MARINET : Latest News

Radioactivity MA Marine Aggregates ML Marine Legislation BW Bathing Water MR Marine Reserves RE Renewable Energy OA Ocean Acidification PO Pollution FI Fisheries GW Global Warming CE Coastal Erosion

Flood Defence Funding — an utter paradox

Despite the fact that it mainly concerns inland riverine flooding as distinct from coastal, Emily Beaments 'Fears over money to maintain flood defences' in the Independent of 31st January 2012 is relative as it gives the points of concern raised by the MPs of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) following the Association of British Insurers warning that as many as 200,000 at-risk homes face problems getting insurance after the deal with the Government and insurance industry expires in 2013.

It concerns the reaction to last weeks parliamentary assessment that the annual costs of flooding could increase to between £1.5 billion and £3.5 billion by the 2020s, and £2.1 billion to £12 billion by the 2080's for England and Wales, and that the Environment Agency's prediction is that its flooding budget needs to increase by 9% during the current spending period in order to maintain levels of flood protection. Yet government funding is being reduced by a further 10%. (In full, a year-on-year 27% cut between 2010 and 2011 on capital spending on flood defences).

DEFRA told the MPs constituting the Public Accounts Committee that it shared responsibility for flooding with the Environment Agency and local bodies, and that they could between them make efficiency savings and improved use of resources. However, the PAC raised concern over whether there will be enough money to maintain and improve flood defences to protect millions of at-risk homes in the future and warned the department that they had no way of knowing if local flood management was adequate and when they should step in. They further warned that it was unclear "where the buck stops" for managing the risk of flooding, as the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) had said it is not ultimately responsible for the issue.

DEFRA said they hoped to encourage more funding for flood defences from sources such as businesses and local authorities, boosting contributions from £13 million in the last spending period to £43 million — but it has not yet secured the increase. Margaret Hodge, chairwoman of the PAC, said the committee was "sceptical" of the possibility of raising funds locally when councils and businesses were facing financial pressures" and that it was "unclear where the buck stops and who is ultimately responsible for managing the risk of flooding".

Shadow environment secretary Mary Creagh accused the Government of playing "Russian roulette" with people's homes and businesses. She said: "The Government is passing the buck to local councils, asking them to choose between repairing roads and protecting homes from flooding. The irony is that this approach may cost more in the long run, as the Environment Agency is unable to predict what schemes will proceed which means procurement costs rise."

Prince of Wales launches campaign to combat global over-fishing

A report published by one of the Prince's charities, the International Sustainability Unit (ISU), will say that fisheries around the world could be pulled back from the brink of collapse by tackling wasteful fishing practices.

Prince Charles in his capacity as President of The Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment, addresses delegates at the annual conference of the foundation at St James's Palace in London, Friday, 27th Jan, 2012

Prince Charles will use the opportunity of his Trust's report to encourage governments, retailers and the fishing industry to adopt more sustainable practices, pointing to evidence that it could allow more fish to be taken from the seas rather than fewer Photo: AP

In a speech at the report's launch, the Prince warned of "dire" long-term consequences unless action is taken to manage fish stocks more effectively. He used the opportunity to encourage governments, retailers and the fishing industry to adopt more sustainable practices, pointing to evidence that it could allow more fish to be taken from the seas rather than fewer.

The move comes on the back of the Prince's campaign save the rainforests, which has been credited with having played a significant role in getting the international community to sign up to initiatives to tackle deforestation. Campaigners fighting to stop overfishing and end destructive policies such as discards, where fishermen throw dead fish back into the sea to avoid exceeding quotas, have backed the Prince's move.

While the Prince will not mention the European Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) in his speech, environmentalists who blame the policy for encouraging discards have welcomed his decision to speak out on the wider issues.

A Clarence House spokesman said: "The Prince of Wales has been concerned about the marine environment for many years. "He wants to focus on the fishing industry and how to promote a more sustainable approach to managing the marine environment. The work of the Prince's Charities' ISU's Marine Programme is about promoting sustainable approaches towards fisheries to preserve a long-term livelihood for the communities and industries that rely on them, to preserve the fish stocks, and to protect biodiversity and ecosystems in the sea."

Twenty five per cent of the world's fish stocks are now believed to be overexploited, depleted or recovering from depletion. Half of the world's fish stocks are already suffering catches at or close to the limit that allows them to be sustainable. The report by the ISU was launched at an event hosted by the Prince at Fishmongers' Hall in London, attended by 250 industry representatives and officials. It argues that the solution lies in readdressing the economics of fishing so governments and the industry recognise the benefits of preserving stocks. It highlights research that shows the oceans are capable of providing $50 billion (£31 billion) per year more value than they currently do if managed in an optimal manner.

Tony Juniper, special adviser to the ISU, said: "The automatic preconception that most people have is that sustainability is about taking less. What we have found, in fact, is that if fisheries were managed optimally then we could be taking more. The key to it is how you get the economics lined up. Then you can deliver value for the consumer, value for conservation and value for the fishing communities themselves to ensure they are rewarded for a hard job under tough conditions."

The report analyses ways to keep fish stocks healthy while also providing more fish for consumers. It will argue that reducing supply for certain species would raise market prices, allowing fish stocks to recover while giving fishermen the ability to continue making a living. Fishing a more diverse range of species could also help to reduce pressure, while new technology could be used to reduce by-catch — unwanted fish that are caught up in nets — and return them to the ocean alive. It also suggests removing subsidies for building new fishing vessels and fuel, which could help to control the number of fishing vessels operating. Currently the EU provides £2 billion a year in subsidies.

The Prince, who has a long record of environmental campaigning, has previously backed attempts to reform the CFP and has described the issue of by-catch and discards as "immoral".

Campaigners now hope that his international influence will persuade governments, regulating bodies, fishermen, seafood processors and retailers to adopt more sustainable fishing practices. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, the chef who led a campaign to change the CFP and is set to begin filming a third instalment of his Hugh's Fish Fight programmes for Channel 4, welcomed the Prince's involvement. He said: "This is absolutely the right approach. If the world's fish stocks were sustainably fished they could be more productive, not less. The Prince's involvement in environmental issues has the ability to rouse political will and business commitment. It is extremely welcome that he is to continue to turn the spotlight on the problems and the solutions."

A spokesman for the Marine Conservation Society said: "We welcome this approach of tackling the economics to incentivise sustainable fishing. It is something that will work and should appeal to governments no matter what their political persuasion."

Al Jazeera investigates the multi-million dollar illegal fishing trade

In a two-part documentary the English Channel of the television station, Al Jazeera, records how the precious marine resources of some of the world's poorest people are being targeted by industrial-scale pirate fishing operations, to feed the seafood hungry markets of Europe and Asia.

The problem is particularly acute in West African waters where fish is a vital — and often the only — protein source for millions of people.

In a special two-part investigation, People & Power sets out to identify and expose some of those involved in the multi-million dollar trade and to look in particular at its consequences for the impoverished West African nation of Sierra Leone. In this film — part one of Pirate Fishing — reporter Juliana Ruhfus and producer Orlando von Einsiedel take to the seas off Sierra Leone with an NGO, the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF), which has been trying to raise awareness about the issue.

The location of two vessels observed by People & Power within the Inshore Exclusion Zone on 22nd October, 2011

In a dramatic opening sequence they manage to catch two South Korean trawlers in the act of fishing illegally inside a coastal exclusion zone. But contrary to international maritime regulations, the trawlers have covered up ship-board markings making it impossible to determine their names and ports of origin. The vessels refuse all their requests to stop and eventually make good their escape.

What follows is a remarkable piece of forensic journalism as the Al Jazeera team strives to track down and identify the vessels. Along the way they investigate disturbing allegations that the trade is flourishing because of rampant local corruption, in which officials are paid to turn a blind eye to the activities of foreign trawlers. With their time in Sierra Leone fast running out and the authorities seemingly reluctant to help, it looks as though the two vessels might evade justice. But then the team gets a vital clue that cracks the mystery wide open.

In part two of Pirate Fishing, the identity of one of the trawlers is revealed and in a nail biting climax, the captain and crew are confronted with the evidence of their crimes.

Taken together the two films are akin to a dramatic detective story, but the issue they address is deadly serious. Sierra Leone is one of the poorest countries in the world — currently ranked 180th out of 187 countries on the Human Development Index. After coming out of a brutal civil war that lasted 11 years, the country has struggled to rebuild its devastated infrastructure. Its waters contain some of the richest fish stocks in the world and could, if sustainably developed and managed, one day provide the country with much-needed income.

Even as things stand, fishing currently represents 10 per cent of Sierra Leone's GDP and is a crucial component in its food security (contributing 64 per cent of the total animal protein eaten in the country). But the pirate fishing activities of foreign trawlers are stripping these fishing grounds so quickly that unless the practice is stopped there will soon be nothing left to develop. And most important of all, local people will be deprived of a crucial food source — just to satisfy the appetites of seafood lovers in Europe and Asia.

The two 30 minute parts of the Al Jazeera programme are now available on YouTube. Part 1 and Part 2.

Norfolk Wildlife Trust & RSPB fear Habitat Directive adulteration

Fears exist among conservationist and wildlife groups that Government Ministers risk sacrificing some of the most cherished parts of our natural world in their haste to create an environment where development and industry can bloom.

One particular announcement in Chancellor George Osborne's autumn statement provoked widespread alarm among the custodians of East Anglia's wildlife, when the Chancellor told MP's that he wanted to make sure that "gold-plating of EU rules on things like habitats" were not putting "ridiculous costs" on British firms, pricing them out of the global economy. He said "If we burden them with endless social and environmental goals — however worthy in their own right — then not only will we not achieve those goals, but the businesses will fail, jobs will be lost and our country will be poorer".

Immediately following this the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) announced a review of how the EU habitats and birds directives are being applied in England, "with a view to reducing the burdens on businesses while maintaining and, where possible, enhancing environmental benefits". This was welcomed by Harry Cotterell, president of the Country Land and Business Association (CLA) who said: "The government is starting to melt the gold-plating on this directive. We support conservation, but it is important that humans are considered as important as bats, newts and dormice". Others too, including some builders and some farmers, considered that the directives are being imposed too rigorously 'by preserving wildlife sites at all costs — to the detriment of the industry required to kick-start the UK's failing and ailing economy'.

But East Anglia's wildlife charities said watering down these legal safeguards would threaten not only protected plants and animal habitats, but also the substantial tourism industry which flourishes around them. Paul Forecast, the RSPB's regional director for the east of England, said: "At this stage, until we know exactly what's going to happen in the review, we don't know what the full implications might be. Clearly, from George Osborne's statement, he wants to weaken the legislation that protects our important wildlife sites in the region. The east of England has a higher number of these important areas for wildlife than many other parts of the country. When you think about the Broads, the Brecks, the Wash and the North Norfolk coast — there are so many areas of land protected by this legislation. The fear is that for short-term economic gain, we might threaten some of the environment which makes the region so distinctive. All of us who live in the East do so because we love the area we live in, and that's part of attracting business and tourism into the area. You meddle with that at your peril."

EU legislation restricts development in special areas of conservation (SACs) under the Habitats Directive, and also in special protection areas (SPAs) under the birds directive. Such designation applies to the RSPB's reserves at Snettisham and Titchwell Marsh. These are overseen by senior sites manager Robert Coleman, who said "The habitat we're looking at here is a very wild place, and there are not many landscapes like this left in the UK. The habitats and birds directives have been in place for a good number of years and they have done a good job helping us to protect these places for wildlife. It is easy to look at these places in isolation, but we need to look at the wider context. We are part of the 'Natura 2000' network of SACs and SPAs across Europe. This legislation is not just about protecting it for the UK. Wildlife does not recognise boundaries, so what happens here affects birds migrating from places like Greenland and Iceland."

Norfolk Wildlife Trust (NWT) chief executive Brendan Joyce said the habitats directive in particular had been an important "last resort" in protecting its reserves, saying "The sort of places that the habitats directive protect are the most important places on a European scale. If they were not, they would not have the designation as an SAC. You cannot just say you are going to let those places go. We are not anti-development. We are not standing in the way of progress. We should have modern networks and housing and we do need economic security, but to be prepared to trash the wildlife jewels in the crown for the sake of it seems to me to be crazy."

The review expects to publish its recommendations in the March budget. It will consider where implementation of the legislation gives rise to the greatest compliance costs and delays, whether the requirements are "applied too or insufficiently rigorously", and "whether competent authorities and statutory conservation advisers could explore more creative solutions".

Wave-power costing less than 2p per KWh

From WaterBriefing Newsletter of 25th January 2012 comes the news that Ecotricity are developing an innovative wave-power technology called 'Searaser', the brainchild of Devon engineer Alvin Smith. It is rugged, gives variable output, and can produce electricity costing less than 2p per kilowatt hour, this four times cheaper than the lowest-priced renewable energy source currently on the marketplace.

'Searaser' thus addresses two of the biggest barriers to the deployment of renewable energy on the scale that Britain needs, that of cost and variable output.

Inventor Alvin Smith said the main barrier to making wave-power efficient and therefore cost-effective was to provide resilience against the hostile ocean environment. Searaser pumps seawater using a vertical piston between two buoys, one on the surface of the water, the other suspended underwater and tethered to a weight on the seabed. As the ocean swell moves the buoys up-and-down the piston works like a bicycle pump to send volumes of pressurised seawater through a pipe to an onshore turbine to produce the electricity. This technique produces the additional option to supply energy on-demand. By pumping seawater into a coastal storage reservoir, it can be released through a generator as required — thus making not just energy from the Sea but energy that can be turned on and off as required, so overcoming the problem of renewable energy's naturally intermittent output on Britain's electricity grid.

It is hoped that the first commercial Searaser will be on stream within 12 months and that two hundred will be operational in five years

Happisburgh homes being demolished

The bulldozers are moving in on nine of the Happisburgh homes of owners who finally decided to sell their erosion threatened properties to North Norfolk District Council at between 40 and 50 per cent of their value, the funding for which comes out of NNDC's £3m provided by the government's pioneering 'Pathfinder' scheme. This now leaves just one permanently occupied bungalow standing which the owner refuses to sell.

What remains of the non-maintained original sea defences can be seen out to sea beyond the line of rock bunding on the left hand side of the photograph appended.

Photographs of Caribbean deep sea vent and a previously undiscovered species of shrimp

World's deepest sea vents reveal unknown creatures — in pictures. Eyeless shrimps and white-tentacled anemones are among the newly discovered life forms that scientists have found thriving near super-hot underwater geysers of the Beebe vent field, kilometres below the surface on the Caribbean seafloor in the Cayman trough.

Deep-Sea Vents: in Cayman Trough area exploration brings to light new species

The Von Damm vent field is thronged with the new species of shrimp, along with other animals such as snake-like fish. Photograph: University of Southampton/NOC

Writing in the journal Nature Communications, a team led by Doug Connelly of the National Oceanography Centre and Jon Copley of the University of Southampton describe the discoveries from an expedition aboard the Royal Research Ship James Cook. The RRS James Cook is the UK's most advanced research vessel, with eight science laboratories aboard and deck space for carrying deep-diving underwater vehicles.

The scientists have revealed details of the world's most extreme deep-sea volcanic vents, 3.1 miles down in a rift in the seafloor of the Caribbean. The undersea hot springs, which lie half a mile deeper than any seen before, may be hotter than 450C and are shooting a jet of mineral-laden water two-thirds of a mile into the ocean above. The vents are nicknamed 'black smokers' for the smoky-looking hot fluids, laden with mineral particles, that gush from them.

"The Von Damm vent field was a complete surprise — hot vents have never been seen in a place like this before,' says Connelly. "Its discovery suggests that there may be more deep-sea vents out there than we previously thought".

For photographs of the marine life at these deep sea vents, visit the source/reference below.

"Seas At Risk" NGO urges adoption of marine litter reduction targets

A group of experts on marine litter has advised EU countries on setting reduction targets for marine litter for 2020. Member States now have 6 months to act on this advice and set ambitious reduction targets in order to combat this growing problem.

In 2010, Member States of the European Union agreed to consult a group of experts on the development of the Union's Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) specific to marine litter, in part to consider the sorts of targets that should be set for 2020. The final report of the group has just been published.

"This report makes a strong case for setting practical marine litter reduction targets for 2020. The problem of marine litter and particularly plastic pollution in our seas is growing and is a major concern for marine wildlife, marine industries, coastal communities and human health. Member States must take this advice on board and set out ambitious marine litter reduction targets for 2020," said Chris Carroll of Seas At Risk.

Beaches in the North East Atlantic have on average 712 pieces of litter per 100m of beach and almost all North Sea Fulmars, a bird that feeds exclusively at sea, are found with plastic in their stomachs. The economic costs are also damaging with coastal municipalities in the Netherlands and UK spending on average €28 million per year cleaning beaches.

With "garbage patches" forming across the world's oceans, most notably in the Pacific and the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean, urgent action is needed the stop the accumulation of marine litter.

