go on and on. But thank you all so much for being here and for taking part. Personally, I think for something like two things I'm going to take away from this. Well actually one wrapped up in one idea which is the idea of time. We've talked about the big history of the last 100 years perhaps, mostly 300 years of fishing. The changes have taken place in that time and then focused in on the more recent past in the last few decades and discussed the pace of change and how at the moment things do seem to be going rather slowly in the changes and the policies grind away but hopefully are slowly pushing in the right direction. So time for me I think is definitely running out today. Those are my thoughts. Master, can I perhaps ask if you've got something you might take away from this? My take home is really it's to applaud the British Library for bringing people like Barry and Callum and me together. We all work in the same blue world but we rarely meet and I think for too long the currency of conservation has revolved around peer-reviewed literature and publications and that's where we stop. But changes about relationships about dialogue and understanding perspectives and it's incredibly valuable that these relationships continue to be grown and nurtured and thanks to my panellists. Thank you. Callum? So if this would have been 10 years ago it would have been a different kind of conversation because I think things have moved in a positive direction in the last 10 years in the waters around Europe certainly. We've seen positive moves towards ending overfishing in many ways. We've seen positive moves towards establishing networks of marine protected areas. We haven't yet figured out that if you want a protected area to work it has to have a high level of protection and so that will be the next stage and we do need to battle on with that point for some time forth. But there are benefits to having those protected areas for fisheries. I've emphasised the conservation need for them today but there is strong science behind them and it's not really being oversold I think Barry. I think that the science behind the contribution that marine protected areas can make to fisheries is getting more and more solid year by year and they will help bring up stocks and they will help us to manage the seas more sustainably as a whole and so I think there's ample space for fisheries and conservation to live alongside one another. Thank you, Callum. Barry, would you like to share some thoughts before we next go? Well I suppose what Callum describes there is advocacy and the belief. I think science is about knowledge, always provisional knowledge and always something we can do more in. I mean in terms of time we talked about the slow rate of political change and that's just something that we have to deal with and try and chill me along. On the biological front it's rather different. We have in the north-east Atlantic reduced fishing pressure. It's now a case of watching what happens. We're seeing as an example of places the best on the Hague, there are other nephrops. We see these stocks coming back up very rapidly but not all of them. There are other stocks that are not moving and one of the interesting scientific observations recently that I heard was that maybe the focus on our recovery plans of two to three years outside five years is just unrealistic. Biology recruitment takes time and it's also taking place against the background of a changing ecosystem. Water temperature change is a reality and that's going to have impacts on what recovers, where it recovers and how fast it recovers and I think that's something we have to bear in mind. Yes we didn't even get to climate change. That's how much time pushed on us. That's all we have time for. First of all I should very much thank our panellists to Alice, Teres, Colin Roberts and Barry Dees for coming along and talking so eloquently about their particular views and areas of expertise. Thank you all for coming and for those of you who managed to get your questions in, sorry to everyone else who didn't. But I hope we've at least given you some food for thought to continue the discussions between yourselves amongst yourselves over Twitter, other things, other means of putting those ideas out there. It's huge. The oceans cover seven times of the planet. We weren't going to nail it in an hour and a half but I think we did a pretty good job. So thank you very much.