 Good evening and welcome. I'm Finlay Carson, MSP. I'm the convener of the Rural Affairs, Islands and Natural Environment Committee, and I would like to welcome you all to this special online edition of the Festival of Politics 2021 in partnership with the Parliament's Think Tank Scotland's Future Forum. This evening's panel is titled Should We Stop Eating Fish? It's held in partnership with Aberdeen University, which I'm proudly doting my Aberdeen University tie. We're delighted that so many of you have been able to join us online this evening, and I look forward to hearing your comments and questions as we get into the discussion. The controversial Netflix documentary Seaspiracy caused uproar in the fishing industry with its claims of overfishing, pollution and damage to our oceans. How accurate are those claims when it comes to Scotland's sea and fishing industry? Who is in charge of maintaining our healthy seabed and thriving ecosystem? And what role do marine protected areas offer for well-managed Scottish Seas? The panel aims to address all of those questions in the next 60 minutes, so please stay with us. We're delighted that you are all able to join us to take part and I would encourage you to use the event chat function to introduce yourself, state your name and geographical location and pose any questions that you would like the panel to respond to. I'm very pleased to be joined by our three panellists, Elspeth MacDonald, the chief executive of the Scottish Fishermen's Federation, Tara Marshall, the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Aberdeen and Phil Taylor, the co-founder and head of policy from Open Seas, an organisation that shares a passion for sustainable fish. There will be an opportunity for our online audience to put questions and views to the panel throughout the event. If you would like to make a contribution, please enter them into the question and answer box and make sure that you state your name and where possible this afternoon. We would like to get through as many questions as we can. However, I would like to begin by asking each of our panellists to give me a snapshot of how they would describe the state of Scotland Seas in relation to our fishing industry. I'll come first to Elspeth MacDonald, then Tara Marshall and then Phil Taylor. Elspeth MacDonald, can I ask you to outline your thoughts, please? Thank you, convener. I also thank the organisers of tonight's event for the opportunity to speak at something like this. It's a really good opportunity to talk about some of these important issues that you've just mentioned in your introduction. I think that we need to look at Scotland Seas in terms of supporting a very diverse range of marine activities, of which fishing absolutely is one and a very important one. There are a lot of diverse activities that take place in the marine environment, and indeed fishing itself is diverse. If you look at what the Scottish Fleet catches, we catch demersal fish—these are the ones that swim quite close to the seabed, pelagic fish—the ones that show in midwater, and also a wide range of shellfish. We've got a very diverse industry here. There are over 2,000 fishing vessels in the Scottish Fleet, ranging from the smallest to the largest. Many of those are within the membership of my organisation. There are just under 5,000 fishermen in Scotland, so it's a diverse and wide-ranging industry. It's really important that we recognise that our fishing industry is, importantly, part of Scotland's food supply. We're supplying healthy, high-protein seafood with an extremely low-carbon footprint. In 2019, it's been estimated that the carbon emissions from our fishing fleet were actually less than 1 per cent of Scotland's total. Of course, any type of food production has an impact, whether it's fishing, whether it's rearing livestock or growing fruit and vegetables. We need to ensure, as a responsible industry, that we continue to be actively involved in improving sustainability, because it's fishermen, after all, who probably have the greatest vested interest in ensuring that our fish stocks are sustainable for the future. We can't look at fishing in isolation from other users of the sea. We share our sea space with so many others, especially, particularly, sitting where I am in the north-east of Scotland, with the energy sector, the oil and gas sector, and increasingly around our coast, and will be increasingly more so in future marine renewables. Here, in the Scottish Fishermen's Federation, we engage actively and constructively in marine conservation initiatives. We've worked for many years now with government and the nature conservation bodies on the development of Scotland's network of marine protected areas, and we'll be speaking about them as we go through the session tonight. Here in the industry, we are also ensuring that we are increasing our knowledge and understanding of what happens in our seas. We invest in scientific research, data collection and, very importantly, looking at innovation in terms of how we can make our industry efficient, sustainable and successful. In summary, we need to recognise that Scotland produces some of the very best seafood in the world, products that are in high demand at home and abroad, and there's a growing population and a growing demand for food. Seafood has a hugely important contribution to make to securing our food supply. We here in the industry want to continue to work in partnership with others to make sure that we can continue to do that sustainably now and also in the future. Thank you very much, Finlay, and I'm very pleased to be here tonight to discuss Scottish seafood and the health of marine ecosystems generally. My opening remarks, I knew that both Elspeth and Bill would give excellent snapshots, so what I thought I'd take a slightly different variation on that and consider our direction of travel, you know, considering where we started, where are we now and where are we going. So, I'll begin with two examples of what I would consider positive directions of travel. The first is for defining healthy fisheries. Delivering sustainability requires defining it in operational terms, and the collapse of the northern cod stock off the coast of Newfoundland in the early 90s illustrated that there was no real framework for being able to define and monitor sustainability. Throughout the late 90s, in the early 90s, a framework was developed, and this framework currently shows us that Scottish seafood, not all stocks, because of course it's a natural resource, things swing up and down due to the whims of the environment, among other things, but overall we've seen that the percentage removal of the harvestable biomass has decreased from 50% in the 90s to about 20%. That value of 20% annual removal rate is really within the sweet spot of maximum sustainable yield, where removing less than is removed through natural mortality, and scientists generally consider this to be a reasonably