Under the MSFD, Member States are obliged by July of this year to have set environmental targets for 2020 to improve the environmental status of their waters. Marine litter is one of 11 marine environmental problems that is accounted for under the MSFD. Other "descriptors" cover the over-exploitation of fish stocks, biodiversity loss and marine noise.

The report proposes a number of absolute reduction targets for marine litter on beaches, in marine biota and in the water column and sets out a number of different monitoring protocols for consideration by Member States

Risk of "bird strike" at proposed Thames estuary London airport

A new airport in the Thames Estuary would be the most dangerous in the UK because of the risk of a plane being brought down by a bird strike, the government has been warned by experts.

The Thames Hub : a four-runway Thames Estuary airport

An artist's impression of the Thames Hub by Foster and Partners, a four-runway airport capable of handling 150 million passengers a year. Photograph: Foster And Partners/PA

A report, commissioned by ministers the last time they considered the option of a major new hub airport on the marshes east of London, found the risk of an "aircraft loss" after being hit by one or more birds was between one plane in 100 years and one plane in 300 years — higher than any of the other 10 major UK airports studied.

The high risk was calculated even after extensive work to make the area as unattractive as possible to birds, such as cutting down woodland, draining ponds, planting artificial grass and shooting birds when necessary. Without such measures "an aircraft could not operate safely in this location", said the report, adding: "Even with world-class management and mitigation measures in place… it is not considered possible to reduce the risk to a level similar to that experienced at other UK airports."

The report was commissioned in 2003 when Labour ministers were considering a new airport at Cliffe, on the north Kent coast; it was cited in the resulting white paper as one reason Labour rejected the Cliffe proposal, but was not published at the time. The experts' view will now add new difficulties for the coalition government, which is expected to announce in March a fresh consultation on building a new airport in the same area — an idea championed by London's Conservative mayor, Boris Johnson. Although the two proposals are not identical, they are likely to be on close or even overlapping sites on the north Kent coast, between the Thames and Medway estuaries. As a result, the findings and warnings of the 2003 report should be "broadly applicable," said Niall Burton, one of the original authors.

Simon Buck, chief executive of the British Air Transport Association, said the risk of bird strike was only one concern they have over the site. Another is possible "conflict" with flight paths for Amsterdam Schiphol's six-runway airport. "We feel as airlines there are lots of operational and technical issues that need to be addressed," said Buck. "It [the Thames Gateway proposal] is not what we see as being the solution to a problem [of shortage of runway space]."

Airlines, including British Airways, are known to favour expansion of existing airports, especially Heathrow in west London. However there is also huge opposition from environmental groups, who argue that no new runways are needed if the government invests in railways and taxes aircraft fuel equally with other transport.

The report will also fuel conservation concerns because, if a Thames airport was to go ahead, measures to reduce the risk of bird strikes would mean wildlife was affected far beyond the runways and buildings. Under European regulations, which cover much of the area's bird-rich salt-marshes and tidal mud-flats, developers would have to prove there was a genuine need to build a new airport, to try and mitigate environmental damage, and to compensate for any damage done. Because of the scale of the multi-billion pound project it would not be possible to compensate with alternative habitat in the area on such a big scale, said Nik Shelton, a spokesman for the RSPB. "Anyway [they would] have to destroy another bit of habitat to create it, so [they would] not add to the natural environment," added Shelton.

Ministers have not yet announced the exact site they will consider in the consultation, trailed by Johnson in the media last week. However a similar private proposal led by the Wembley Stadium and London "Gherkin" architect Sir Norman Foster appears to place a Thames Gateway airport on a site overlapping with the original Cliffe airport scheme, both of them on the Isle of Grain on the north Kent coast, between the Thames and Medway estuaries.

The Department for Transport stressed "no decisions have been taken" on the Thames Estuary or building a new runway at Gatwick or Stansted airports. "As the chancellor made clear in his autumn statement, we will explore all the options for maintaining the UK's aviation hub status with the exception of a third runway at Heathrow," said a department spokesman. "The government will consult on an overarching sustainable framework for UK aviation this spring and alongside this we will publish a call for evidence on maintaining effective UK hub airport connectivity."

The bird-strike report, prepared by experts from the government's Central Science Laboratory (now part of the Food and Environment Research Agency, Fera) and the British Trust for Ornithology, said the greatest risk to aircraft was from heavier birds, especially over 1kg, or flocks of 10 birds or more hitting a plane. It found that overall the highest risk bird species in the area were oystercatcher, curlew, herring gull, shelduck, wigeon, lapwing, great black-backed gull, cormorant, mute swan, greylag goose and redshank.

The mix of species affected by the different new airport schemes put forward would vary, but the overall impact in the "scale of numbers" was likely to be the same, said Burton, head of wetlands and marine research at the British Trust for Ornithology. Burton said he was not aware of any significant changes in bird-strike mitigation, though this was not his primary area of expertise.

MARINET notes: There is a further complication. During World War II the S.S. Richard Montgomery, a US Liberty Ship carrying munitions, sank on 20th August 1944 in the estuary off the coast of Sheerness. This wreck still contains 1,400 tons of unrecovered, unstable high explosive. If this unrecovered material were to explode, it would have the explosive force of a small atom bomb (i.e. equivalent to but without the radiation). See www.liveleak.com/view?i=0f1_1296339830 for further details.

86% of ocean debris is plastic

In a campaign to secure the banning of single use plastic bags in San Luis Obispo, California, the Surfrider Foundation which has led this local campaign has advised legislators that 86% of all debris in the ocean is made of plastic.

The Surfrider Foundation also advise in their latest email news that this campaign has proved successful, and a ban on single use plastic bags in San Luis Obispo and its county area has been passed. The use of plastic in single use bags will now be replaced by paper, and should encourage a greater use of cloth bags. This action has been taken to protect the seas and oceans which are currently heavily polluted by plastic, resulting in serious injury to marine life worldwide.

Renewable Energy Marine Park planned for SW England

The south-west of England is to be named as the UK's first marine energy park. The announcement has been made by the Climate Change Minister, Greg Barker MP, during a visit to Bristol. The South West Marine Energy Park will stretch from Bristol to Cornwall and as far as the Isles of Scilly.

A PowerBuoy wave energy converter wave Hub project in Cornwall

The PowerBuoy wave energy converter, which is to be used as part of the Wave Hub project, will see a giant National Grid-connected socket built on the seabed off the coast of Cornwall. Photograph: Handout/PA

The announcement establishes a partnership in the region between national and local government, Local Enterprise Partnerships, the Universities of Plymouth and Exeter and industry, including Cornwall's Wave Hub. The aim of the partnership will be to speed up the progress of marine power development.

Energy from the waves or tides has the potential to generate up to 27GW of power in the UK alone by 2050 — equivalent to the power generated from eight coal-fired power stations.

In a press release, the Minister stated: "This is a real milestone for the marine industry and for the south-west region in securing its place in renewables history as the first official marine energy park. The south-west can build on its existing unique mix of renewable energy resource and home-grown academic, technical and industrial expertise. Marine power has huge potential in the UK not just in contributing to a greener electricity supply and cutting emissions, but in supporting thousands of jobs in a sector worth a possible £15bn to the economy to 2050. The UK is already a world leader in wave and tidal power, so we should capitalise on this leadership to make marine power a real contender in the future energy market."

Chris Ridgers, cabinet member for economy at Cornwall council, welcomed the announcement. He said: "Cornwall's marine energy programme is reinforced by more than a thousand years of industrial heritage. The land and the sea have provided the foundation of Cornish entrepreneurship in engineering and innovation, recognised across the world."

Welcoming the Government's proposal for making the South West of England a marine park, Friends of the Earth's South West Campaigner Mike Birkin said: "This is exciting news for the South West and our economy — developing the UK's marine energy potential will create thousands of new jobs and help cut the nation's dependency on expensive fossil fuels long term. We need real action to make this a reality — we're still waiting for wave energy machines to be plugged in to Cornwall's Wave Hub a year after it was installed on the seabed. With cash-strapped households facing huge fuel bills there's no time for delay — the Government must get on with developing affordable clean power."

Generation IV Fast Reactor rejected for Sellafield

Advocates of a new breed of civil nuclear reactors using waste nuclear fuel, collectively known as "Generation IV Fast Reactors" have had the GE Hitachi version of this type of reactor, known as "Prism" (Power Reactor Innovative Small Modular), rejected by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) for use at Sellafield, Cumbria.

Nuclear waste at Sellafield nuclear power plant

Flasks containing used fuel cooling down at Sellafield's reprocessing facility. The reactor plan was announced as a way of converting the UK's 82-tonne stockpile of plutonium into power. Photograph: Don Mcphee

"A plan to build a plutonium-burning reactor at Sellafield in Cumbria has been rejected by the UK government's Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA). Internal e-mails seen by the Guardian reveal that the NDA regards the reactor technology as immature and commercially unproven. It would also create large amounts of plutonium-contaminated waste and increase the risk of terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons, the NDA says.

The reactor plan was announced by General Electric (GE) Hitachi in November as a way of converting the UK's 82-tonne stockpile of plutonium at Sellafield into power. Known as "Prism" (Power Reactor Innovative Small Modular), it is a new design of sodium-cooled fast reactor that is fuelled by plutonium.

In an e-mail to GE on 29th November 2011, the NDA's strategy and technology director, Adrian Simper, said that the two organisations "have struggled to reach a clear agreement on the work necessary to demonstrate credibility, without which neither NDA nor government can consider Prism further in the development of our strategy."

In a draft response to GE prepared for the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc), the NDA said it had carried out a "high-level assessment" of Prism. The technology was "still to be demonstrated commercially", it concluded, and "the technology maturity for the fuel, reactor and recycling plant are considered to all be low".

One drawback with Prism, according to the NDA, was that it would be fuelled by plutonium metal, rather than the oxide form in which UK plutonium is currently stored. Converting the oxide to metal would result in "a likely large amount of plutonium contaminated salt waste requiring management".

Plutonium metal is also thought to be easier to make into bombs. "This would introduce more security/proliferation risk," warned the NDA. "In summary the Prism concept is unlikely to start before 2050 and as such does not appear to meet the requirement for deployment within 25 years."

Jean McSorley, a Cumbria-based nuclear critic, obtained the e-mails under freedom of information law.

GE said that there had been "miscommunication" about Prism, which had been under development in the US for 30 years. "We haven't had a chance to explain it yet," the company's chief nuclear engineer, Eric Loewen, told the Guardian. "We're working on a framework with the NDA."

But Decc said that the alternative of turning plutonium into mixed oxide (Mox) fuel was "the most credible and technologically mature option" so it was prioritising work on that. "We are not closing off alternatives," added a Decc spokesman. "We remain open to any technically mature proposals that offer better value to the taxpayer and can be delivered in within a comparable timeframe as our preferred option."

California's Central Coast Kelp Forest captured on film

Terry Lilley, a marine biologist and former pro-surfer, and his assistant Sue Sloan, have made a film for the San Luis Obispo Surfrider Foundation which records the amazing marine life and exceptional biodiversity to be found in the California Central Coast's kelp forests.

This film shows many ocean creatures, including: giant lingcod, huge schools of rockfish, rare angle sharks, colourful sea slugs and anemones in every colour of the rainbow, 300 pound seals, giant crabs and lobsters and, as Lilley himself remarks in the film's commentary, there is no need to go to Mars to be an original explorer because the marine life in these Californian kelp forests is being recorded here for the first time, and many of the marine animals in this film will have never seen human beings before.

We provide an extract from this exceptional film on our new Planet Ocean webpage.

Strong community support, including amongst fishermen, for new Isle of Man marine reserve

Ramsey Bay has been designated as the Isle of Man's first Marine Nature Reserve in a project welcomed by government, fishermen and Friends of the Earth.

Underwater surveys have revealed that the bay has a highly complex, thriving and diverse habitat and that it is ideal for the establishment of a reserve which will protect marine life, safeguard local fisheries and provide opportunities for Ramsey to develop as a centre for marine tourism, research and education.

The seabed also has lush eelgrass meadows, kelp forests, reef habitats and bright pink maerl beds as well as an abundance of shellfish and numerous fish species.

"The designation of the Ramsey Marine Nature Reserve is an exciting step forward for the Isle of Man," said DEFA (Dept. of Environment, Food and Agriculture) Minister John Shimmin MHK (Member of the House of Keys). "The area will provide a replenishment area for our important local fisheries and it will maintain and restore essential marine habitats. It will also help us contribute to reducing impacts of climate change by increasing the carbon storage capacity of our seas. Eelgrass meadows, kelp forests and reef habitats all store carbon in the same way as rainforests, contributing to lowering carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere."

"I am especially pleased" said the DEFA Minister "that at a time when fishermen across the British Isles are fighting a rearguard action against designation of Marine Protected Areas, the close partnership we have developed with our fishermen means that we were able to put out a joint press release when we announced the proposals, and continue to work with our fishermen to ensure that the benefit they obtain from this designation is maximised."

Chief Executive of the Manx Fish Producers' Organisation, Tom Bryan-Brown, added, "The fishing industry has been involved in the Ramsey Bay MNR from its inception. This particular MNR differs from the other closed areas around the Island in that they have been created primarily for fisheries management purposes whereas Ramsey Bay has been created for environmental reasons. However, we hope that there will be associated fisheries benefits from this MNR in Ramsey Bay and if that is the case then the industry will be able to take advantage and the environmental credentials of the Island will be maximised."

The Ramsey Bay designation is the result of a three year process to involve the Manx community in identifying possible sites for the Marine Nature Reserves and to work with users of the sea and the wider public to choose the best site to protect. Hundreds of people have attended workshops and presentations and responded to surveys and interviews, ensuring that the MNR is based on the best possible information. Ramsey Bay provides the perfect combination of important marine habitats and potential for benefiting local fisheries. The Marine Nature Reserve is also well supported by marine users.

In August scientists from the Fisheries Directorate of DEFA carried out comprehensive surveys of Ramsey Bay using special seabed mapping equipment and a camera on an underwater sledge. This will enable scientists to produce detailed maps of the marine life of Ramsey Bay to assist in the monitoring of the Reserve.

Tony Glen, Seasearch Isle of Man Co-ordinator who led the team of volunteer divers added, "Isle of Man Seasearch has been involved with the Fisheries Directorate for many years and is pleased that the Ramsey Marine Nature Reserve is now officially designated. This is not the end of the exercise, and we look forward to further dives to monitor the state of the seabed in the years to come. Credit should go to the Ministers both past and present who have supported this scheme and I look forward to our continued involvement in surveying the marine habitats around the Island in association with the officers of the Directorate."

The wider benefits of the Marine Nature Reserve have also been recognised by Isle of Man Friends of the Earth. Local co-ordinator Phil Corlett said, "It's really heartening to see the Ramsey Marine Reserve set up in the Island's territorial waters as it shows the Isle of Man is taking steps to protect biodiversity and helping at the same time to conserve vital habitats. "As a diver myself involved in the Seasearch surveys around the Island, I look forward to revisiting the area next year to survey it and document any changes".

Independent study says UK Government "stress test" of nuclear power plants was inadequate

A study undertaken by marine radioactivity consultant, Tim Deere-Jones, for the Nuclear Free Local Authorities (NFLA) has concluded that the "stress test" undertaken by the UK Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) to establish the safety of nuclear power plants in the UK following the Fukushima nuclear disaster was inadequate.

A key issue in the Fukushima accident has been the use of emergency cooling water in order to keep the damaged reactors and cooling ponds in a safe condition, and the NFLA report concludes that the Government's ONR report has failed to properly consider this issue should a similar emergency occur in the UK.

The NFLA report states that there was loss of containment at 3 reactors and one spent fuel cooling pond at Fukushima, and that emergency cooling water had to be used in vast quantities. Initially the emergency cooling water was applied in unquantified volumes, but later attempts to quantify the use of emergency cooling water on a daily basis has confirmed flow rates of up to 432 tonnes per day. Also initially, this emergency cooling water was discharged into the surrounding environment (watercourses and sea) in unquantified amounts, but in September 2011 the IRSN (Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire — the French public expert in nuclear and radiological risks) estimated that during the period from late March to the end of April 2011 about 27 PBq (Peta Becquerels) of radioactivity from the radio-isotope Caesium 137 alone, had entered the Pacific coastal waters as a result of the escape of primary and emergency cooling waters from the Fukushima disaster.

Now, after several months of preventative action, the amount of emergency cooling water in storage is estimated as being in the region of 195,000 tonnes. This cooling water has become highly contaminated with the entire range of 50 to 60 isotopes found within such environments, including several isotopes of plutonium and similar substances (americium, curium, etc).

The NFLA report notes that massive use of emergency cooling water was required at the Windscale and Chernobyl accidents, and also at 3 Mile Island, USA, at Mayak/Kyshtym in the Urals during the USSR era, and at the Hanford plant in the USA.

In the context of the UK, the NFLA notes that the UK's seas are relatively enclosed, with relatively slow flushing/dispersion/dilution rates, and thus the use of emergency cooling water in large quantities, and its ultimate fate in the environment, is a major issue.

The NFLA report expresses deep concern that the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) report only discusses releases of radioactivity to atmosphere in the context of nuclear accidents, and believes that the ONR report has failed to give serious consideration to the use of emergency cooling water. The NFLA report concludes that the ONR report has failed to learn and respond to the most crucial outcomes of the Fukushima disaster, and the NFLA makes a number of recommendations for the construction of bunding, storage tanks and site drainage control in order to manage, capture and store escaped coolant and emergency cooling water at UK nuclear power plants.

A summary of the Nuclear Free Local Authorities report, prepared by Tim Deere-Jones, may be seen here on our Radiation page.

'Human rights at risk' in Shoreline Management Plan

Brian Hardisty, chairman of the Hopton Coastal Action Group and Parish councillor, has threatened to invoke the Human Rights Act after proposals for a new Shoreline Management Plan revealed it would bring about the loss of five houses at Hopton within the next 40 years (one of these being Brian's).

"Human rights will be breached if Great Yarmouth Borough Council fails to protect more than a dozen cliff-top homes and businesses from the ocean" is Brian's stated concern, whose Hopton home will be engulfed with a total of fourteen houses and two holiday companies (Bourne Leisure and the Potters Leisure) by 2105 if the Kelling to Lowestoft Ness Shoreline Management Plan (SMP) is approved. His warning comes after plans revealed sea defences at Yarmouth and Gorleston would be maintained, while parts of Hopton would be allowed to fall into the sea, a recommendation he believes breaches Article 14 (discrimination) of the Human Rights Act 1998.

True Costs of Coastal Abandonment

Coastal Group member Richard Steward points out to us that the recent DEFRA 'puff piece' failed to mention that much of the £12 million the Environment Agency are removing from our coastal defence budget (now totalling £84 million since 2005) is required to pay for the relocation 32,000ha of EU designated habitat (i.e. habitat that should be protected in-situ under EU law) and 10,000ha of 'managed realignment' (flooding of productive farmland using HLS/CAP payments of £10,000/ha) and that the total bill for this is close to £2.6 billion.

He feels that until this absurdity is stopped we will never get the coastal protection we need.

Sea defences for Dungeness nuclear power station threaten surrounding SAC

The view from the windows of Ken and June Thomas's black-tarred cottage is extraordinary. The largest expanse of shingle beach in Europe is dotted with rare plants and desert flowers. Birds screech as they flock beneath the vast sky. Ken Thomas's fishing boats are pulled high above the tide mark as giant tankers pass by in deep channels scored close to the shore and anglers huddle along the water's edge, their tents hidden in the ridges of shingle. Strain to the right and you can see a lighthouse, built with a unique pigmented, spiralled concrete. Beyond is the weathered shack where Marconi sent the first radio messages across the Channel, and along to the left is Derek Jarman's celebrated Prospect Cottage, with its driftwood garden and John Donne's poetry carved in wood on its wall. At the tip of the promontory is the Dungeness nuclear power station. It is no ordinary backyard.

The artist Derek Jarman stands in the driftwood garden at the front of Prospect Cottage, his celebrated home on the beach at Dungeness. Photograph: Geraint Lewis/Rex Features

Residents of the 99 Dungeness houses — many of them built on top of Victorian railway carriages dragged on to the shingle a century ago — will attend a public meeting with Kent county council and EDF, the company operating the Dungeness B plant, to discuss a controversial planning application that would see this landscape change dramatically.

The proposal, from EDF and the Environment Agency, is to have between 50 and 100 quarry lorries a day, each weighing 30 tonnes and three metres wide, coming along the 3.1-metre wide unmade road for five days a week, trundling right past their front doors. Diggers will be out too, along a 300-metre stretch of seafront, pulling out up to 30,000 tonnes of shingle a year to dump it back into the sea a few miles away down the coast.

The idea is to "recycle" the shingle by piling it on to the eroding coastline on the Kent-East Sussex border and prop up the beach in front of the power station. Anglers who come to Dungeness from miles around for its cod and bass fishing have already been getting up petitions over the quarry works fencing, which would cut off access to some of the best fishing spots.

Now residents have started a campaign against the plans. They say it is a waste of time and money, because not all the shingle is washed back to its original location. Residents also fear that the huge dumper trucks will destroy the fragile ecosystem and turn away the growing numbers of tourists who have been starting to visit their stretch of the Romney marshes. Dungeness is also of international importance, designated as a national nature reserve, a special protection area, a special area of conservation and a site of special scientific interest.

A similar scheme of quarrying the eastern side ended in 2007 over concerns for the environment, and since then the Environment Agency, responsible for England's coastline defences, had been buying in shingle from inland quarries. But that costs three times as much as digging out the beach — or "borrow pit", as the area to be excavated is known.

In a statement, the Environment Agency said: "Recycling shingle has an effect on the Dungeness special area of conservation, and in 2007 we stopped using the borrow pit and started to explore how we might minimise this effect while still maintaining the defences. Recycling shingle from the borrow pit provides the best value for money for the taxpayer and means that we can stretch public funds further to reduce the risk of flooding to more homes and businesses."

It would seem to go against the Department for Energy and Climate Change which, in a recent report on sites for a new nuclear facility, rejected Dungeness, stating: "If shingle had to be sourced from Dungeness for sea defence purposes, then this could impact this nationally and internationally important conservation site".

For local people it could also radically set back the area's growing popularity as a tourist destination. "Since they stopped quarrying here in 2007 the tourists have been coming. We get coachloads of schoolchildren, students on photography courses, bird watchers, photographers, the anglers of course. With the power station going out of commission we need the tourism for the local economy," said June Thomas. "You can't expect anyone to come here when there are giant lorries constantly going up and down. It's not safe." She can see the "borrow pit" from her windows. I dread it. As they load the lorries the sound will be awful, a mass of shingle being dropped from a height into a metal container, all day, every day, awful."

Her husband Ken, 60, is from a family who have fished here for generations. For him the plan itself doesn't make sense. "They will just change the profile of the beach and the channels, but do nothing to stop coastal erosion. None of them has any idea of how shingle moves. They had no idea how the shingle would shift when they built the power station and they wouldn't listen to the fishermen who told them this would happen, that they were building it in the wrong place. "Now they're not listening again. They haven't done basic research to see what works and what doesn't by way of coastal defences. They stopped it once, when the conservationists stepped in and said that method can't be done. Now they want to save money and they've come back to it. They think Dungeness is a dump, a wasteland. Well, they're out of date, it's recognised now for what it is, somewhere special."

Paul Schwartfeger's house is built around a Victorian railway carriage, complete with parquet floor. He has been busy making up "No to Quarrying" posters that almost all the homes have in their windows. He says the EDF and Environment Agency proposals are short-sighted and won't provide any long-term defence against the longshore drift that affects the stretch of coast from Kent into East Sussex. "The quarrying at Dungeness is a cheap way of trying to tackle a major problem but all the expertise points to it not working. The Environment Agency says itself that flood defence strategies we need to be working with are those which manage risk — protecting and restoring and copying the natural regulating function of rivers, floodplains and coasts."

Mudflats and salt marshes provide a natural "sponge" for rising sea levels rather than hard barriers like shingle, while lifting the shingle also allows more water into the land — raising the water table and, in effect, raising the flood risk. "What makes me feel really angry is the hoops we have to jump through, and rightly so, about planning and the environment. We can't touch the land in our garden or put up a fence. It's a privilege to live here, but then the council can come along and decide quite arbitrarily to dig it all up. It's extraordinary," says Schwartfeger.

The protesters also make the point that EDF and the Environment Agency could dredge shingle offshore for a similar cost but without the noise and disruption. That's not something the owner of the fishing tackle shop in the nearby village of Greatstone is keen on. Tony Hills is chairman of Dungeness Angling Association and a Shepway district councillor. He believes the government's rejection of Dungeness as a nuclear site could still be overturned and is in favour of a quarry to provide the necessary shingle. "We need jobs desperately. Economic advantage shouldn't be put off by environmental needs. If we don't get sea defences, we don't get a power station, and vice versa." He adds: "What's going to happen if we don't do this? For starters, you're leaving the 30,000 people living in the marsh area to drown."

Ships could move from fossil oil to algal oil as their fuel

Giant cargo boats and US navy warships have been successfully powered on oil derived from genetically modified algae in a move which could herald a revolution in the fuel used by the world's fleets — and a reduction in the pollution they cause.

Trials of the algal oil have been carried out on a Maersk cargo ship. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

The results of substituting algal oil for low-grade, "bunker" fuel and diesel in a 98,000-tonne container ship are still being evaluated by Maersk, the world's biggest shipping company, which last week tested 30 tonnes of oil supplied by the US navy in a vessel travelling from Europe to India. Last month, the navy tested 20,000 gallons of algal fuel on a decommissioned destroyer for a few hours. Both ran their trials on a mix of algal oil — between 7% and 100% — and conventional bunker fuel.

"The tests are not complete yet, but we had very few problems," a Maersk spokesman said.

Collaboration between the world's two biggest shipping fleets is expected to lead to the deployment of renewable marine fuels. Maersk uses more than $6bn of bunker fuel a year for its 1,300 ships, and the US navy, the world's biggest single user of marine fuels, burns around 40m barrels of oil a year. The navy plans to test more ships on algal fuel next year as part of its "green fleet" initiative and has pledged to cut 50% of its conventional oil use a year by 2020. Maersk hopes to achieve similar cuts in the same time.

"Shipping takes 350m tonnes of oil a year and causes 3-4% of all greenhouse gas emissions, so it is very attractive to find alternatives. We can envisage [the world's] ships being 10% or more powered by biofuels in 20 years' time," Jacob Sterling, the Maersk head of climate and environment, said.

The exact nature of the algae, one of 30,000 single-cell organisms known to exist in the wild, is a secret closely guarded by Solazyme, the company that manufactures the fuel in giant fermentation tanks in Pennsylvania. The fast-growing algae are fed crop or forest waste and convert their sugars to oil.

"The technology is there. The question now is how to scale up," Tyler Painterm, the chief finance officer of Solazyme, which has a contract to produce 450,000 gallons of biofuels for the navy's trial, said. "We have tested thousands of algae, found in swamps, in mountains and at sea and we know we can be competitive. By using different strains of algae, we can produce different kinds of oils."

The company, which is set to expand shortly with a 50m gallon-a-year plant in Brazil, is backed by the oil company Chevron, the giant US agribusiness Bunge, and Sir Richard Branson, whose Virgin airline has tested planes on algal fuel.

Unlike early biofuels, which made transport fuel from food crops, the new "second generation" process uses only plant waste and does not displace foods which could be fed to people or animals. Nevertheless, immense amounts of feedstock would be needed to power the world's ships. Maersk estimates it could take the crop waste of an area half the size of Denmark to completely power its ships.

But even a partial switch to algal oils would massively reduce air pollution. Bunker fuel, which is little more than asphalt, can produce as much pollution from a single ship in a year as 50 million cars and is the most polluting fuel in the world.

But there is uncertainty over how much algal fuels would reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Algae sequester CO₂ when growing, but release it when burned as oil. Solazyme and Maersk claim they reduce carbon emissions by 80% compared with petroleum-derived fuels in a "lifetime" analysis.

The race is on between different companies to produce competitive algal oils. In October 2010, the US Navy purchased 20,055 gallons on algae biofuel at $424 per gallon, but by December 2011, the price had reduced to $26.67 per gallon. Meanwhile, Craig Venter, the scientist who first sequenced the human genome and designed the first synthetic cell, is trying to develop a genetically-engineered algae fuel that depends only on sunlight and sea water and can be grown and harvested at sea. In an interview in this month's Scientific American, he said: "We need three major ingredients: CO₂, sunlight and seawater, aside from having the facility and refinery to convert all those things. We're looking at sites around the world that have the major ingredient. To us, this is a long-term plan."

If the US navy does switch to algae or other biofuels, it would mark the end of an era of oil-burning navies ushered in by Winston Churchill. In 1911, as the British navy minister, he controversially ordered the huge British fleet to switch from coal to oil for efficiency. Two years later, he bought a 51% controlling interest in the then small Anglo-Persian Oil Company for the UK government. Within a few years, the company changed its name to BP, and is now the world's fourth-largest corporation.

Further concern over oil tanker transfers at sea

Fears of an oil spill along the Suffolk Coast were further elevated by the news of the stricken 54,000 tonnes oil tanker Genmar Companion, which ran into trouble off the Northern Irish coast on Friday 6th January when the crew spotted a crack in the deck as it was travelling from Rotterdam to New York. The tanker was taken to Belfast Lough for a transfer of the cargo of oil to take place, which was completed by the Saturday, safely and apparently without further incident or hazard.

Secretary of the Southwold and Reydon Society John Perkins opposes the Department for Transport plans that will see the Sole Bay area designated in April as the singular spot for oil transfer in UK waters, pointing out that the situation with the Genmar Companion identified potential hazards that could be posed to the Suffolk coast. He stated "Having looked at the details of this, it obviously highlights the risk and just shows the potential risk of transferring large quantities of oil by sea. Our concern is always that in Sole Bay these ships are very close to the shore.""> adding "These things are potentially more dangerous than modern boats. It highlights the risk and it is a concern." The Suffolk campaigners objecting to the Government legislation say the Genmar Companion episode raises question marks about the safety of the oil tanker industry and the sea-worthiness of the ships.

Suffolk Coastal MP Therese Coffey raised questions about the standard of some of the vessels used in the transfers, saying "It is fair to say people are concerned about the seaworthiness of the oil tankers. The boats going through our international waters — are they the appropriate standard and are they going to just break up?"

But a spokeswoman for the Department for Transport said the situation in Belfast with the Genmar Companion was a "one-off problem because of the ship" and that the change in legislation coming into place on 1st April was unaffected, stating "There is no plan to change our plans for ship-to-ship transfers."

£50K NNDC loan to FLAG

North Norfolk District Council Cabinet are about to approve a £50,000 interest free loan for a provide a working cash flow under the FLAG Scheme, to help the areas ailing fishing industry when the final grant payment is received from the Marine Management Organisation. Altogether £2.4m worth of projects are aimed at boosting Norfolk's fishing industry

The FLAG scheme, mainly funded by the European Fisheries Fund, will allow the cash needed to be spent on infrastructure, marketing, on education and in obtaining EU protection for the Cromer crab, with the long-term aim of creating a fisheries training school. It will benefit the wide sweep of the Norfolk fishing industry by being spread over a 59-mile stretch of the counties coastline, ranging from Thornham to Caister-on-Sea, and will also include inshore businesses with links to the trade.

The money will be due for repayment at the end of the three-year Marine Management Organisation programme.

New study records evidence of excess childhood leukaemia around nuclear power stations

A major epidemiological study published in the January 2012 edition of The International Journal of Cancer indicates there is "a possible excess risk" of acute leukaemia among children living in close vicinity to French nuclear power plants (NPP). The study called for an "investigation for potential risk factors to the vicinity of NPP, and collaborative analysis of multi-site studies conducted in various countries."

The study found a doubling of occurrence of childhood leukaemia between the years of 2002-2007 among children under 5 years living within 5 km of nuclear plants — similar to the findings of the German 2008 study by the Cancer Registry in Mainz which found an association between the nearness of residence to nuclear power plants and the risk of childhood leukaemia.

The epidemiological study was conducted by a team from the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale, the Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire (IRSN) and the National Register of haematological diseases of children in Villejuif. The results marked a surprising and encouraging change at IRSN which had endeavoured to discredit earlier French epidemiological studies that had shown an impact of nuclear facilities on health.

Could quotas for catching whales lead to their better protection?

Introducing tradable quotas for catching whales could reduce the number of the marine mammals killed each year, researchers have suggested.

Writing in the journal Nature, US academics said a market of quotas that could be bought and sold would allow environmental groups to "purchase whales" to save them and let whalers profit from the animals without killing them. Christopher Costello and Steven Gaines, of the University of California, and Leah R Gerber of Arizona State University have proposed the method of putting a "price tag" on whales in the face of the ongoing battle over whaling, which continues despite a global ban. The researchers said that although a global moratorium began in 1986, the number of whales being caught has more than doubled since the early 1990s to almost 2,000 each year.

"A fervent anti-whaler will be quick to argue that you cannot and should not put a price on the life of a whale; a species should be protected irrespective of its economic value," the researchers write. "But unless all nations can by convinced or forced to adopt this view, whaling will continue. It is precisely because of the lack of a real price tag in the face of different values that anti-whaling operations have had such limited success."

In 2010, a 10-year "peace plan" drawn up by the International Whaling Commission proposed limited quotas for those countries that continue to hunt the mammals despite the ban. The plan would have meant that Iceland and Norway, which hunt commercially, along with Japan, which exploits a loophole allowing it to catch whales under an exemption for "scientific" whaling, agree to catch limits set by the commission and based on scientific advice.