sustainable place to be. We monitor it very carefully, and year on year we adjust it accordingly. So, how can we sustain this direction of travel going forward? I think one of the most pressing challenges that we face is climate change. We need to adapt our framework to consider the impacts that climate change is going to have on productivity and yields. My second example relates to how do we measure and monitor healthy ecosystems, marine ecosystems, and this goal has really benefited over the past decades from developing a metric-based system of performance management. When we were part of the European Union, of course we were legislated by things like the Marine Strategy Framework Directive and the Habitat Directive, these laid out that sort of quantitative framework. This is the rule book for defining success and failure, and it was ways for defining things like good environmental status. So, I think they use a variety of descriptors, quantitative metrics, and these were updated annually by all member countries. This approach will be followed in future because now that we've left the EU, we're still signatories to OSPAR, and OSPAR is quite in alignment with the European Union approach. The term metric-based performance indicators might be a little bit unfamiliar, but I just want to remind you that you might have encountered them already in terms of the National Performance Framework and also the UN Sustainable Development Goals. These are the same approach of trying to measure and monitor success or failure in achieving objectives. Once again, I'll think about going forward. We need to adapt these for climate change, and specifically I'm looking to the UK Fisheries Act, which has a specific objective related to climate change. It's quite poorly defined at the moment, and the scientific community and everybody else who's concerned should consider how we're going to define that operationally going forward. There are a few areas where I think we're not making progress at the rate that perhaps we should be. I'd like to highlight Fisheries Co-management. Co-management is the flexible and cooperative management of aquatic resources by user groups and the government, and I think that there's been a lot of desire to achieve co-management that there's perhaps not the delivery of that aspiration. I look to the future fisheries management strategy that Marine Scotland produced. I think they interpret co-management to mean communication, but it's more than that. Co-management is co-management. It's more than stakeholder engagement. I think we really need to develop that. Going forward, I think it would be useful to examine how co-management is being delivered in other countries. I look to the west coast of the US, specifically the Alaskan Fisheries, the Pacific Northwest. They're doing excellent co-management, really state-of-the-art, and in particular, fully documented fisheries. To end on a little bit more downbeat note, are there areas of perhaps sliding backwards over the past three decades that I've been involved in fisheries management? In Scotland, I've been here for about 20 years now. I would have to say that there's been a slow erosion of the scientific capability of Marine Scotland. I don't mean this as a critique of Marine Scotland or the scientists who work there, but this is a festival of politics, so I thought it worth raising this point. Marine Scotland has a distinguished track record of scientific excellence, but they're currently the demands on them are largely regulatory in nature and policy-related, and the scientific capability is being compromised. I think that's really to the detriment, in particular, of delivering on aspirations with respect to climate change research. I'm a member of the academic community, but I really want a strong Marine Scotland, so I would really encourage perhaps a reconsideration of the basic funding level. Thank you very much, Tara, and final for the opening remarks, I will move to Phil Taylor. Phil, please. Thanks, Finlay, and thanks to the Festival of Politics team for this event and my panellist as well for being able to have this debate with you. I'll try and be quick. Unsurprisingly, I'm going to contrast with what my co-panellists have said. The best snapshot we have is the snapshot that was published by the Scottish Government in December 2020, actually the last working day of 2020. The Scottish Marine Assessment 2020, which I would advise everybody watching to go and have a look at. Sadly, that shows we failed against the range of metrics to secure the health of our marine ecosystem. We had a target within something called the Marine Strategy Framework Directive. It's a bit of EU law. It's actually pretty much still competent in Scottish law, despite Brexit, which set 15 indicators for good environmental status in our sea, and we failed 11 of those. So there's some real significant issues here. Overfishing, there's a real problem with monitoring a significant number of our stocks, but the Scottish Marine Assessment estimated 45% of our fisheries were overfished or unsustainably fished. The Scottish Government's national performance framework estimates that at around two-thirds. Of course, there's a massive problem, like I said, with a significant proportion of fisheries still not being assessed. That is a very small sample, as we are looking at, even in the beating there. We failed to achieve targets to end the loss of by-genit reefs, and we failed to end overfishing, which was a sustainable development goal by 2020. There are some real big problems in front of us. You asked us, convener, to answer this in the context of fishing. In that context, I've answered it here. But it is also worth remembering that there are a lot of stresses on the sea, and fishing does sit within that context, and we need to get a handle on that broader sense, too. But, as I said, we've got to be led by the evidence, and that marine assessment did find that fishing was the most significant and most widespread pressure throughout the majority of Scotland's marine regions. So it is either at the top of the list or it's very high on it. Bill, thank you very much for that, and thank all three panellists for your opening remarks. Certainly food for thought. I'm going to ask a couple of questions to kick off. It's quite clear when it comes to land ownership, who owns the land, and we have natural heritage, and we've got SNH or NatureScot or whatever now. But the sea is slightly different, isn't it? It's not quite easy to work out who is in charge of it. So can I come to you, Tara, and ask you for the people who are watching today who may not know. Can you tell them exactly who is in charge of maintaining a healthy seabed and a thriving ecosystem? Yes. I consider that we all own the common resource of the ocean, and we empower our government to enact the legislation that is developed to achieve some level of oversight over the status of those marine resources. So I think that it