The bid to introduce quotas — which the IWC said would save several thousands of whales — failed, but the US academics said a trading market could benefit whales and whalers. In their comment piece, they propose that quotas be allocated, at sustainable levels, to all member nations of the IWC, who would have the choice of using them or retiring them. The majority of the quotas could be divided between whaling and non-whaling nations based on historical whaling patterns, with the remainder auctioned and the proceeds going to whale conservation.

The scientists said calculations based on market prices and whaling costs put the profit per whale at around $13,000 (£8,500) for a minke and $85,000 for an endangered fin whale. As a result, prices for whale quotas should be within the reach of conservation groups and even some individuals. The millions of pounds spent by conservation organisations on fighting whaling could be used to "purchase whales" by buying the quota, with the same or better effect. It could reduce the number of whales caught — possibly even to zero — and suitably compensate whalers, the scientists said.

The academics acknowledged that policing a whale quota market would not be simple, but they said: "By placing an appropriate price tag on the life of a whale, a whale conservation market provides an immediate and tangible way to save them."

15 new species found in Scottish seas during 2011

A brainless and faceless "fish" was one of 15 species discovered during a series of Scottish marine surveys during 2011.

Prehistoric amphioxus, which have no face or brain, have been discovered in the waters off Tankerness in Orkney. Photograph: Andrew Want/Marine Scotland/PA

The prehistoric amphioxus, was found in waters off Tankerness in Orkney. It has a nerve cord down its back and is said to be regarded as a representative of the first animals to evolve a backbone.

Giant mussels with shells measuring up to 48cm (18in), were also discovered around the Small Isles and are said to have the largest sea shells in Scotland.

More than 100 specimens of the Fan Mussels were found around the islands, meaning the area has the largest aggregation of the fish in UK waters. The mussels are said to have golden threads similar to human hair, which are so fine they are able to attach to a single grain of sand. In Caithness, the country's largest horse mussel bed was found in waters near Noss Head. The species, known as clabbydhhu in Gaelic, which translates as "enormous black mouth", are slow-growing molluscs that can live for up to 50 years.

Other finds from the marine surveys, which covered more than 2,000 sq miles, included flame shell (Limaria hians) beds in Loch Linnhe, Argyll, as well as new communities of northern feather star, a brightly coloured species with 10 feather-like arms fanning out from a central disc, which were discovered off the Sound of Canna.

The Scottish government said the findings would further the country's knowledge of the biodiversity of its seas. Scotland's environment secretary, Richard Lochhead, said: "In an age where the lands of the world have been mapped out and recorded, it's amazing how many discoveries are waiting to be found under the waves. Spanning from the weird to the wonderful, discoveries this year have included the bizarre amphioxus and the beautiful yet elusive brightly coloured flame shell. The waters around Scotland are rich in such fascinating biodiversity and it's our responsibility to protect this fragile environment."

Dr Dan Barlow, head of policy at WWF Scotland, said: "These surveys highlight that Scotland's seas and coasts are home to a truly amazing range of weird and wonderful wildlife. By providing vital information on what lies beneath the waves, these surveys will help inform decisions on better ways to protect this important resource now and long into the future. From helping inform the appropriate deployment of marine renewables to supporting the rollout of a network of Marine Protected Areas, these survey findings will prove invaluable in helping ensure the recovery of Scotland's seas. It is important that the government builds on this survey work to further our knowledge of the marine environment."

Susan Davies, director of policy and advice with Scottish Natural Heritage, added: "Scotland's seas really are a fantastic asset. The findings from these surveys will help us to manage them sustainably and ensure future generations can also enjoy the benefits of a healthy and diverse marine environment."

Exotic creatures found in Indian Ocean hydrothermal vent, but mining is about to commence

British scientists have found a remarkable array of creatures, some of them new to science, in one of the most inhospitable regions of the deep sea. In the first ever expedition to explore and take samples from the "Dragon Vent" in the south-west Indian Ocean, remotely operated submarines spotted yeti crabs, sea cucumbers and snails living around the boiling column of mineral-rich water that spews out of the seafloor.

Dr Jon Copley, a marine biologist at the University of Southampton who led the exploration of the Dragon Vent, said his team found animals that had not been seen in neighbouring parts of the oceans.

"We found a new type of yeti crab. Yeti crabs are known at vents in the eastern Pacific and there are two species described so far, but they have very long, hairy arms — ours have short arms and their undersides are covered in bristles. They're quite different to the ones that are known from the Pacific," said Copley. "This is the first time a Yeti crab has been seen in the Indian Ocean." His team also found sea cucumbers, vent shrimps and scaly-foot snails. Sea cucumbers have previously only been seen at deep sea vents in the eastern Pacific. "This is the first time they've been seen at vents in the Indian Ocean and they're not known from the central Indian or mid-Atlantic vents so far," he said.

Deep-sea vents, also known as hydrothermal vents, are springs of superheated water that are powered by underwater volcanoes. They erupt from the sea bed and are usually found a few miles under the sea surface. The scalding temperatures and rich mineral content of the water give rise to vast rocky chimneys, which have been found to support a wide variety of life forms. The survey was part of a larger expedition to study underwater mountains aboard the RRS James Cook, which sailed from Cape Town on 7 November and returned to South Africa on 21 December. The exploration of the Dragon Vent took place in an intense three-day burst in the middle of the trip.

Copley's team took hundreds of samples of 17 different creatures, all of which are now being shipped back to his lab for detailed morphological and genetic examination. "Chances are that there will be several that are new species," he said. "We won't know for sure until we get them back into the lab and analyse them."

Copley's work builds on a Chinese expedition in 2007 that pinpointed the hydrothermal vents on the south-west Indian ridge for the first time. This chain of undersea volcanoes joins the mid-Atlantic ridge to the central Indian ridge. This part of the volcanic ridge is less volcanically active, so scientists think hydrothermal vents should be fewer and more scattered here. It therefore raises the question of whether life there is significantly different.

Copley said that characterising the life at the world's hydrothermal vents was a race against time. " Earlier this year, China was granted a licence by the UN International Seabed Authority for exploratory mining at deep-sea vents on the south-west Indian ridge," he said. "The vent chimneys are very rich in copper, zinc, gold and uranium. But we have no idea what's actually living there."

In evolutionary terms, hydrothermal vents were like the islands of the ocean floor, he added. "Just like the 19th century naturalists used to go to the Galápagos and other islands to find species there that are different to elsewhere and then use that to understand patterns of dispersal of dispersal and evolution, we can use deep-sea vents to do the same things beneath the waves," he said.

"And we need to do that because the exploitation of the deep ocean is overtaking its exploration. We're fishing in deeper and deeper waters, oil and gas is moving into deeper waters and now there's mining starting to take place in deep waters. We need to understand how species disperse and evolve in the deep oceans if we're going to make responsible decisions about managing their resources."

Sea Defences at Cromer

reveals that Cromer is close to getting £6.5m with which to shore up its groynes and sea walls, this coming about more than 13 years after the project was first proposed.

At the end of this month (January 2012) the Environment Agency will finally decide whether to include in its forward programme the multi-million pound scheme to revamp the groynes and add new concrete armour to the protective walls, some of which date back to Victorian times. If agreed, the work will start in November 2012 and take two years, with all work performed outside the April to September tourist season. North Norfolk District Council (NNDC) is forecasting a March 2012 commencement for a long-awaited £1.2m project to repair the Victorian pier in order to give it another 20 years of life.

North Norfolk District Council Coastal Engineer Brian Farrow said that the existing groynes were "hugely effective" as they had been built to last. He said the plan was to rebuild them "like for like". He claimed that the overall scheme would give the defences 50 years of life adding "We want to encase the sea walls in concrete. But we will have to be careful because some of the walls are listed". He further said that there was no prospect of extra sand being put on the beaches at Cromer to replenish them, commenting "Over the years all the beaches have dropped because the sand is working its way towards Great Yarmouth. The North Sea is a very high energy sea. The problem with putting sand on the beach is that it will be carried away again." He added that if the project was not passed, the council would continue to do minimal maintenance and keep plugging away with the scheme, which had been through three sets of consultants since 1998 because the sea defence funding rules were changed. But it is now finally on the approved list, only now needing to be given the final go-ahead by the agency — a decision that local engineers are confident will be made.

In the meanwhile, the pier repair scheme has been delayed recently months because NNDC had to put it out to tender twice. It is currently out to five contractors, with the expected response this January. If all goes well there should be a commencement of planning by the end of February with work starting in March 2012, to continue for 68 weeks, without the necessity to close the pier.

MARINET takes Dredging threat to Parliament

MARINET has enlisted the aid of Norman Lamb, MP for North Norfolk (and since 14th May 2010 Assistant Whip to the House of Commons) in drawing the attention of DEFRA and the government in general to the now rapidly advancing and escalating threats facing East Anglia due to the many combined aggravating government policies on dredging and its licensing, and the lack of any that could help prevent the degradation. Norman Lamb has taken aboard our concerns by addressing them to Environment Minister Richard Benyon of DEFRA, seeking his response on the many issues that have further escalated and arisen over the past year.

The main expressed concerns of MARINET that we hope will be raised with the Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Natural Environment and Fisheries, in priority order, are:

There exist other threats, but those given above should suffice to hopefully stimulate some consideration into government policies and a re-think of marine and coastal issues. Some of these are brought about by government inaction, and some by ongoing actions. The entire policy of the exploitation of our sea and seabed and the means by which it is licensed is in need of a vital revue, and has been ever since the government proposed a ban on marine aggregate dredging due to its proven coastal erosion impact over 100 years ago.

If members are able to lobby there own constituency MP's on this now serious issue, the resulting awareness and concern shown from numerous parliamentary constituencies may provoke debate and intervention, leading to a re-appraisal of the current system that permits and promotes the increasing hazard. We already have interest from several East Anglian MP's.

Canadian seal cull "unnecessary due to climate change"

Canada faces fresh calls to shut down its commercial seal hunt following new evidence that death rates among seal pups had dramatically increased due to thinning winter sea ice. The study, by scientists from Duke University and the International Fund for Animal Welfare, was the first to track declining sea ice cover in all four harp seal breeding grounds in the North Atlantic — with devastating effect.

A pup harp seal off the coast of the Magdalen Islands, Quebec, Canada. Photograph: David Boily/AFP/Getty Images

David Johnston, research scientist at the Duke University Marine Lab, said: "The kind of mortality we're seeing in eastern Canada is dramatic. Entire year classes may be disappearing from the population in low ice years. Essentially all of the pups die."

Satellite records of ice conditions since 1979 showed that ice cover had fallen by as much as 6% every decade. The research is published in the journal PLoS ONE. The loss of sea ice — and its threat to the future of seal populations — has been confirmed by Canadian government scientists, the International Fund for Animal Welfare said.

Up to 80% of the seal pups born in 2011 were thought to have died because of lack of ice, according to the department of fisheries and oceans. The study adds additional weight to the long campaign by animal protection groups against the seal hunt. IFAW said on Thursday that Canada should work towards ending the commercial seal hunt for good, compensating the hunters and retraining them for other jobs. "It is time for the Canadian government to face the reality that the commercial sealing is neither viable nor necessary," the organisation said.

Russia recently banned the import of harp seal pelts. The European Union allows only Inuit seal products.

Female harp seals depend on stable winter sea ice as a safe place to give birth and nurse their young, until the pups are grown enough to hunt on their own. The seals typically seek out the thickest, oldest patches of sea ice each February and March. The seals are able to adapt to short-term changes in ice conditions, Johnston said. But it was unclear the animals would be able to make a long-term move to new breeding grounds with more stable ice, such as those off east Greenland.

Thousands of seals still return each year to their traditional breeding grounds in the Gulf of St Lawrence or off Newfoundland — despite the declining ice.

"There's only so much ice out there, and declines in the quantity and quality of it across the region, coupled with the earlier arrival of spring ice breakup, is literally leaving these populations on thin ice," Johnston said. "It may take years of good ice and steady population gains to make up for the heavy losses sustained during the recent string of bad ice years in eastern Canada."

Spain faces crunch-time over CFP Reform

The incoming Spanish government is coming under intense diplomatic pressure to fall in line with EU proposals to ban wasteful fishing practices, after a leaked document showed that the previous administration was planning to derail the plans. The government must choose between supporting its new allies in the EU, on which Spain's economic future depends, or bowing to its powerful fishing industry.

Spain's former prime minister Rodriguez Zapatero

Spain's former government, led by Rodriguez Zapatero (above), lobbied for the continuation of discards. Photograph: Ezequiel Scagnetti/Reuters

As Europe's biggest fishing industry, Spain could hold the key to the success or failure of the reforms, which would prevent fishermen discarding edible fish at sea. But according to a secret government document seen by the Guardian, Spain's previous administration was plotting a last-ditch attempt to bring down the reforms, and allow Spanish fishermen to continue throwing away edible fish as they have been doing so for decades.

The document is dated 2nd November, just weeks before the general election of 20th November, showing that lobbying for a continuation of discards was a key policy for the outgoing socialist government even in its dying days.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, the chef and Guardian food writer who has led the high-profile Fish Fight campaign against discards, said: "Throwing away thousands of tonnes of perfectly edible fish is completely unacceptable — and I'm sure that if the Spanish public knew about the scale of the problem in their fishing fleet, they too would demand an end to discards, and support a radical overhaul of the EU's common fisheries policy." He said that early in 2012, the campaign, which Europe's fisheries chief Maria Damanaki has credited as an important factor in generating public support for her anti-discards policy, would be extended to the rest of Europe.

Fearnley-Whittingstall said: "We're planning to launch our Fish Fight campaign in Spain, as well as in France, Germany and Poland. We need to get the whole of Europe as outraged about this senseless waste of fish as we are here in Britain. Then perhaps the Spanish government will spend more time working towards developing a sustainable and effective solution to the discards problem, rather than trying to build alliances to derail the proposed reforms."

If the new government reverses the stance of its predecessor, it would mark a major victory in the fight to end discards, which result in European fishermen throwing away — dead — as much as two-thirds of their catches of live, edible fish.

Discards are a perverse result of the current EU fishing policy: whenever fishermen accidentally land fish for which they have no quota, or when they exceed their quota, they must throw part of the catch away. Nearly three-quarters of the EU's fish stocks are now estimated to be overexploited. As Europe's biggest fishing nation, Spain is in pole position to obstruct or water down the reforms, which are aimed at protecting dwindling fish stocks and which the European Commission wants to finalise in 2012.

David Ritter, oceans campaigner at Greenpeace, said the current quota system was "indefensible", and the leaked Spanish policy document showed the sort of attitudes that must be overcome if radical reform of the Common Fisheries Policy was to succeed. He said: "[This is] a broken system that is destroying Europe's marine environment and the fishing industry that depends on it." He called on David Cameron to join in the fight against discards. "Cameron needs to give his full support to Richard Benyon [UK fisheries minister] in Europe. Our national interest isn't contained by the M25 — it extends to our coastal communities, and they're under severe threat [if the Spanish government opposes an end to discards]," he said.

There is all to play for in the next few days as the incoming Spanish ministerial teams work out their detailed policy responses. While the country's dire economic state will take precedence, fishing is a major economic and social issue for Spain, home to Europe's biggest fishing fleet in terms of volume, taking up more than a quarter of the EU's total fishing capacity and employing tens of thousands of people directly, and many more indirectly. The new ministers will be under huge pressure from the powerful Spanish fishing lobby to oppose the reforms. Although many fishermen support ending discards, because they hate the waste of throwing back edible fish to die, some want to continue the practice because it allows them to maximise their profits, by throwing away lower value fish and leaving room in their quota for higher-priced fish.

The extent of fish industry lobbying is shown by the secret document seen by the Guardian. It said that Spain wanted to retain discards as a way of allowing its fishermen to land only the most valuable fish, killing hundreds of thousands of healthy and edible fish in the process. The document said eliminating discards was "not realistic" and instead opted for a reduction in discards "with a gradual approach" that should be varied according to each region — meaning get-out clauses for large sections of the Spanish fleet.

The document said: "The terms and deadlines [on discards] are not realistic, particularly for specific sections of the Spanish fleet. Spain requests that this discards policy be set out in terms of reduction, with a gradual approach, rigorously planned and over a period no shorter than ten years. Furthermore, this will have to be implemented regionally, taking into account the different causes for discards in different fisheries."

The European Commission wants to change fishing quotas in order to reach a scientifically set "maximum sustainable yield" for all fisheries by 2015. But the previous Spanish government wanted to move this deadline to 2020.

From the document, it is clear that the previous administration in Madrid planned to cite the country's economic woes as an argument for watering down the reforms. But the European Commission has repeatedly said that allowing the exploitation of Europe's seas to continue at the current rate would store up economic problems for the near future, as stocks would decline further and fishermen find their livelihoods in peril as a result.

Maria Damanaki, the EU fisheries commissioner, has repeatedly said that urgent action must be taken for stocks to be preserved. On formally presenting her reform proposals this summer, she said: "Action is needed now to get all our fish stocks back into a healthy state to preserve them for present and future generations. Only under this precondition can fishermen continue to fish and earn a decent living out of their activities." She added: "It is not too late for the situation to be reversed, but we have now reached a crisis point. Overfishing must cease or there will be no more fish on the plate."