really means that we all need to get engaged in managing what is our resource. Now, the fishing industry does not own those resources. They are stewards of the resources. They have a long-term interest in sustainability, and they make money off of that resource. So, in essence, as we move into an era of having shared goals with respect to sustainability, I think there's the potential for all of us to be pulling in the same direction of recognising the long-term value of our ocean resources. However, I regard ultimately as a society having ownership over those resources. Thank you. Elsbeth, you represent fishermen, and obviously they've got to earn their livelihoods from fishing. From a fisherman's point of view, who do you think is in charge? Is it just government? Is it environmental activists? Who should take charge and maintain the healthy seabed? Well, I very much agree with Tara. There's no one person or body who could ever be responsible for something as broad as this, and as you said in your opening remarks, this isn't like the terrestrial environment where land is owned by somebody or groups of people. As I said in my opening remarks, there's a wide range of activities that take place in the sea, of which fishing is one, but there are many others, such as the oil and gas industry, such as renewables, aquaculture industry, marine tourism. It's really a pretty long list, so I think all of the sectors operating in our marine environment have responsibilities for making sustainable use of our resources, and that will involve obviously working with the regulatory bodies that have different responsibilities. I'm sure tonight that in our discussions we'll touch on some of these things in a bit more detail, but I very much agree with Tara that this is not any one person or any one sector's responsibility, it is all of our responsibilities. Okay, thanks. Finally, Phil, you represent a charity working to improve the health of the seas, and you're a marine campaigner. What's your perspective on that? Well, in terms of who's responsibility it is for maintaining that healthy marine ecosystem, I think it's pretty unequivocal, it's legislatively it's the responsibility of the CABSEC here in Scotland for our inshore and then through a sort of devolution settlement through the Marine Scotland Act, more broadly out to 200 nautical miles as well, despite the fact that it sits under the UK legislation. The concept of who's responsibility that is, and then how does that cascade from the current fisheries minister's responsibility down into decision making. I think I'd subscribe to what Tara was saying about co-management. I think that those systems are showing to work well, but they have to be held within a framework that then brings with the responsibility accountability. And when we see that those two things get separated, as you know just on land, I mean we've seen this in many cases just on land, the real problems start to occur because you effectively end up with a situation where no one's accountable. Now there's a constitutional issue here that I'm just going to touch on because you know Charity's constitutionally agnostic, I don't really want to get into too much detail on that, but the Smith commission recommended that the whole, the CBA devolved wholly to Scottish Government and Scottish Parliament. And the UK fisheries bill was passed by Westminster, but then took some of that management or basically replaced the common fisheries policy and then brought some of those powers to Westminster that were currently sat in Hollywood. Now at the time, the SNP Government in Westminster voted against that, but at the same time the SNP party in Hollywood passed a legislative consent motion to bring that legislation into Scottish law. So there was a real contradiction there and there's a real then lack of clarity. So like I said, it's not a constitutional point agnostic in that term, but there's a lack of clarity then as to which Parliament actually has supremacy on some of those issues and how then the governments are making decisions about these issues and then how they're accountable. And that's critical because at the moment we're going in under, you talked about land ownership and the equivalent here is quota ownership. And the quota system is required, the ministers are required to distribute quota in a way that delivers best social, economic and environmental criteria. That's something we can all subscribe to. Pretty good, right? But at the moment, they're not doing that. They're effectively doing it based on the distribution quota previously, the historic track record. And they're not actually bringing in then any criteria, which they're thinking about, well, how can we use this quota to incentivise change? How can we use this quota to drive change? And, you know, Elspeth said that fishing is really important for the food system. But, you know, macro quota, for example, macro and heron quota, really heavily consolidated. You all have seen the headlines from Greenpeace saying, you know, buy families control about third of the quota in Scotland. But that quota is, you know, 50% of that quota is getting landed directly abroad, completely bypassing our food systems, our economy and, you know, others consumers. That's a real problem, right? And it's not really delivering then the best economic, social or environmental outcomes necessary for us. And, like I said, the constitutional issue you're not going into, but because there's this lack of priority between the UK Fisheries Act competence within Scotland, there's a problem with regards to how we actually resolve this issue and how we then start to think about returning the best value for the Scottish public who own this resource, as Tyra and Elspeth have said, from these assets which are getting distributed by our current ministers. OK, thanks, Phil. I'm going to keep on that sort of theme. You know, we talk about quotas and potential overfishing and so on and who's responsible. I've had an audience question from David, who's an ex-trollerman, who's asking if the overfishing is due to EU or Scottish fishing boats in Scottish waters. So, Phil, can I ask you that first and then move to Elspeth? Sure, yeah. A combination, of course. I mean, it depends on which stocks I haven't seen the question. But through most of our waters, Fish Doctor shared, and therefore you will find that EU and Scottish fishing boats are targeting the same species. Now, the problem that we're in at the moment is the sort of fallout from Brexit, and therefore there is a bit of a sort of aggression between the two parties when they're coming to the negotiation table on these issues to sort of drive those catches higher, race to overfish or race to the bottom. It's a problem, it's a real problem. Of course, Scottish ministers have themselves made decisions that have led to overfishing. They could easily see that they're going to fish, we're going to fish less. That wouldn't necessarily be the best outcome economically for the Scottish fishing businesses. But there's several cases where that decision has been really just a domestic issue. We look at the West Scotland cod fishery. The scientific advice is for no fish to be caught whatsoever, probably pretty impractical of that, because it's by-quarter significant volumes in the nephropstraw fishery, the scampy fishery. But what we're seeing at the moment is that about 1200 tonnes of quota being made available for that stock, so that's 1200 tonnes of overfishing, and that quota is being siphoned into a fishery that's then targeting it elsewhere. So it was meant to be available for the by-catch, so it's not a choke term that I don't really buy into, but to choke the fishery. But instead what's happening is that choke issue, the by-catch issue is ongoing. Those fishing are still being killed and they're still being lost from the population. Meanwhile, that 12,000 tonnes is being taken by a separate part of the fishing industry that's then going to target in the deeper waters. So we've got what I would call a hyper overfishing problem in that instance, and that is a decision that's being made domestically regarding domestic boats. There is a small degree of that that's relevant to EU boats as well. Like I said, it depends on the stock, I'm afraid. Y Llywydd, I'm going to move to that before I do, but can I ask the audience, if they want to start submitting questions, please do so now and we'll pick them up as we go through the conversation. Can you pick up on the back of Phil and where's the overfishing coming from? Well, I think it's very important that we look at this in context. I think absolutely some of our stocks have been overfished in the past. I think the situation in Scotland is very much improving. We've already spoken earlier in the evening about the fact that we have limited data on some of our stocks, but I think it's important that we look at the trend, we look at the direction of travel. And I think Tara mentioned this earlier on. I think it is important that we recognise that the direction of travel on our fisheries and fishing sustainably is improving rather than decreasing. I think also, I think it's likely that we'll touch a bit later on about this issue of by-catch. It's a very complicated issue. I think that Phil has described a specific problem. I think that we have to understand that we don't have species here that, when we're looking at these demersal and shellfish species that are in isolation from each other, it is very difficult to catch some species without catching others. And it's important that fisheries managers are able to make sensible management decisions that can allow fisheries to be able to continue. I think that the questioner asked about whether overfishing might be due to a UK fleet or EU fleet. I would actually highlight a particular issue that we have at the moment with the mackerel fishery in the northeast Atlantic. That's managed through a process known as coastal states. The UK has been, frankly, appalled by the unilateral tax setting by some of our coastal state neighbours who have been fishing the stock above levels that align with the IC's advice. I think that we have to look at the context of these fisheries. We have to look very much at understanding the complex dynamics of our fisheries. Unfortunately, we are not yet able in many of our fisheries to go and only catch the species of interest. We have mixed fisheries that are a bit different in the pelagics. Big sholing species are perhaps easier to catch than with less by-catch. We have to look at the overall trends. They are improving and we have better fisheries management. I absolutely agree with Tara's point about that we need to invest more in our science, that we have a lot of data gaps and a lot of stocks where we are data deficient. It is important that we can improve our understanding and absolutely improve the knowledge of what impact we and other processes are having on our marine environment. We will probably touch on by-catch a little later. On the back of what has already been said, Tara, there is a question from Elaine. Do you feel that fishermen are adequately involved in the management of frameworks and the research across the fleet and the scale and the size of the fleets? Are there barriers that you are aware of that we can work to improve in this area to ensure that stakeholders are very much involved? Thank you Elaine for that question. I think it's a very good one. We've made some positive steps in the direction of engagement and that is an example of that would be the regional advisory committees or the advisory committees under the old EU system that brought stakeholder groups together. Certainly different stakeholder groups are able to attend the assessment working groups that are held at ICs annually and there's certainly stakeholder representatives at the old December council meetings and I presume at the trilateral meetings going forward and things like that. So the system over time has opened up a lot. It's created complications because that just means there's a lot more people in the room. There's a lot more diversity of opinions that need to be expressed. I think what we could work on is develop mechanisms for making these discussions efficient and developing consensus to promote definable actions going forward but when I think of co-management I think of it as more than just bringing people around the table. I regard it as being involved on the day-to-day collection, analysis, interpretation and presentation of information and I think that there's a lot of scope for improvement to empower different groups because of course scientists are very data driven. We don't take anecdote for example. We want to see the data and we want to see it on large time scales, large spatial scales and we need the stakeholder groups to start engaging with that heavy lifting of developing the evidence space and there's a few positive initiatives. I'll point out the pelagic self-sampling system that got up and running, spearheaded by the Scottish Pelagic Fishermen's Association and that's running generating data from the industry to feed into the ICS assessment of herring and mackerel. Thank you very much. We're going to move back to by-catch because it's a term that we hear quite a lot. Phil, can I ask you what is meant by by-catch and why the uniquely Scottish form of langoustine fishing causes by-catch and what its impact is? We may have lost, Phil, actually. Did you hear the question? A bit of it, sorry. We're talking about by-catch. Why is the uniquely Scottish form of langoustine fishing caused by-catch and its impact, specifically about the langoustine fishing by-catch? Some information on that, please. For sure, yes. It's certainly not a Scottish only problem. We've seen massive by-catch volumes in some of the Skaggarat catagat fishery as well. The problem is because nephrops, the species you're trying to catch, are