The European Commission has proposed compensation for fishermen, and ways to use the catch more efficiently, for instance by encouraging consumers to move away from the over-consumption of a few species, such as cod and haddock, to a wider range of fish that are currently undervalued. Damanaki has also proposed novel alternatives, such as trial projects for fishermen to sweep up plastic detritus from the seas instead of fishing, and to use their boats for tourism.

One Bluefin tuna fish sells for nearly £500,000

A Japanese restaurateur has parted with almost half a million pounds for a single bluefin tuna at the first auction of the year at Tokyo's Tsukiji market. Kiyoshi Kimura, who runs a chain of sushi restaurants, paid 56.5m yen (£473,000) for the 269-kg fish, which carries enough flesh for an estimated 10,000 pieces of sushi.

Kiyoshi Kimura, left, cuts the bluefin tuna outside his Sushi Zanmai restaurant in Tokyo. Photograph: Shizuo Kambayashi/AP

The sum is almost twice the 32.49m yen paid at last year's opening auction, a largely symbolic affair and not — diners will be relieved to hear — an accurate reflection of wholesale fish prices.

Japan has come under pressure to decrease its catch of Pacific and Atlantic bluefin, whose stocks have reached dangerously low levels, according to campaigners.

Kimura, however, said he has made his record-breaking bid in an attempt to "liven up Japan" as it attempts to recover from last year's tsunami. "Japan has been through a lot the last year due to the disaster," he said. "It needs to stay strong. That's what I tried to do and I ended up buying the most expensive one." The businessman, who runs the Sushi-Zanmai chain of 46 restaurants, also claimed he was acting on behalf of home-grown sushi lovers, who for the past three years have seen the first big fish of the season snapped up by overseas bidders.

Last year, the Hong Kong restaurateur Ricky Cheng joined forces with an upmarket sushi restaurant in Tokyo to produce the winning bid. But this year Kimura said his restaurants would slice up and serve the entire fish — caught in Oma off the northernmost tip of the main island of Honshu — in Japan, rather than let it go overseas.

Although the restaurant needs to sell each piece of sushi for more than 6,000 yen to break even, Kimura is already selling prized slices of fatty otoro for a far more affordable 418 yen each, with the cheaper akami cuts going for about 130 yen apiece. "It's unbelievable, Kosuke Shimogawara, a diner, told Associated Press. "President Kimura is so generous. All I can say is thank you."

Japan consumes about 80% of Pacific and Atlantic bluefin tuna, and has been accused of stifling international attempts to dramatically reduce fishing quotas or ban the trade altogether.

Pale octopus, hairy-chested yeti crab and other new species found in Southern Ocean

A world of previously unseen creatures has been found thriving next to boiling vents of water, several miles under the surface of the Southern Ocean near Antarctica. Hundreds of hairy-chested yeti crabs, a mysterious-looking pale octopus and colonies of limpets, snails and barnacles were found by British scientists at a hydrothermal vent located in the ocean's East Scotia Ridge.

A pale octopus found in the Southern Ocean, near Antarctica. Photograph: Oxford University/PA

Prof Alex Rogers of Oxford University used a remotely operated vehicle called Isis to scout the sea bed around the ridge, which spans about 2.4km and features springs of black, smoky water that can reach temperatures of almost 400C (752F). The hydrothermal vents are powered by underwater volcanoes, and the scalding temperatures and rich mineral content of the water gives rise to vast rocky chimneys that support a wide variety of life forms.

"The visually dominant species are the yeti crabs, which occur in fantastically high densities, up to 600 per square metre around the southern ridge," said Rogers, who led the expedition aboard the RSS James Cook in January 2010. "Also high densities of stalked barnacles, a large snail from a group called the peltospiroids, and we've also got small, green limpets which occur all over the vents."

The first-known yeti crab, Kiwa hirsuta, was described living near a hydrothermal vent in the south pacific in 2005 and, since then, several species have been discovered in different parts of the undersea world. Around other hydrothermal vents, however, these creatures tend occur in lower numbers; and the new species found in the ESR are not only more numerous but also visually distinct.

"Hirsuta has long hairs on its limbs and its claws, whereas our yeti crabs have extremely hairy chests. One of the nicknames of the crabs which developed during the cruise was the Hasselhoff crabs because they had these dense mats of [hair] on their undersides, the equivalents of their chests."

Another striking creature spotted by the scientists was a pale octopus, which was photographed by the team. Rogers suspected it might be a new species related to the Vulcanoctopus hydrothermalis seen at other underwater vents around the world.

In total, the expedition brought back more than 12,000 samples of rocks, bacteria and animals. Rogers said: "One of the staggering things we did find is that these vents are completely different to those seen anywhere else — the animals existing at these vents are almost all new to science," he said. The findings have been published in the journal PLoS Biology.

"What we didn't find is almost as surprising as what we did," said Rogers. "Many animals such as tubeworms, vent mussels, vent crabs, and vent shrimps, which are found in hydrothermal vents in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans, simply weren't there."

Last week, scientists at the University of Southampton announced the discovery of new creatures in the so-called "Dragon Vent" in the south-west Indian Ocean. Dr Jon Copley, a marine biologist at the University of Southampton who led the exploration of the Dragon Vent and is also an author on the latest PLoS Biology research paper, said that exploration of the world's deep-sea vents was a race against time.

"The exploitation of the deep ocean is overtaking its exploration. We're fishing in deeper and deeper waters, oil and gas is moving into deeper waters and now there's mining starting to take place in deep waters. We need to understand how species disperse and evolve in the deep oceans if we're going to make responsible decisions about managing their resources."

Rogers added that the vents revealed much about how deep water communities have evolved, and how they are distributed across the world's oceans. "In the space of a single eight-week cruise, we've changed our level of understanding of these systems completely. We've changed our ideas about how vent systems are distributed and the factors that may influence that distribution. What that tells us is that our level of knowledge of the deep sea in general is extremely poor indeed."

He added that hydrothermal vents had already changed the way scientists thought about how life exists on earth. "They told scientists that life could exist in the absence of sunlight — you could have food webs based on mechanical energy. They were also informative about the extreme conditions under which life could exist, they told us about where else in the universe life may occur. Hydrothermal vent biology has stimulated a whole new science of astrobiology."

€3 billion plan to protect Belgium's coast against North Sea sea-surge

Ostend residents no longer see the poetic side of the town's broad sandy beach, immortalised by the French singer Léo Ferré. These days the North Sea is increasingly a source of anxiety and Ostend a multicoloured building site, throbbing with bulldozers, diggers and dredgers.

Regional authorities say about a third of Ostend's heavily populated coastline is inadequately protected against flooding. Photograph: Tanguy Jockmans/Rex Features

The Vlaams Gewest (Flemish) region has launched a coastal safety master plan, and at several points along the 67km coast work has already started to reshape beaches and dunes, reinforce breakwaters and raise protective walls.

Erosion, heavy rainfall, storms and rising sea levels due to climate change are fuelling fears for the medium-term survival of this part of prosperous Flanders. The shape of the Belgian coastline, a segment of the concave eastern shore of the North Sea running up from France towards the Frisian Islands, makes it even more fragile.

Not only is Vlaams Gewest a popular location for holidays and leisure activities, it is also densely populated. An industrial area, it has two ports, Ostend and Zeebrugge, open to shipping and pleasure boats, and two others, Nieuport and Blankenberge, just for leisure activities. It has four nature reserves as well, the most famous being Zwin, close to Knokke, now the most upmarket resort on what has been officially renamed the Vlaams Kust (Flemish coast), in place of the Côte Belge.

According to the regional authorities, about a third of the coastline is inadequately protected against flooding or a storm equivalent to the 1953 disaster, the most destructive to have occurred in the 20th century. So what would happen if nothing is done? "Potentially the loss of 250 lives and damage in the region of €2.1bn [$2.7bn]," says Nathalie Balcaen, a coastal development engineer.

The water would quickly flood a strip of polder (wetlands) about 20km wide, lying just inland, and could spread as far as Bruges. The motorway down to Ostend and Dunkirk would also be engulfed.

At the present rate of greenhouse gas emissions, climate change is forecast to cause a 30cm rise in the level of the North Sea by 2050, adding another 30cm by the end of the century. This is a direct threat for about 16 million residents of the various countries along its coast. In Flanders, experts are studying the risks entailed by a severe storm and the likelihood of 5m waves punching holes in the dykes.

Philippe Konings, a specialist in geomorphology at Ghent University, says: "a storm on this scale will happen some day". As things stand it would destroy part of the coastline. The resorts at Blankenberge and Wenduine are under immediate threat, and port facilities would be particularly badly affected. The top priority is to protect the weakest links by 2020, by raising various beaches, protecting the entrances to ports and building stone walls designed to break the force of the waves.

It has become "a sort of routine", jokes Denis Seurynck, of the Deme dredging firm, a world leader in this business, with a workforce of 4,000. Its fleet is at work all over the world, often in waters far more hostile than the Belgian coast, where the only real difficulty is steering ships round the countless sandbanks. The dredgers suck up sand from the seabed and deposit it on adjoining beaches.

The cost of the work currently under way is estimated at a modest €300m ($390m), and a group of Flemish industrialists are proposing far more radical solutions. Their plan would cost an estimated €3bn, and would include a sustainable initiative to reduce the pressure on this heavily exploited area. The scheme includes wind farms, artificial islands and even an airport for freight. Policy makers have so far not responded.

Sea Shepherd uses airborne "drones" in its Southern Ocean whaling campaign

Environmental activists in the rough Antarctic seas have launched a new tool in the fight to stop a Japanese operation to kill hundreds of whales — remote-controlled drones.

Every morning for the past week, a battery-powered drone with a range of 300km (190 miles) has been launched from the MV Steve Irwin, which is attempting to disrupt the annual Japanese whale hunts in the waters off Antarctica. "We first found the Japanese fleet when they were 28 nautical miles away," said Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, an international marine wildlife protection group based in the United States.

Subsequent attempts by Japanese whaling ships to block the anti-whaling flotilla and allow the whale factory ship Nisshin Maru to escape were foiled by the activists, who repeatedly launched the drone, which uses GPS co-ordinates and provides both video and still images to track the whaling ships.

"Our helicopter pilot, Chris Aultman, has been lobbying for this technology for the past two years and now that we have this 'eye in the sky' it makes it much harder for the whaling fleet to escape," said Watson in a telephone interview from the Steve Irwin. "The other day they switched back from east to west and we detected this with the drone."

Watson has 88 crew on three ships, two of which are equipped with drones. They act as spotters, finding the whalers in the vast expanse of ocean and allowing Watson's ships to home in on them. Watson has embarked on his annual expedition to stop the slaughter of thousands of whales — the Japanese consider this to be scientific research while critics call it cruel and archaic. "Last year they had a quota of over 1,000 whales and only caught 16%. We saved at least 800 whales," said Watson, who has been known to ram the Japanese boats as part of his anything-goes tactics.

The advent of new technologies such as drones may finally put an end to the Japanese hunt, said Watson, who is also bringing publicity to the cause in Whale Wars, the Discovery channel documentary series that tracks the hunts: "Our goal is to bankrupt them and destroy them economically. Now that we can track them, it is getting easier."

Once exclusive to Israeli spy forces and the US air force, drones and other types of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are being sent on civilian missions such as crop inspections or marine mammal surveys. In April, drones hovered inside highly radioactive areas at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and recorded data from areas too dangerous for humans to enter.

Federal bodies in the US, including the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), are scrambling to monitor the burgeoning industry. According to the Los Angeles Times, the FAA will issue proposals this month to clarify rules for the use of UAVs in civilian and commercial roles. While drones used to cost hundreds of thousands of pounds, some are now available for less than £500. The unit used by Sea Shepherd is a highly durable model known as the Osprey, which can run for hundreds of hours .

It was given to Sea Shepherd by Bayshore Recycling, a New Jersey-based solid waste recycling company committed to environmental protection. In addition to paying for the drone at an estimated cost of £10,000, Bayshore also paid for pilot training to run the remote control equipment. "Everyone here at Bayshore is thrilled with the Sea Shepherd's news of not only saving the lives of many whales, but knowing our drone will continue to track the Japanese whaling fleet in this chase," said Elena Bagarozza, marketing co-ordinator at Bayshore.

Watson expects drones will be used to patrol environmentally sensitive areas ranging from the Galapagos Islands to other famed wildlife areas, including South Africa's Kruger National Park. "There is huge potential and great value in this technology — for our expedition it is wonderful," said Eleanor Lister, 20, a Sea Shepherd crew member from Jersey, who spoke by satellite phone from aboard the Steve Irwin from a location that, she said, "was about 1,000 miles south-west of Australia". She described the daily routine that begins when the ship's first mate holds aloft the Osprey drone, then tosses it into the headwinds. After tracking the Japanese whalers, the drone ends its mission as it homes in on the Steve Irwin and is flown into a thick net, where crew members inspect it for damage and download the video and photographs from the latest mission.

Despite severe weather in the Antarctic, the drone has flown dozens of flights and had no problems so far with ice build-up on the wings or trouble negotiating the gusty winds. "The Osprey is comfortable in the wind and can handle 40 knots," said Jimmy Prouty, systems engineer at Hangar 18, the Kansas-based company that manufactures it. "This unit is waterproofed and has multiple security backups so that if it has problems or low battery it automatically returns to base."

Exceptional marine algal event covers seafront near Blackpool in foam

A thick white blanket settled gently on the seaside town of Cleveleys, near Blackpool, but this was no seasonal dusting of snow from above.

There's no place like foam… Cleveleys, near Blackpool gets in a lather with foam blown in from the ocean. Photograph: MEN Syndication

The Environment Agency dispatched officers to Princess Promenade to gather evidence as gobs of foam blew in from the sea and smothered streets, cars and houses. The foam is whipped up by strong winds once or twice a year along the town's seafront and vanishes soon after, a spokeswoman for the agency told the Guardian.

Lab tests on samples collected in earlier years have found no signs of pollution. Decomposing algal matter is the prime suspect for the mysterious lather.

"It appears to be naturally occurring. When the tides and winds combine to churn dead algal matter up from the bottom of the sea, it produces this foam, which is quite dramatic," the spokeswoman said. Officers visited Cleveleys on Wednesday and again on Thursday to collect more specimens to analyse. The results of the tests are expected to confirm the foam is natural and not caused by detergent in seawater or other pollution.

By studying the foam, the agency hopes to learn how and why it forms and so predict when the froth will return. "If we can understand what conditions cause it, that will help us predict it and help local authorities involved in the clean-up operations," the spokeswoman said.

East Anglian Film Archive film of the last major North Sea surges

Readers may wish to view a thirteen minute film of the disastrous 1953 East Anglian Sea Flood just made available by the East Anglian Film Archive. Just as now, the flood defences were allowed decay and be lost, resulting in a huge inundation from a major North Sea Surge. For details of the mechanism of North Sea Surges please visit 'Sea Flooding 1' at the Norfolk RAYNET Website.

It will bring back memories of fifty-nine years ago to many mature people, and hopefully act as a stark warning to those who are now aiding and abetting the loss of our sea defences.

Another worth seeing from the same East Anglian Film Archives is The Horsey Mail which is a Post Office film showing how the mail got through in the previous major 1938 sea flood.

Now New Zealand's 'Worst Maritime Disaster'

Yet another major oil polluting incident was reported by BBC News Asia on 8th January 2012 when the Greek owned cargo ship 'Rena' grounded on the Astrolabe Reef off Tauranga, North Island New Zealand on 5th October 2011, then broke up, spilling its cargo including a significant volume of oil to sea.

Maritime New Zealand report that they were unsure as to the precise loss, but container recovery company Braemar Howells said it believed 200-300 containers of the some 800 which had remained on the ship went overboard when the ship split, and whilst salvage crews have removed more than 1,100 tons of oil from the stricken vessel, some 385 tonnes remain onboard. Already hundreds of tonnes of tonnes of fuel have spilled into the sea, killing more than 20,000 seabirds in the area.

It seems that most of the worlds problems, be they economic, military, political, social, ethical or environmental, emanate either directly or indirectly from oil these days.

MARINET addresses e-petition to UK Fisheries Minister : CFP reform must restore "food security" and historic levels of fish stocks

The message from MARINET and members of the public supporting its new e-petition on Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) reform is that current fishing practices in Europe have pushed us to the edge. If they continue unchecked:

The rules governing European fishing — known as the Common Fisheries Policy — are now being rewritten. And most importantly, the UK Government is directly involved in this rewriting and reform process.

To comply with EU law, the rewritten rules have to ensure that all commercial fish stocks are restored to a sound and healthy condition by 2020. However at the moment, the European Union's proposals only aim to keep fish stocks at their current, much depleted levels.