relatively small, so you need a relatively small mesh size. Now, there are means to filter out some of the catch as it's going through the net, the Swedish panel, square mesh. These are different types of technology you can fit onto the net as you turn it through the water. The key issue, as Elsbur said, is that this is a mixed fishery. You end up catching other stuff with it. In the North Sea, a lot of what you're catching there is a salable size, or a proportion of it is a salable size, and therefore can be taken from the quota for those other stocks. Sadly, in some other parts of Scotland, what we're seeing is that the by-catch is largely very small. We did some work a couple of years ago where we basically compared the landings of that nephrops species with the landings of these other species that you would expect to be by-cought. You see for 150 tonnes of nephrops landed, you see maybe 10 kilograms odd. That is just a completely unrealistic catch proportion. You wouldn't expect that to be the case. Therefore, that fish has suddenly gone over the side dead at some point. By-catch discarding is a serious problem. It's illegal. In most cases, there's exemptions in various ways. Everyone accepts that it's happening. It's a real problem. It's one of these cultural changes, cultural problems that we've got in the fishing industry. The real problem is that which I mentioned at the top there, which is that if we're not counting the amount of fish that are being by-cought in this way and then discarded, we don't actually know how many fish are being killed in these fisheries. We're failing at the first hurdle. The first hurdle of fisheries management is to establish how many fish there are, establish how many fish are being killed from that stock and then come up with a mechanism for managing that inlandly sustainable limit. We're failing at that first hurdle. Sorry if that's not exactly what you're asking. We've had a question from Alasdair online. I'm suggesting that you're anti-mobile fishing and asking what you propose to do with inshore trollaman when a lot of what you propose is to stop it. Remembering that for every job that there is at sea, there's four jobs on land. Phil, how can you work with industry to ensure that we don't turn the lights off in our rural fishing communities? I mean, a couple of things to tell you about that there. Firstly, I'm not anti-mobile fishing and I don't, you know, open seas isn't either. What we're pro is establishing a sustainable management system for it. It's clear from all the evidence, including evidence and research collected by people commissioned by the industry, that spatial management is needed in Scotland's inshore to get to that stage where the inshore fisheries are no longer having a significant negative impact on habitat and then via bycatch on these other issues as well. The point about turning off the lights. So first, it's important to note that Scottish Government research has shown that if you were to establish a three mile limit, this highly contentious topic, established a three mile limit, you would increase the GVA return from the nephrops fishery annually. And if you were to come up with a slightly different spatial management regime, one that takes account of trawling within that three mile as well, you would increase it yet further. So, the evidence is actually the opposite way around. And there's this attitude that, you know, the trawlement and the sort of backbone of the coastal communities and without the lights are going off. It's just sadly not true. I mean, they're important in various places. It's, you know, moving away from the Clyde and the West Coast. Look at the broth, Fraserborough, you know, Fraserborough is one of the biggest trawl ports in Scotland and has a part of Scotland Fraserborough in the lowest Scottish index on multiple gap provision scores. There's a mismatch between what is happening at sea and what is happening in these communities already. And this is part of the point I was making with regards to quotes that we need to re-establish that link. We need to use things like the quote system to incentivise those changes. You know, again, I haven't seen the question, but if the assertion is like, you know, these are sustainable fisheries and they're doing a good job already meeting the sustainability. We need to use sustainable objectives. What I'm suggesting is that we should incentivise that. That's great. Let's give those fisheries more access to more quota, more opportunity, and let's use that just in the same way as we use the subsidy system in farming to create a race to the top rather than a race to the bottom. Sarah, there was a mention in Phil's response about the lack of data around fish that was lost. Can you, as an academic, give us any light on what data there is about fishing that was wasted due to overfishing or bycatch? Thank you very much, Finlay, for giving me that opportunity to respond because I think it does need a response. Now, Phil is very different from myself. He works, you know, his interests are more in the inshore. I know relatively little about the inshore, and I work with the offshore industries. I don't want the audience to have the impression that we don't know how much is discarded for the largest commercial fisheries in Scotland as well as Europe. We have quantitatively estimated the amount of fish being discarded, and this information is entered into the annual assessments. There is distinction between catch and landings, and so we have tracked the amount of discarding over time and we see that it's gradually coming down. That is the picture in those areas. No one in the fishing industry wants to discard, so I think we have to be clear about that. Now, with respect to the inshore fisheries, I accept they're more data limited. They're small boats, and there's many of them. So it's more difficult to get a quantitative overview of what's going on, but that's not to say that there aren't initiatives. The Scottish Government is very focused on this task at the current time. I'll mention SIFEDS, which is the Scottish Inshore Fisheries, something or other, run out of St Andrews, and they're equipping small boats in the scallop industry to take a variety of measurements, and it's quite sophisticated, quite state-of-the-art, and literally I look to it to see where the offshore should be going because they're doing fantastic things. These are initiatives. They're getting off the ground, but there's a long-term commitment to making them work. I have a PhD student working on electronic monitoring in the scallop industry, so I think it would be misleading to say that there's simply no information. We need more information, agreed, but we have to get these systems for measuring information on these small boats in the inshore. I come from a farming background, and I know that farmers are having to change to address climate change as well. There's one thing about the theory, but it's a different thing in practice, but collectively I would suggest that the farming community are up for the fight, if you like. Given that there are some initiatives and schemes, how are Scottish fishermen adopting the new methods to do the part to ensure that the Scottish fishery is sustainable? In the context of climate change, which is the question that you're asking Finlay, it's important to understand that there are things that the fishing industry will need to do to play our part in reducing our carbon emissions. We will need to play our part on that journey to net zero, but there's also a parallel with fishing in terms of the changes that we are seeing in our natural environment. Tara alluded to that in her opening remarks about how the industry is going to have to adapt to things that are coming in future. We are already seeing a change in the distribution of many of our fish stocks. Northsea cod is a really good example of that. We have now had two years, almost approaching three years, of having scientific advice from ICs suggesting that the total allowable catch of Northsea cod must be significantly reduced. That is proving to be hugely problematic for the industry in Scotland. Cod is an absolutely iconic part of our mixed fisheries. For all of the reasons that we've spoken about before, it's very hard to avoid catching cod. The problem that we have is that there's quite strong evidence that cod and other species are migrating northwards. I think that there's been some estimates that cod are possibly moving north as much as about 12 kilometres a year. What we are seeing now is a situation whereby the fisheries science is not keeping up with the changes that we are seeing in the environment. We have a mathematical model that does some clever number crunching and tells us how much cod we should be able to catch in a year. However, that model is based on the whole of the North Sea, yet we know that, probably due to climate-related reasons and warming temperatures, cod are moving out of the southern North Sea and being replaced by other species, there are other things coming in to take their place. We are having to adapt in the industry in terms of what is going to be the impact of climate change on the distribution of what are completely wild, unmanaged fisheries. It's not like farming. There's that side of the coin. The other side of the coin is what will the industry do to make sure that we continue to contribute to that transition to net zero, reducing our environmental impact, our carbon emissions. The more efficient our operations can be in terms of the more efficient your boat's engines can be, the amount of fuel that you can reduce from your operations, that not only contributes to reducing your economic cost of your operations but also contributes to reducing your emissions of your operations. There's a lot that can be done in terms of the existing way in which the fleet operates. If you like modern engines, modern propulsion systems, hull design, all those sorts of things, but also looking forward, how do we see electrification perhaps of the fleet? Perhaps some of the smaller insurer vessels, there might be some potential there not too far down the road to look at how you can decarbonise the fleet. Hydrogen strategy has been announced by the UK Government. Marine is part of that. We would like to think that fishing vessels will be part of that strategy going forward. There's a great deal that we need to do in terms of our operations to adjust and adapt to climate change and do our bit to reduce the impact of climate change. There's a lot also that we have to do to adapt to the impacts of climate change. I would just finish my response by reiterating my point about what a low-carbon emission emitting foods that wild caught fisheries are. They really compare very favourably to all other sources of protein. We've had a question from Amanda. One of the main points in the sea spiracy programme was that fishing disturbs the marine environment in a way that significantly contributes to climate change. Tana, can you comment on exactly what that means and explain a little bit more? Actually, I haven't seen sea spiracy. I don't have Netflix. I don't spend a lot of time watching television. I can't exactly say, but Amanda said that fishing contributes to... I think that's not correct, actually, because if you actually look at the carbon emissions caused by the global fishing industry, it would be on... If you think about all of the carbon emissions on the planet, I think it's on order of less than 4%, you know, much less. So it is a very small proportion of carbon emitting activities. And I also think you have to balance that very carefully against the role it plays in human food protein, especially in continents like Africa, where they derive about 25% of their protein from fish. They don't have options. And so it's an economical resource for them. And so it's very hard to make global statements about situations that are very different locally in that respect. I'll also point out the nutritional value, as Elspeth will be obviously very aware of, of fish. So I don't recognize that fishing itself. There is a controversy at the moment about blue carbon and the release from the seabed, but the scientific evidence base for that is very partial and preliminary and subject to discussion. I'll point out that Scotland has a working group headed by Bill Austin at St Andrews University, looking into this for Scottish waters that's ongoing at the moment, so there should be more information about impacts on carbon from the seabed at the moment. So I would be cautious about making any conclusion with very, very minimal data. So, Phil, we've heard how the fishing fleet is trying to tackle climate change with emissions in the future. Can I have open seas view on how fishing disturbs the marine environment in a way that it contributes to climate change? What's your views on that comment? So I'd agree with the point that I made that the evidence is still very much in its infancy. I think that there's some clear things that we can all agree on. One of them is that the sea at the moment absorbs about, I think it's 27% of the carbon we emitted last year was absorbed by the sea. So the sea is this really important part of the carbon cycle. That is largely done by plankton in the water column, and no fishing is really going to be having a serious impact on that cycle. The sea floor itself, in particular, things like that, sea locks are massive carbon stores just in the same way that our peat bogs are. There's no doubt that trawling has an impact and re-suspends that carbon. There's an argument about what happens to that carbon once it's in the water column, and an argument about how much suspension is caused. It's obvious that the direction is in the direction toward emission. Clearly, as well, there's what we call blue carbon habitats, or some people call blue carbon habitats, which are mostly already part of our marine management