The UK Government is a key player in the negotiations which are currently hanging in the balance. This is why MARINET has drawn up an e-petition which tells the UK Fisheries Minister, Richard Benyon, to do all he can to make sure:

"I understand that you are involved in negotiations around reforming the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP).
"I'm sure you are aware that nearly 90% of all commercial fish stocks are over-fished in European seas. And of the very real threat of extinction to most common commercial fish species — like cod, tuna, mackerel and herring — and the ecosystem which supports them.
"Indeed, cod is now extinct in the North West Atlantic because of similar practices.
"The EU's Marine Strategy Framework Directive requires that by 2020 'populations of all commercially exploited fish and shellfish are within safe biological limits, exhibiting a population age and size distribution that is indicative of a healthy stock' (Ref. MSFD, Annex I).
"Yet, in discussions on CFP reform, the EU is calling for maximum sustainable yields (MSYs) to be based on current depleted levels of stocks, rather than historically referenced levels (i.e. prior to over-fishing).
"That risks contravening EU law by making it impossible for fish stocks to return to healthy levels. It would also hamper both the re-building of the fishing industry, and our marine food security.
"Please can you reassure me that you'll be pushing for the new CFP to follow EU law and for any MSYs to be based on historically referenced levels of fish stocks."

Defra is looking for contractors to establish the scientific basis for "recommended MCZs"

Defra needs to collect new evidence from a number of pre-defined recommended Marine Conservation Zones (rMCZs) during the 2011/12 financial year (FY2011/12).

Cefas as an executive agency of Defra, has been appointed by Defra to act as R&D Programme Managers for this work. Cefas' main responsibilities are to co-ordinate the collection of scientifically robust and cost-effective R&D evidence from within a selection of rMCZs during the remainder of FY2011/12, and to manage the delivery of the resulting survey / data outputs. The work will be undertaken via marine R&D surveys and the programme will be conducted in close consultation with Defra, Natural England, JNCC and the Environment Agency.

In order to successfully deliver survey requirements for FY2011/12, Cefas is inviting expressions of interest (EOI) from contractors who can provide vessels and/or technical staff and/or equipment capable of undertaking R&D multibeam and biological validation surveys during February and March 2012.

Where possible, Cefas' preference is that any multibeam data that is collected under this programme of work will meet IHO Order 1A specifications. Biological validation will entail the use of grabs and/or corers suitable for sampling in particular substrates, and also the deployment of drop-down and towed video/stills techniques using recognised guidance. R&D surveys may be conducted from the intertidal zone through inshore estuarine and coastal waters, to offshore areas in all geographic regions of English waters. Any intertidal work will be limited to field sampling techniques appropriate for habitat surveys on both soft and hard substrates, rather than remote methodologies (e.g. LIDAR, aerial photography).

Cefas is aware that there may also be a number of useful datasets that have already been collected from within rMCZs. As part of this EOI exercise, Cefas is inviting contractors to identify relevant datasets they may own that they may wish to make available as part of any future competitive tendering exercise.

It is expected that a competitive tender exercise will be conducted during January 2012 and following a short tender deadline contractors appointed to commence work in February 2012. All survey work should be completed by 31st March 2012.

MARINET observes: We believe it is most important that Marine Conservation Zones (MCZs) are designated on a sound scientific basis, indeed science forms the foundation of properly designed and managed conservation, and therefore Marinet welcomes this step by Defra.

However, we do have to point out that this process is back to front — the scientific basis for the identification and validation of sites should have led the MCZ identification process, and not now be applied after the MCZs have been nominated by the regional Stakeholder Groups for consideration by the Minister.

This back to front process highlights a serious weakness in the UK's proposed network of Marine Conservation Zones.

These sites were meant to be designated on the basis of those places which are of most importance in scientific (conservation) terms; and yet, the sites which we now actually have are what has been left over after economic interests have ruled out substantial areas of the sea for MCZ designation because they conflict with their interests.

Moreover, these sites were meant to be "ecologically coherent" — that is to say, the sites of greatest importance in terms of scientific (conservation) need were meant to be linked and knitted together as a network which would serve a wider ecosystem function which viewed the MCZ exercise as protecting the ecosystem as a whole in our seas.

However because what we have is set of second choice sites MCZs, whose scientific basis is, in all too many cases, vague (hence the Defra programme) it is clear that their function in terms of "ecological coherence" is uncertain, and second-rate at best.

MARINET has continually argued throughout the MCZ identification process that the process should be scientifically-led. This is what the Minister assured Parliament would be the case at the time of the Marine and Coastal Access Act's enactment in 2009. However the identification of MCZs has actually been led by economic interests, and only now is the science being seriously applied.

MARINET has tried hard to secure the primacy and integrity of the scientific procedure in the MCZ identification process, asserting the vital importance of this principle to the current Minister and Defra officials, the statutory nature conservation agencies (Natural England and JNCC) and to other marine NGOs.

However whilst it might not be true to say that the call to uphold this principle has fallen on deaf ears, it is certainly evident that those who have been implementing the MCZ identification process have not been in a consistent position that has given primacy to the science. The present situation is the clear evidence that proves this statement.

It is to be hoped that the scientific process now about to be implemented will go some way, indeed it is to be hoped some large way, to redeeming the situation. Nevertheless one cannot help feeling that marine conservation for the UK's seas has been "short changed" in terms of its integrity and currency.

Our seas are under enormous pressure from mineral exploitation and over-fishing, and the marine ecosystem as a whole is in a poor condition and is a pale shadow of its former self. The Marine Conservation Zone process was meant to go a substantial way towards pulling our seas back from this state of perilous decline, but the culture of exploitation for economic gain over the protection of the integrity of the marine environment still remains dominant, and has managed to keep marine conservation firmly confined to the back seat.

We still have a great deal to learn and understand — our economic wealth depends on a sound environment. A clean, healthy and biologically productive environment is the source of our own health and wealth, and a degraded environment can only lead to our decline into poverty.

Therefore in terms of sustainable definitions of society and economic activity, it is absolutely essential that the health of the environment is given primacy because our own wealth and health stems from, and originates from, and is dependent upon the sound health of the environment.

This is why conservation is so important and central to our current situation and economic ethic. And, this is why the decline in our seas, and the disappointing delivery of the conservation process that we have waited so long for in order to protect our seas is such a grave matter. We do indeed play with peril. The meaning of conservation and the lesson it teaches remains unlearnt or, at best, misunderstood and misapplied. We cannot go on in this manner forever. At some point, we have to change. Or events will do that very harshly for us.

Government backs loss of vital Wildlife protection

In his Autumn statement Chancellor George Osborne clearly showed his intention of defying the European Habitats Directive when he announced (quote) "That the gold-plating of EU rules on things like habitats" was holding back British industry. This was immediately followed by DEFRA deferentially announcing a review of how the EU Habitats and Birds directives are being applied in England, with (quote) "a view to reducing the burdens on businesses". Coming as this does from a regime whose pre-election pledge was to be 'the greenest government ever' shows contempt for any promises and undertakings made prior to its election, although Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman still claims that the government is 'determined to maintain the integrity of the habitats and birds directives while freeing British firms from excessive bureaucracy' — hardly a compatible objective!

The proposals provoked outrage among conservationists, environmental groups and wildlife trusts charities, who fear the government's relentless drive for financial growth at the expense of our natural heritage could cause lasting damage to both the environment and the multi-million pound tourism industry which depends on it. Norfolk Wildlife Trust chief executive Brendan Joyce said: "We are not standing in the way of progress. We should have modern networks and housing and we do need economic security, but to be prepared to trash the wildlife jewels in the crown for the sake of it seems to me to be crazy."

But, rather as could be expected, the review was warmly welcomed by business and landowner representatives, who could profit well from the exploitation likely to result, such as the conversion of greenfield and wildlife areas to building sites and the industrial use of previously safeguarded areas. It is probable that the current legal protection of these could be taken away and self-regulation provided, so allowing developers a free hand to convert to their own wishes.

Compiled by Pat Gowen of MARINET from numerous sources, including BBC TV's Parliament programme, interviews and briefings given by Norfolk Wildlife Trusts Chief Executive Brendan Joyce and RSPB's regional director for the East of England Paul Forecast, and from ARCHANT reporter Chris Hill's "Warning over Norfolk's wildlife habitats' published in the Eastern Daily Press of Sunday, 11th December, 2011.

Isle of Wight offshore oil drilling licence awarded

Northern Petroleum Plc announced 5th January 2012 that they have been awarded the rights to carry out oil drilling operations in two areas off the shores of the Isle of Wight.

Initially exploration will be carried out there, "to evaluate the oil and gas potential of the mapped well-defined prospect that extends from the Isle of Wight into the English Channel," say the company. They add, "There is no firm drilling commitment attached to the licence award."

The area extends from the shoreline of the Island on the South West, along the line of the Military Road. Its outer boundaries form the other two sides of a large triangle. Part of it attaches to the company's onshore licence (PEDL 240) area on the Island, which they gained in May 2008.

Appearing sensitive to concerns about carrying out works in an AONB, Derek Musgrove, Managing Director of Northern said, "Northern recognises that the prospect is in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) and a Heritage Coast. At Northern we well understand the attendant challenges that are posed in conducting field operations in an environmentally safe and responsible manner. To date, Northern has an exemplary track record for its drilling operations, the most recent of which was Markwells Wood-1, completed in January 2011, which is currently undergoing flow testing operations in West Sussex."

A new company, NP Solent Limited, is being formed to carry out the business. This will be the majority licensee, alongside four other companies.

EU Commissioner calls for natural resources, like fish, to be used more responsibly

The overuse and waste of valuable natural resources is threatening to produce a fresh economic crisis, the European Union's environment chief has warned.

The EU environment commissioner Janez Potocnik says resources like water, fish and precious metals need to be used more responsibly. Photograph: Georges Gobet/AFP/Getty Images

Janez Potocnik, the EU commissioner for the environment, linked the current economic crisis gripping the eurozone with potential future crises driven by price spikes in key resources, including energy and raw materials.

"It's very difficult to imagine [lifting Europe out of recession] without growth, and very difficult to imagine growth without competitiveness, and very difficult to be competitive without resource efficiency." Unless consumers and businesses take action to use resources more efficiently — from energy and water to food and waste, and raw materials such as precious metals — then their increasing scarcity, rising prices and today's wasteful methods of using them will drive up costs yet further and reduce Europe's standard of living, Potocnik warned. He said: "We have simply no choice. We have to use what we have more efficiently, or we will fail to compete. Resource efficiency is a real competitiveness issue for European companies."

Some European regulations will have to be altered in order to ensure the efficient use of energy, water and raw materials, and to protect the natural environment.

Potocnik gave notice that his department was scouring through existing regulations and proposed new ones in order to ensure that none would encourage resources to be used profligately, and to safeguard the EU's natural resources for the future.

The stark warning highlighted the increasing scarcity and rising price of some key resources, including energy and water, but also food and raw materials from metals, ores and minerals. Although most of the west is still mired in economic woes, much of the developing world including rapidly emerging economies such as China and India are forging ahead financially, and as a consequence are consuming a far greater share of the world's resources. The current economic models used by businesses and governments have failed so far to take this rapid change into account, and one of the associated problems is that many business models are predicated on cheap resources and an inefficient use of raw materials and energy.

"This is an issue of competitiveness," Potocnik said. "China is understanding that this is a mega-trend. We can't ignore it." Resources are under increasing constraint, as developing countries lift more of their population out of poverty. "If our current living standards are to be maintained, and the aspirations of developing countries satisfied, then the global economy will need to be changed drastically," Potocnik said. "If we want things to stay the same, things will have to change." He added: "This will be an enormous pressure on resources, which we are already overusing."

Labour costs now make up a much smaller proportion of most manufacturers' overheads than the cost of raw materials and energy, according to Potocnik. A greater proportion of those resources is also coming from overseas, with the attendant potential problems around security of supply. "Europe is importing more than half its resource use in many areas," he said.

Concerns have grown in recent months over the supply of some key resources, such as rare earths. These are used in many modern products, from mobile phones to renewable energy equipment, but the supply is small and China controls many of the sources. China has about a third of global rare earth deposits in its territory, but it accounts for nearly all of the production because of its efforts in this key market. Recently, the Beijing government has made moves to reduce exports, in order to help its indigenous manufacturers, and this trend has worried western governments. But these supply constraints are not yet fully priced in to world markets, and while the economic crisis continues the issue is likely to remain overshadowed — which could lay up future problems, according to the European commission.

"There are real problems with security of supply and this is not yet on the radar screen," Potocnik said. Potocnik called for resource use to become a "mainstream" issue in economics. Recalling his own education as an economist, he noted: "I was taught that water was a free commodity, like air. We really do need to have the internalisation of these costs."

"SMP application breaches Human rights" says Hopton Chairman

Brian Hardisty, Hopton parish councillor and chairman of Hopton Coastal Action Group (HCAG) says that if Great Yarmouth Borough Council (GYBC) (in partnership with Waveney District Council) fails to protect a score of cliff-top homes and businesses from the sea then human rights will be breached by their discriminatory policy made under the auspices of the Shoreline Management Plan. This is to allow the coast to retreat through a policy of 'managed realignment' once the sea defences fail, *** so allowing fifteen properties to be lost to the sea by 2015 as well as five seafront properties including the major Bourne Leisure and the Potters Leisure resorts lost by 2055 (Although MARINET believes that this could come about much sooner).

Even when looked at in purely economic terms this policy appears rather surprising when it is known that Hopton brings in revenue of £10m to the local economy each year, plus 1,000 jobs from holiday resorts. Yet similar situations exist along many parts Great Yarmouth area coastline and much more in greater East Anglia.

The HAAC Chairman says that if he is able to raise the financial backing he would take the Great Yarmouth Borough Council to the European Court of Human Rights for breaching the Article 14 (discrimination) of the Human Rights Act 1988.

*** 'Allow the coast to retreat through a policy of 'managed realignment' once the sea defences fail' is Orwell-speak meaning 'do nothing to address the cause or to attempt to save the shoreline and vital infrastructure, but just to surrender everything to the eroding shoreline and encroaching sea'.

RSPB Concerns on MCZs

Mike Jones, Marine Conservation Officer of the RSPB, believes the MCZs will fail to create a coherent network of protected areas if there are no sites looking after seabirds in the North Sea, so has called for seabirds to be protected in plans to create a number of marine conservation zones (MCZ) along the Norfolk coast. He said "We were very shocked that seabirds were not going to be included. You cannot have an ecological coherent network if it doesn't protect all the wildlife… marine conservation zones are the foundation stone for a healthy marine environment. If we look after the environment this will protect the micro organisms at the bottom of the food chain upon which everything else feeds. The predators feeding higher in the chain will then thrive. What we now need is the protection of some important cetacean and seabird feeding areas not covered by current legislation".

As it stands some seabirds (and mammals, e.g. dolphins and seals) will not be safeguarded at sea under the projected MCZ policies, which fail to include Norfolk's little tern colonies. In the UK, the Little Tern is afforded some degree of protection through its inclusion on Schedule 1 (part1) of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981. In Europe, it is included in the Species of European Conservation Concern (SPEC) list, classified as SPEC 3. Over half of Britain's Little Tern population breed in coastal colonies in East Anglia, obtaining their food as small fish and invertebrates collected from feeding areas within 3 to 4km from the breeding site.

Peoples concern over seabird protection has led over 3,500 people in the East to sign up to the RSPB Safeguard our Sealife campaign to try to ensure that seabirds are better protected in the future. The alarm was raised by a recent study which revealed the UK had lost 9% of its breeding seabird population in the last decade — the equivalent to 600,000 birds.

You can read the whole story by Ben Woods entitled Call to protect Norfolk seabirds in conservation zone plans by visiting the Eastern Daily Press website.

EU halts cod fishing in Irish Sea and West of Scotland, and says only 8% of the 136 fish stocks in EU waters could still be at sustainable levels within next 10 years

Cod stocks in the Irish Sea and the west coast of Scotland have collapsed because of overfishing and politicians' refusal to fix low enough catch quotas, according to a leading fisheries scientist who advises the European commission on fish quotas.

Dr Paul Connolly's comments followed the European commission's decision on Wednesday to recommend for the first time that all fishing cod in the two sea areas is stopped. The commission has previously stopped short of pushing for such draconian measures in such a wide area of sea because of the political difficulty of placing a ban on fishing such a key species.

A fishing boat returns to the Scottish east coast

A fishing boat off the Scottish coast, which has seen dramatic declines in cod stocks. Photograph: David Cheskin/PA

Dr. Paul Connolly, who is the director of Fisheries Science Services at the Marine Institute in Galway, advises the commission on "total allowable catches" and in 2013 is due to take over as president of the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas (ICES), the oldest marine scientific body. He said: "Continuous over-fishing has led to a collapse in cod in both these areas. The signs have been there for years and scientists have repeatedly warned quotas must be cut but fisheries ministers have time and time again ignored us. We do not know now whether the stocks will recover."