system in the form of priority marine features or biogenic reefs. As I said in my statement, those biogenic reefs, we failed our target. There was a target to prevent loss of biogenic reef by 2020. In 2010, when the Scottish Government did their assessment, they found that we really needed to jump up and start a lot of work on this area. Sadly, we failed that in subsequent 10 years. Melbeds, for example, hold, I think it's not 3 megatons of carbon a year in Scotland, and we lost 10 hectares per hectare, and we lost 10 hectares of Melbed in that intervening period. There's clearly a direction of travel on that, the scale of that. I think that I would completely support the statement that both panellists have made, that seafood are really low carbon protein. We should be eating more of them. The question that this talk is, should we stop eating fish? No, not at all. We should be eating more, but we shouldn't be eating all of it. We should be using our consumer powers to actually avoid the stuff that's causing a lot of harm and also drive change within supply chains. In that regard, it is worth noting that, on an average, and in particular the species like mackerel and herring are really low carbon proteins, especially when you get them long lined and you can get them really fresh if you're up in the northeast long lined. The opposite side of the spectrum, you're going to think that I've got some vendetta but scallops and nephrops as shown by a paper that came out of Sweden, I think it was on the opposite side of that and actually causing significant emissions because of the fuel use in dragging that gear and also the refrigeration in the product as it goes through the supply chain. We do have to not just think about seafood as one thing, we have to think about it across the spectrum and recognise that some of those fisheries actually do have significant carbon footprints too. You touched on marl beds. Those are one of the areas that are often protected and marine protected areas. Elspeth, what role do you think marine protected areas serve in the overall picture of a well managed Scottish sea? As I said at the outset, our industry, our organisation has spent a lot of time, invested a lot of effort and resources along the way, working with regulators on the network of Scottish marine protected areas. I think that what's really important to remember up front is that MPAs, marine protected areas, are not created to manage Scottish seas. They're certainly not a tool intended for fisheries management. What they are there for is that they're there to protect certain features, whether they're biodiversity features or geo-diversity features that have been put in place to protect particular features, some of the things that Phil mentioned for example. There certainly will be management measures in some MPAs that might limit fishing, maybe through seasonal or spatial measures, and that will be because that is considered necessary to meet the conservation objectives of whatever the feature has been designated for and what it's there to protect. It's important that we understand that they're not there, per se, for the purposes of fisheries management. They're there to conserve the feature that the site has been designated for. There's a lot of work between stakeholders like ourselves and others and government to work through developing the right management measures to make sure that you can get that right balance of meeting the conservation objectives, but also meeting the sustainable harvesting objectives, for example, from fishing. That's where we are with the MPAs. We have a clear commitment in the policy co-operation agreement between the Scottish Government and the Scottish Greens to designate at least 10 per cent of Scotland's seas as highly protected marine areas. What we are expecting in those areas is that those areas will be areas where fishing and, indeed, other types of activities such as agriculture, many forms of other types of marine activity will be prohibited in those areas. MPAs are really important in terms of marine conservation and conservation of features, conservation of biodiversity and due diversity purposes, but we must remember that they're not there as a management tool for fisheries management, although fisheries management measures may indeed be part of them. We're starting to run out of time, so I'm going to come back to Tara and then Phil. Can you also factor in a question that we've had from David on offshore wind farms and also the oil drilling, how it affects seabed but also how it affects fishing? In the same light, and still looking at marine protected areas, what are your thoughts about how they can help us to manage Scottish Seas better? Can you cover those topics in a whole? I'm going to introduce something slightly variation on marine protected areas, which we think of as static parks that are closed or limited. That's the concept of dynamic ocean management where we use real-time information to develop things like real-time area closures if we're trying to protect mobile species. Marine protected areas tend to be good for species that are not mobile, for example shellfish species. They work well in tropical regions where the fish do not leave their reefs. They're very immobile, but our fish species here are highly mobile and so they can swim in and out at their leisure of boundary areas. I think that a more dynamic approach is to consider real-time information. It has been used before in Scottish waters during the cod recovery program. They designed what were the world's first real-time area closures. That was maybe a decade or so ago. We're revisiting the concept on the west coast of Scotland with the demersal industry there who are now sharing information to avoid cod in real-time. I think that those dynamic measures have a role to play for mobile species as well. That's fascinating. Technology really does have a role to play, Phil. Can I ask you for your thoughts on marine protected areas and what other panellists have already said? I think that marine protected areas have largely yet to fill their potential here in Scotland. Most marine protected areas need some form of fisheries management, despite what others have said, to meet their objectives. You have to remember that the Scottish Government has a duty to use those sites to protect and enhance the health of the marine areas. It's not just about the specific model that was here. That's the only tool that they're using to fill that legal obligation that they have, so they need to be more. The majority of them are still without any management. In fact, we actually saw one marine protected area lose its management, so it had a troll ban in place called the windsock. Unlawfully, the government allowed that to lapse. The point that Tara made about these dynamic areas, actual spatial management thinking outside of marine protected areas, I think is really important. If we think about our land, we don't just have