The continuing crisis in the Common Fisheries Policy, where 88% of European stocks are overexploited and 30% in danger of collapse, has led the commission to label its own policy a failure. It has not achieved any of its objectives: to protect stocks, provide a sustainable food source and help fishing communities to be profitable.

The proposed bans were the most drastic measures the Commission has demanded and are designed to reduce the continued overfishing in many waters controlled by the EU. In all quotas for 53 stocks were reduced.

Maria Damanaki, the commissioner for fisheries, warned that if the EU did not reform the policy and reduce overfishing, only 8% of the 136 fish stocks in EU waters would be at sustainable levels by 2022.

According to ICES two of the biggest fishing nations France and Spain repeatedly failed to provide data on fish landings. This effectively prevented a realistic assessment of how many fish were actually caught and what was the state of the stock.

"The governments concerned say because there is not sufficient scientific evidence available that the stock is going down, then a higher quota should be fixed. Hiding the information is a political ploy to try and get higher quotas," said Connolly. Aware that this is a problem, the Commission has reduced its recommended quotas for some of the major fisheries by up to 25%, to try and force governments to supply scientists with the data.

The Commission's decision puts pressure on governments to accept reforms and bring an end to the system where fishing ministers compete to get the best deal for their home industries without considering long-term consequences. As a result, the average quota for catches is fixed 48% higher than scientists advise.

Mike Parks, from the Scottish White Fish Producers Association, based in north-west Scotland, said a "state of anarchy" still exists in parts of the fishing industry where everyone was out for what they could get from a diminishing stock.

Orkney is becoming Scotland's centre for marine renewable energy

The winds and stormy seas that dominate the 70 islands that make up the Orkneys has shaped the life of islanders as well as the island itself — most evident from the lack of trees or crops able to grow there. Today it's no different; the weather and the climate caused by its open exposure to the Atlantic and North Seas continues to provide inspiration, but this time it's for a new generation of pioneers using the land and sea to produce renewable electricity.

Despite being on the outer fringes of the British Isles, these islands are producing cutting edge wave and tidal technology, demonstrating innovation that's putting the UK on the map as a global leader, and regenerating island communities; bringing new jobs, new skills and creating a strong supply chain. If Scotland is the envy of Europe when it comes to renewable energy then Orkney is the envy of Scotland.

Green technologies for Orkney : World's Largest Tidal Power Turbine Is Unveiled

Atlantis's AK-1000 tidal energy turbine is loaded onto a barge to be shipped to a test site off Orkney. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

The Scottish National party recently announced the ambitious target of sourcing 100% of our electricity demand from renewables by 2020. Lessons from Orkney about community engagement, supply chain development and research and development will help us reach this target.

Orkney-based companies such as the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) are hugely celebrated for their work in the wave and tidal sector. It is the first centre of its kind to offer developers the opportunity to test full scale prototypes in the sea, and no stranger to world firsts. In 2004 Pelamis, a wave power device became the world's first to successfully generate electricity for the National Grid. A few weeks ago the world's largest single-rotor tidal turbine, built by Atlantis, became the first in Scotland to be grid-connected at the marine energy centre. It has also brought visitors and researchers from all over the globe and is attracting people to live, work, and study on the island. EMEC along with companies like Xodus Aurora and ScotRenewables are all employing graduates on Orkney.

These are opportunities which did not previously exist on an island that has traditionally relied on farming and fishing. Where students would have left for university believing they could not return to the Orkneys, there are now real opportunities for returning graduates. Fred. Olsen, the Norwegian-based cruise company that is also involved in renewable energy activities, has just announced four scholarships for Heriot Watt University campus in Stromness. The university is also home to the world's first MSc in marine renewables, with the first intake of students this year.

Anecdotal evidence from those involved with this new industry suggests that already a couple of hundred people are dependent on renewables for their livelihood. All of these benefits come from just a few installed megawatts (MW) of renewable technology. With plans for 1,600MW by 2020 there is genuine potential for many hundreds of jobs, with talk of commuting workers coming in by boat from other islands and Caithness on the Scottish mainland.

There are plenty of examples of how renewable energy is changing the working lives of Orcadians. Two local companies have purchased new work boats on the demand for diving and other services from companies like Aquamarine who are now looking for crew. Tugs dedicated to the Flotta oil terminal are also likely to be increasingly used on marine renewables in future.

The white van drivers on Orkney aren't just the construction workers or delivery guys we know so well on the roads of the mainland. On Orkney the white van man can also be a tidal turbine technician, hinting at what Scotland's workforce may look like in the near future. It's the promise of jobs for this and future generations, inward investment from international companies as well as improved infrastructure, (a former naval base at Lyness has received £3m to upgrade the port for future marine developments) that has helped forge support from local people.

The desire for renewables was made clear after a wind turbine in an industrial estate on the edge of Kirkwall provoked an online petition by opponents. This prompted a rival petition from supporters, which got more signatures than the naysayers, with the turbine now constructed and soon to be operational. Figures available in real time on the Orkney Renewable Energy Forum website show that output from commercial, community and agricultural wind turbines is often so high the island is now self-sufficient in electricity, relying less on imported fossil-fuel based power from the mainland.

Like many of Scotland's islands, tourism plays a key role in the local economy. With so many wave and tidal devices working in the waters, Orkney Council has had to train local tour guides on marine renewables to help deal with questions from tourists. EMEC is now looking at converting office space to help educate and inform the visitors that burst into their office anxious to hear more about these strange looking devices in the waters off the islands.

Like centuries of islanders before them, Orcadians have come to use their natural environment to support and sustain their way of life. If you want to know what Scotland could look like in 10 years then take the 90-minute ferry journey from Scrabster to Stromness and find out.

The Arctic's near-record 2011 sea ice low — big picture

A view from space of Arctic sea ice at a near record low this month. Scientists in Germany, who use a different methodology, said 2011 was a record low.

By early September, the area covered by sea ice in the Arctic Ocean was approaching a record low. On 9th September, sea ice covered 4.33 million square kilometres (1.67 million square miles), US National Snow and Ice Data Centre reported. The 2011 low is 2.38 million square kilometres (919,000 square miles) below the average minimum extent measured between 1979 and 2000. Late season melt or a shift in wind patterns could still decrease the sea ice extent before the winter freeze-up begins. Photographer: AMSR-E/Aqua/NASA

Fukushima : fishermen halt discharges of cooling water to sea

Tepco (Tokyo Electric Power), the operator of Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant, has said it is scrapping a plan to dump water it treated for radiation contamination into the sea. The climbdown was forced by fierce protests from fishing groups.

A Fukushima water purification building: the company had wanted to release water treated for radioactive contamination into the sea. Photograph: AP

Tokyo Electric Power had said it was considering discharging some treated water into the sea because it was running out of storage space. That caused an uproar among Japanese fishing co-operatives."Treated" means once-high radioactive content has been reduced considerably but not completely.

The Fukushima plant was struck by a devastating quake and tsunami in March and has released radiation into the atmosphere carried by winds, rain and snow ever since.

"The decision not to include the plan was made after talks on Thursday with the federation of fishing co-operatives and opposition from the government's fisheries agency," a Tepco spokeswoman said. The Tepco general manager, Junichi Matsumoto, told reporters on Friday the company would try to build more tanks and recycle more of the treated water for cooling purposes.

Tens of thousands of tonnes of water contaminated with radiation have accumulated at the plant, 150 miles north-east of Tokyo, after Tepco early in the crisis tried to cool reactors that went into nuclear meltdowns by pouring in water, much of it from the sea.

Tepco estimates the amount of treated water requiring storage is increasing by 200 to 500 tonnes every day. It says the plant is likely to reach its storage capacity of about 155,000 tonnes around March.

The utility released more than 10,000 tonnes of water tainted with low levels of radiation in April to free up space for water with much higher levels of radioactivity, drawing sharp criticism from neighbours including South Korea and China.

Global Tuna stocks have halved, and could be fully extinct within 50 years

Tuna stocks in the world's seas have more than halved in the past 50 years, with overfishing pushing many exotic varieties to dangerously low levels.

The rising popularity of sushi has been cited as one of the factors for declining numbers, with many tuna species now listed as either endangered or critically endangered. Over-fishing of the fish, especially of the rare bluefin, bigeye and yellowfin varieties — which are prized as delicacies — is now 'jeopardising their long-term sustainability'.

Researchers studied tuna and mackerel levels in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans between 1954 and 2006. Maria Juan-Jorda, from A Coruna University in Spain, said: "Populations have declined, on average, by 60 per cent over the past half century, but the decline in the total adult biomass is lower (52 per cent), driven by a few abundant populations. The steepest declines are exhibited by two distinct groups: the largest, longest lived, highest value temperate tunas and the smaller, short-lived mackerels, both with most of their populations being over-exploited. The remaining populations, mostly tropical tunas, have been fished down to approximately maximum sustainable yield levels, preventing further expansion of catches in these fisheries.'"

Around 12.5 per cent of the tunas and their relatives are now caught each year globally, according to the findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Wild tuna are captured and kept in floating cages where they are fed with fresh fish, and with farming unregulated the amount caught and exported is unknown.

Tuna provides a critical part of the diet for millions of poor people as well as being at the core of the world's luxury sushi markets. But many tuna species are now listed as either endangered or critically endangered.

Over the past few decades the world's appetite for tuna has spurred a surge in the number and capacity of tuna-fishing vessels. Industrial tuna fleets from Japan, the European Union (EU), Taiwan, Korea, the US and increasingly China and the Philippines, fishing far from their home ports, are squeezing the last remaining financial benefits out of the planet's tuna stocks.

The researchers said: "Over-capacity of these fisheries is jeopardising their long-term sustainability. To guarantee higher catches, stabilise profits, and reduce collateral impacts on marine ecosystems requires the rebuilding of over-exploited populations and stricter management measures to reduce overcapacity and regulate threatening trade."

Even tuna fisheries that were considered healthy just a few short years ago, such as those of the Western Pacific Ocean, have joined the global depletion trend.

Tuna are highly migratory. Over their life cycles they travel vast distances, crossing the high seas and darting in and out of the waters of many coastal areas on their routes to breed and feed.

The researchers said: "The annual catches of tuna and their relatives have risen continuously since the 1950s, reaching 9.5million tonnes in 2008.

'The global adult biomass of tunas and their relatives has been halved over the past half century but not without yielding considerable catches, income and food for the benefit of humanity."

Demand from Japan has seen the Mediterranean fishing fleet increase over the past decade. Many of these boats use illegal spotter planes to track the tuna. Previous research has shown the average size of mature tuna fish, which can weigh over half a ton, had more than halved since the 1990s. This has had a large impact on the population since bigger fish produced many more offspring.

Scottish fishermen win concessions and increased quotas for 2012 at CFP meeting in Brussels

A deal done after two days of frenzied negotiations in Brussels has secured the future of Scotland's fishing fleet — but further improvements could not be implemented because of legal red tape, Scotland's Fishing Minister Richard Lochhead told MSPs.

Mr Lochhead said while it was a tremendous success and testament to the intensive work by the Scottish and UK Government's that the Commissioner confirmed she would adopt the Scottish Government's interpretation of the now infamous 'Article 13' of the cod recovery plan, it was incredibly frustrating that on a separate days at sea issue, Scottish and UK officials looked to have secured a freeze on the cod recovery plan annual reductions right up until the eleventh hour, when the Commission admitted they had been unsuccessful in finding a legal way to deliver it. The Minister highlighted that the Article 13 result was crucially important on two fronts.

Firstly, had the Commission not accepted the interpretation, the cuts to days at sea would have been devastating for Scotland's fleet.

But secondly, in relation to the annual days at sea reductions imposed through the cod recovery plan, this clause is extremely important as it allows Scottish fishermen to top the number of days they can go to sea back up to previous levels, if they take measures to improve stock conservation by avoiding cod and reducing discards.

MSPs were also updated on quota changes. Highlighted in particular were significant increased quotas for west coast haddock (200 per cent), west coast nephrops (3 per cent), north sea haddock (15 per cent), north sea whiting (15 per cent) and north sea herring (94 per cent).

Mr Lochhead said: "Last week's fishing talks delivered increased and sustainable quotas in some of our key stocks as well as a dramatic turnaround on the Article 13 days at sea debacle. Both of these significant wins are really good news for the future of fishing in Scotland. There is no doubt the consequences for Scotland's fishing communities if the Commission had not accepted our interpretation of Article 13 would have been extremely dire. Boats would have been tied up, livelihood's would have been lost and thriving communities would have had the heart ripped out of them. For too long common sense has been replaced by the common fisheries policy (CFP) — next year's reforms can't come soon enough. It is hugely frustrating that we need to spend so much time and energy simply to ensure that such highly damaging and unjustified measures are not applied. Lawyers appear to be running the show to the detriment of conservation and the fishing industry. The Commission admitted the Cod Recovery Plan (CRP) isn't working but a call from many Member States for a pause in the annual automatic cuts in days at sea wasn't possible because they could not find a legal way to implement it.

"It is utterly ridiculous that our fishermen miss out on having the basic number of days they can go to sea in a year maintained simply because of a legal matter. Science and stock levels are the only credible reasons that should prevent this. However, it is important to recognise that the other key benefit to having won the Article 13 debate, is that we can negate the impact of that legal block by using Article 13 to 'buy back' days at sea and top up the number to previous levels through the Conservation Credits Scheme. This means that as long as our fishermen take adequate steps to avoid cod and increase conservation, they can continue to go to sea for as many days as previous years. This should not be unpalatable and is achievable. Our Scottish Conservation Credits Scheme is proof of what can be done, with various methods being used to avoid cod including some vessels also using more selective fishing gear to avoid catching undersized fish. Our catch quota scheme also shows how we can remove less fish from the sea yet land more to market.

"Reducing high discard rates is also very important and we must do more to bring our discard rates down. Scotland has seen the greatest reductions in North Sea cod discards achieved in the EU and while we still have more to do this shows the impact Scottish measures can have on stock conservation.

Scotland has always led the way in putting in place incentive based conservation measures which will protect our fish stocks. However, we cannot rest on our laurels — the buck does not just stop with the Commission when it comes to self-assessing and continuing to make improvements. Scotland has led the way on conservation over the past few years. Now is the time for us all to consider what more we can do. And this will require the continuing co-operation and commitment of our fishermen."

All Norwegian cod and haddock fishing certified sustainable by Marine Stewardship Council

Norway has a long tradition of managing its fisheries in harmony with nature, and is internationally regarded by many organisations as a world leader in sustainable fisheries management. The long term sustainable fishing practices and world-class management of Norwegian North East Arctic cod and haddock fisheries is also recognised by Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification as a sustainable and well-managed fishery. This latest MSC certification means that over three quarters of the catches from the entire Norwegian fishing fleet are MSC-certified.

Norway manages the largest sustainable cod stock in the world. For over several decades the Norwegian cod stock in Norway's cold, clear waters has been intensively monitored and pro-actively managed, utilising scientific advice from the country's best experts. The cod stock in the Barents Sea, where Norway captures about 93% of all its cod, is strong and the stock is growing. Following scientific advice through ICES, Norway has been able to increase its cod quota over the last few years. The catch quota for the North East Arctic Cod in the Barents Sea is 751,000 tonnes in 2012, of which 339,857 tonnes is the Norwegian quota. The catch quota for haddock is 318,000 MT, of which 153,235 is the Norwegian quota.

Karin Olsen of the Norwegian Seafood Export Council says: "We are very proud of Norway's sustainability record and the MSC-certification of the whole fisheries of Norwegian North East Arctic cod and haddock is a great way to ensure even more credibility in the market place for Norwegian suppliers, as well as ultimately making it easier for consumers to make a sustainable choice by selecting Norwegian cod and haddock.

"The fishing industry is the backbone of coastal Norway and is of vital importance to settlement and employment. The successful management of fish stocks are an important part of Norway's rolling commitment to a sustainable future, and we will continue to work hard to ensure that future generations will have the pleasure to enjoy Norwegian cod and haddock."

"Norway is a leading supplier of seafood globally, and it's our commitment to manage our resources sustainably" says Ingrid Dahl Skarstein, environmental adviser at NSEC. "The combination of environmental responsibility and economically sustainable fisheries shows that the Norwegian management model is successful. Today this is also recognised by the MSC."

Camiel Derichs, MSC Deputy Director Europe says: "This is a milestone for the MSC program, and a fantastic result for the collective Norwegian Seafood industry. Norwegian cod and haddock fisheries are among the most important white fish fisheries in the world, from a market perspective as well as from a historic perspective.

"The famous Lofoten winter fisheries for cod date back to pre-Viking times, and modern fisheries science and management started in that area over two hundred years ago, when Norwegian scientists searching to explain yearly variation in the catches started to do research on cod in Norwegian waters. From these humble beginnings, fisheries science and management as we know it today branched out."

Exceptional marine features highlighted in the North Devon Biosphere Reserve

Why are North Devon's rocky shores some of the best habitats in the Biosphere Reserve and amongst the richest in the country for their marine life? Grand geology and wild waters provide some of the answers. The Biosphere coastline stretches over 77 miles from Welcombe in the south, with its stunning stratified rocks, to Foreland Point and the towering cliffs of Exmoor in the north.