national parks and then leave the rest of the countryside to be used in the most exploitative ways possible. We need spatial area management as part of that broader system. The sad fact is that we still have a legal fishing in these closed areas as well. Just this week, we had an incident on the west coast of Scotland. This is an on-going problem, which every time we find evidence of and report on, everyone tells us that it's a limited problem that's going away, and it's really not. Phil, thank you very much for that. I've got one closing question, just a very quick one. It's from Christina and Greg. The question is, can we start trusting dolphin safe labels on tins again? I'll start with you, Elspeth. We don't fish any tuna in our Scottish fisheries. We don't have tuna, but we have climate change and cod going north. There may indeed be incursions of tuna into Scottish waters. It's certainly not an issue for the guys within our membership, so I'm afraid I'm good to... I think probably Tara is better place to comment on that one than I am. Tara. Like Elspeth, I have no real insight to add to the mix, but we're just about to submit a paper to a scientific journal highlighting the need to incorporate climate change as a sustainability metric that the eco-label should be using going forward. How well are the individual fisheries prepared for impacts of climate change? Okay, thanks, and Phil? As the guys have said, it's largely a specific problem where the fisheries there are targeting. They look for where the dolphins are. They target that area, catch the dolphins and then let the dolphins out the net, which is dolphin friendly, which is obviously a problem. I think that there's a sort of overarching issue here, which is about the fact that we don't... There isn't good information about what's getting caught within all of our fisheries, and that comes back to that by-catch issue. And Tara spoke at the beginning about some of the great examples in Alaska and elsewhere where you have what we call fully documented fisheries. Fisheries management is full of these terms that people create, but fully documented fisheries just means everything that was caught is listed and captured. And I acknowledge what Tara was saying about the North Sea. Some of the more offshore fisheries being better documented, but we still have massive data gaps as to what's happening in some fisheries. And that is ultimately inhibiting our ability to manage them properly. And we as consumers should be challenging that. We at the moment are running the campaign challenging those who call stuff responsible. One of the biggest scampy companies, CEOs downplayed discarding as not immoral, despite the fact it's illegal, and is packaging the products as responsibly sourced. We have to challenge that as consumers. We have to challenge that. We have to see this stuff and see if what it is and ask questions. Thank you. Great. Thank you very much. And thank you all very much for your contributions to this event and the audience for their questions. So before we close, I'd like to give each of the panellists one minute to sum up the issues raised in the discussion. And I can start with Tara and then move to Phil and finally Elspeth. Okay. Well, thank you very much for Finlay and also to the audience, particularly those who ask questions. I just want to sum up by saying we've come a long way since the collapse of Northern Cod in the early 90s. I was a PhD student in fisheries at the time and it was a very scarring episode that we've learned from it. Have we reached our final destination? No, we haven't. And we never will, but we keep moving on. And I think all of us coming together tonight to discuss the sustainability of fish and our marine resources is a great example of how by working collectively to develop consensus to develop a set of priorities and move forward is definitely the way to go. Thank you, Phil. Thank you. Well, I'll just respond to the question. Should we stop eating fish? No. We should eat more of it, like I said, but we should be selective and we should either stop eating some products or at least hold them for the time being to force change from supply chains. Those are products, you know. Scallops from Scottish Fisheries poorly managed at the moment needs to be improved and we need to put pressure on the supply chain to actually start to make some of those proactive changes. And I guess that's all I'm going to say from now. Thank you, Phil, and finally, Elspeth. Thank you. It's been a really interesting discussion. So many questions that we haven't been able to get to today, but I think that just shows the range and diversity of interest in this topic. I think that what's been clear tonight is that there's actually been a lot that we, the panellists, have been able to agree on, but there have also probably been some things for what will continue to disagree. I think that some themes that I've come through really strongly here for me tonight are just how important science and investment in science is at the moment and will continue to be going forward. And I think I absolutely echo Tara's comments at the start in terms of, you know, we mustn't lose any more capability here. We actually should be building our capability, our capacity. There's certainly work that date that industry does, but we need much more investment in our fisheries science. Co-management, another theme that I think has come through strongly tonight from all of us in terms of how we work collectively together to manage our fisheries well. And I think that the future fisheries management strategy that the Scottish Government published at the end of last year touches on a lot of the things that we've spoken about tonight. Discards, how we reduce our buy-catch, how we go forward in terms of managing our inshore fisheries. I think that there's a great deal in there. And I think that if the Government gets the right approach to that future fisheries management strategy and we get that evidence-based approach and genuine co-management, then I think that there's a great deal that we can secure through that. So, lots to do. Thank you very much. I think that co-management certainly seems to be an award that's been used repeatedly and obviously we welcome everybody working together. But there we must end and I'd like to thank you all for joining us tonight and making such a big contribution to our panel, which has been brought to you in partnership with Aberdeen University. And I would very much like to thank our panel, Tara Marshall, Elsbeth MacDonald and Phil Taylor, for giving up their time to take part. And I may take this opportunity to remind you that over the weekend we have a number of discussions ranging from a just transition to diversity in Scottish politics, climate activism and resilience cities to name just a few. So I hope you can join in these discussions as well. So thank you very much for joining us and enjoy the rest of your weekend. Thank you.