Its mix of shore habitats includes the golden beaches that are so beloved by holiday-makers but that are, from the point of view of marine life, virtual deserts by comparison to our rocky shores.

Rocks may seem inhospitable, but they provide an anchorage for many encrusting plants and animals, like seaweeds, sponges and barnacles, as well as shelter in rock-pools and other nooks and crannies for mobile animals such as crabs and fish. Rocks strike out into the full force of the waves at west-facing Hartland, and the headlands at Croyde and Woolacombe.

These are exposed shores, suited to the toughest animals and the firmly-attached that feed well in rich water.They contrast with the more sheltered Channel coast shores beyond Morte where the animals are often softer-bodied and thrive in the siltier waters. This range of exposure contributes to the biodiversity and conservation importance for which much of our coast has been designated.

The stretch from Combe Martin to Croyde is a Voluntary Marine Conservation Area, and Foreland Point to the Estuary mouth is a candidate for Marine Conservation Zone status, as is part of the Hartland Peninsula. The shore's inhabitants have to adapt to make the most of a complicated jigsaw of factors influencing where they live.

As well as waves, our shores are subject to the Bristol Channel's powerful currents that ensure that our waters are rich in food and can sustain large numbers of marine animals, but perhaps the greatest challenge for marine life is this area's huge tidal range; the second highest in the UK.

Simply staying wet enough to breathe poses problems but then there are the other necessities of life such as eating and avoiding being eaten, sex and reproduction and competition. Rocks might look bare, but this is only because the microscopic seaweeds that coat them are being grazed by limpets and other sea snails before the weed has a chance to grow. Mature limpets have a neat trick that enables them to live on the drier parts of the shore. As the tide recedes, they retrace their route and hunker down on a home scar, an indentation that they have tailored for a snug fit where they can keep moist.

When the tide is out other animals that can withstand considerable fluctuations in temperature and salinity can be found in the rock-pools. Here throughout the day snails graze, mussels and sponges filter water for food, anemones grab passing prey, and small fish and crabs feed, alert for predators.

Many animals have evolved adaptations that help them cope with the ever-changing conditions in the rock pools by sheltering and waiting for the sea to return. For example, sea-snails have trap doors that shut in a little moisture whilst blennies can hide in shady crevices and breathe through their moist skin. The beadlet anemone can close its tentacles and shelter under a protective coat of mucus.

Coastwise North Devon's shore safari organiser, Jim Monroe says: "Understanding how these animals behave helps you to find them. Each has their place on the shore where their chances of survival are best. "Find a good rock-pool and you can watch them close at hand. Many are indifferent to your presence, others may eye you warily, but most will continue about their business. To see them feels like a huge privilege."

When covered by the tide barnacles and mussels, animals that dominate the exposed shore, come to life. Barnacle larvae that have glued themselves to the rocks headfirst when settling as adults, constantly sieve the water for food using their feathery legs, stopping only when a threat looms, such as a young blenny looking for a leggy meal.

Carpets of mussels open to syphon and filter gallons of water for food. Like barnacles they are prey to the dog whelk, which can take a week to drill into a mussel and make a soup of it. The mussel has a surprising defence and can trap the whelk using the threads with which it anchors itself to the rock.

Further down, shore encrusting colonial animals join seaweeds to give a colourful patchwork coating on most surfaces. They provide micro-habitats with good feeding for many small animals including the cowrie which feeds only on star ascidian, in a food chain that runs from microscopic plant and animal material in the plankton to top predators such as seals and dolphins.

Coastwise member Paula Ferris says: "For me the low shore is the most exciting part to explore. It is wetter for longer so there are more animals. Blennies and other shore fish lurk under the weed, crabs tuck into crevices, and every large stone hides tiny scuttling Porcelain crabs and maybe brittlestars or sea urchins. Better still I might find a worm pipefish, a sea slug, or even a squat lobster clumsily backing-off as I draw back the weed. There will always be something new for me, such is the variety of life on our rocky shores."

Ocean2012 highlights overcapacity in the EU fishing fleet, and the failure of several Member countries to record the size of their fleets

Ocean2012 has written to EU Fisheries Commissioner, Mrs. Damanaki, on 19th October 2011. We reproduce here the text of that letter:

Subject: Proposal for a European Maritime Fisheries Fund

Dear Commissioner Damanaki,

We understand that the Commission proposal for the future European Maritime and Fisheries Fund (EMFF) is currently undergoing inter-service consultation. The Commission Green Paper on the reform of the CFP (COM(2009)163 final) acknowledges that the current CFP has led to a number of serious problems including overfishing, fleet overcapacity fuelled by subsidies, low economic resilience and decline in the volume of fish caught by European fishers. The reform of the EMFF in parallel to the basic regulations and the rest of the CFP package provides an opportunity to effectively address these issues, and we would like to bring to your attention essential elements in ensuring that EU funding will no longer contribute to maintaining over-capacities and to overfishing in European waters and by EU fleets globally.

Funds should be provided for sustainably managing and restoring marine ecosystems and biodiversity. The comments below are based on joint NGO submissions already sent to the Commission on the same subject:

The European Commission has identified over-capacity as the primary cause of the failure of EU fisheries management. It is also estimated that European fishing fleets in many cases exert fishing pressure on stocks which is two to three times the sustainable level. However, there is no detailed assessment of the actual overcapacity of the EU fleet. This is because many Member States choose not to comply with the legal requirement to report their fleet capacity.The most recent report from the Commission identifies Spain, France, Ireland, Cyprus, Poland, and Portugal as not providing an assessment of fleet capacity in relation to fishing opportunities and Sweden, Spain and the United Kingdom as not describing their fleets in relation to fisheries.
Accurate information is essential to ensure that funding allocated for investments on board of vessels or on fishing gear does not benefit vessels which are part of fleets operating at overcapacity. Otherwise counter-productive spending of public aid will continue, with vessels targeting depleted fish stocks, such as the Atlantic bluefin tuna, continuing to receive public aid for modernization measures. We therefore urge you to ensure that the new EMFF includes provisions that explicitly make adequate assessment and reporting of the balance between fishing capacity and fishing opportunities a precondition for Member States to use EU funds for vessel measures.
The practice of discarding unwanted fish overboard is an appalling example of bad fishing practice and governance in the EU. However, the objective of any policy to tackle discarding should be to avoid unwanted catches in the first place, rather than to make economic use of what has previously been discarded. In that respect, no future marketing measures should apply to unwanted catches. Also, support for marketing measures of surplus or underexploited species runs the risk of contributing to future overfishing. Therefore, marketing aid should be restricted to support the marketing of sustainable fisheries and aquaculture products.
Regarding aquaculture, indiscriminate promotion and development, e.g. through the promotion of investments in off-shore aquaculture, will invariably entail negative environmental impacts and may result in problems of excessive production and supply and poor profitability. The new EMFF should only direct support to the development of ecologically sustainable or environmentally friendly aquaculture, particularly for small and medium enterprises. The reformed CFP must ensure that, if it is to contribute to future food security, aquaculture becomes a net producer of fish protein. The most crucial means of achieving this is to ensure that European aquaculture does not rely on or lead to the overexploitation of forage fish in order to feed farmed carnivorous fish. Funding schemes for environmentally friendly aquaculture practices should be designed along similar lines as Article 38 (Natura 2000 payments) and Article 39 (agri-environment payments) of Regulation 1698/2005 (Rural development regulation).
We are in favour of using public funds to support a transition to a new sustainable fisheries management system. Funding should be made available for the design and implementation of stakeholder led or co-management systems, which will provide fishery-specific management plans. We do not, however, consider Transferable Fishing Concessions (TFC), as proposed in the draft Basic Regulation of the CFP, as an adequate fleet management policy. Europe's fisheries are diverse and need more options than the single approach of TFC. While we acknowledge that rights-based management tools, under certain circumstances, can reduce capacity in numerical terms, we do not agree that the current Commission proposal addresses in a sufficient way the different circumstances of fisheries in the EU. We are also concerned that the proposed system may fail to address capacity reduction in a qualitative way, i.e. ensuring that more socially and environmentally responsible operators are supported or prioritized. These concerns have recently been shared by more than 160 fishers, environment and development organisations, which therefore oppose the mandatory introduction of TFCs as proposed by the Commission.
Data on subsidy spending should be centrally stored and include a broad range of information. In case subsidies continue to be used to fund measures on/for vessels, information about the vessel's name, registration number, port, flag, targeted stock and details on the type of measure(s) should be disclosed. Regrettably, Member States are not required to release any information on the vessels concerned or the stocks targeted by the benefiting operators. Consequently, information relevant to understanding where aid is spent is widely dispersed, difficult to access, in unsuitable formats and therefore of little use to a rigorous, quantitative analysis of the effect of public aid on the state of fish stocks. It is therefore of paramount importance, that the new EMFF should ensure that the public has adequate access to all information about their spending, allowing an easy and user-friendly evaluation of the success of whether funds have met their objectives. This will help to clarify potential misperceptions about the use and impacts of EU aid to the fisheries sector.

Thank you for considering these important issues. Should you wish you to discuss these further or if you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact me or my colleagues listed below.

Yours sincerely,
Uta Bellion, Director, European Marine Program, Pew Environment Group, and Co-ordinator OCEAN2012

Will Fukushima's emergency cooling water end up in the sea?

The operator of Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant has said it is considering dumping water treated for radiation contamination into the ocean as early as March, prompting protests from fishing groups.

Water on the floor inside Fukushima after a leak in an image released by Tepco. Water has been used to cool reactors at the plant. Photograph: Tepco/AFP/Getty Images

Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), the utility operating the Fukushima Daiichi plant, which was hit by a powerful tsunami in March that caused the world's worst nuclear accident in 25 years, said it was running out of space to store some of the water it had treated at the plant because of an inflow of groundwater.

"We would like to increase the number of tanks to accommodate the water but it will be difficult to do so indefinitely," a Tepco spokesman, Junichi Matsumoto, told reporters.

He said the plant was likely to reach its storage capacity of about 155,000 tonnes in around March.

Tepco plans to come up with possible ways to handle radioactive waste and present its proposals to the government's nuclear regulatory body for approval. "The government should not, and must not, approve a plan allowing Tepco to dispose of treated water in the ocean," said Kenji Sumita, an emeritus professor at Osaka University who specialises in nuclear engineering. "The reality is that semi-permanent storage is the only solution available under current technological constraints. Tepco may have to find the storage space and look for a technological breakthrough in the coming years that allows it to condense and greatly reduce the volume of tainted water."

The admission is a setback for the utility, which appeared to be making progress in its clean-up after building a cooling system that no longer required pumping in vast amounts of water. It also built a system, drawing on French, US and Japanese technology, that decontaminates the vast pool of tainted run-off to supply the cooling system with water.

The company said representatives of a nationwide federation of fishing co-operatives had visited its Tokyo headquarters to protest.

Tepco said it was still assessing the potential environmental impact of releasing the accumulating water, but that if forced to do so, it would discharge water expected to have the least effect on the environment.

Tens of thousands of tonnes of water contaminated with radiation have accumulated at the plant, 150 miles (240km) north-east of Tokyo, after Tepco, early in the crisis, tried to cool reactors that suffered nuclear fuel meltdowns by pouring in water, much of it from the sea.

"Our priority is also to look for ways to limit the inflow of groundwater into the buildings at the plant," Matsumoto said.

The operator estimates that due to the inflow the amount of water requiring storage is increasing by 200 to 500 tonnes every day.

The utility released more than 10,000 tonnes of water tainted with low levels of radiation in April to free up space for water with much higher levels of radioactivity, drawing criticism from neighbours such as South Korea and China.

Fukushima's radioactive cooling water leaks into the sea and remains a formidable problem

Nine months after Fukushima Daiichi was ravaged by an earthquake and tsunami, the plant continues to pose a major environmental threat. Before the latest leak, the Fukushima accident had been responsible for the largest single release of radioactivity into the ocean, threatening wildlife and fisheries in the region, experts have said.

The new radioactive water leak called into question the progress that the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, appeared to have made in bringing its reactors under control. The company, known as Tepco, has said that it hopes to bring the plant to a stable state known as a cold shutdown by the end of the year.

The trouble on Sunday came in two stages, a Tepco statement said. In the morning, utility workers found that radioactive water was pooling in a catchment next to a purification device; the system was switched off, and the leak appeared to stop. But the company said it later discovered that leaked water was escaping, possibly through cracks in the catchment's concrete wall, and was reaching an external gutter.

In all, as much as 220 tons of water may now have leaked from the facility, according to a report in the newspaper Asahi Shimbun that cited Tepco officials.

The company said that the water had about one million times as much radioactive strontium as the maximum safe level set by the government, but appeared to have already been cleaned of radioactive caesium before leaking out. Both elements are readily absorbed by living tissue and can greatly increase the risk of developing cancer.

Since the disaster in March, workers have been struggling to cool the stricken plant's reactors by flooding them with water, which is contaminated with radioactivity in the process and becomes a problem of its own.

Tepco installed a new circulatory cooling system in September with filters that decontaminate and recycle the cooling water. But the company acknowledges that some water has already leaked into the ocean, and thousands of tons of water remain in the flooded basements of the plant's reactor buildings.

The Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety in France estimates that between March and mid-July, the amount of radioactive caesium 137 that had leaked into the Pacific from the Fukushima Daiichi plant amounted to 27.1 petabecquerels, the greatest amount known to have been released from a single episode. (A becquerel is a frequently used measure of radiation, and a petabecquerel is a million billion becquerels.)

Deeper CFP reform necessary, says Ocean2012

The EU Commission has announced plans for a 6.5 billion-euro fisheries fund from 2014-2020 as part of a long overdue reform of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP). Fisheries Commissioner Maria Damanaki announced the plans with a strident message: "No more money will be spent to build bigger vessels… the fund will help small-scale fisheries to become more profitable and more viable. It will reverse the decline of many coastal areas and island communities which are dependent on fishing."

Few boats left in Oban harbour. Much of the West coast became fished by the bigger offhsore boats

Since the EU Commission unveiled the original proposals in July, marine sustainability groups from many sectors have been concerned that the stated plans do not go far enough. UK members of OCEAN2012, a consortium of NGOs and community groups from countries across the EU, have argued that the voice of the small fishing boat sector is still in danger of being sidelined, along with the necessary and radical measures to reverse decades of over-exploitative fishing.

As a member of the coalition, The Community of Arran Seabed Trust (COAST) recently attended a members meeting held at the New Economics Foundation (nef) in London. Members showed broad support for a range of measures outlined in the CFP reform proposals, specifically the clear target to regenerate fish stocks to 'good environmental status' by 2020 and its commitment to adhering to the Maximum Sustainable Yield. It also welcomed the stronger commitment to follow scientific advice, including the ecosystem approach. Crucially it supports the stated intention to minimise bycatch, as a way to tackle the problem of discards, rather than simply landing bycatch.

However, OCEAN2012 members are critical of CFP proposals insofar as they fail to radically prioritise environmental sustainability and the growing privatisation of fish resources. Members attending the meeting such as MARINET, Sustainable Inshore Fisheries Trust (SIFT), New Under Tens Fishermen Association (NUFTA) and the Marine Conservation Society (MCS), are now urging the European Commission to consider deepening the proposals.

Historic levels

The replacement of the CFP, argue marine sustainability campaigners MARINET, must tackle the pressing issue of 'food security,' and restore fish stocks fully to the levels that were present before industrial steam-powered trawling was introduced. To this end, a new CFP must link annual catch quotas and Maximum Sustainable Yield to historic levels of fish stocks.

"The reform proposals of 13th July advanced by the Commission only suggest at such an outcome… an enduring future for our fisheries remains very much in the balance," explains David Levy, Chair of MARINET.

Members at the meeting also discussed the need to structure the fishing industry more fairly. Coalition members believe that small scale, low impact fisheries are in danger of being left behind, with their interests not adequately represented by the well-funded lobbyists of the major producer and fishermen's organisations.

Strong lobby

In Scotland, the SFF (Scottish Fishermen's Federation) and the Producers Organisations (POs) represented by the NFFO (National Federation of Fisheries Organisations) have cornered the lobby on the issues of quotas and discards (bycatch), according to OCEAN2012 members. They also argue that Seafish — technically a governmental advisory body for all sectors of the fishing industry, including aquaculture — represents mainly the interests of the large producer organisations.

This has led to a systemic unfairness, currently not addressed by the CFP reform proposals, say coalition members. This situation was portrayed starkly by a representative from Hastings, where the fishing quota is allocated to big boats and smaller inshore, traditional boats are currently left with just 2 tonnes of Totally Allowable Catch (TAC) per month.

Small boat sector disadvantaged

The vast majority (93% in 2006) of the British fleet comprises vessels under 10m, but this "sub-sector" of the industry sees only a small proportion of the quota. Paul Joy from Hastings and a member of NUTRA (New Under Tens Fishermen's Association) told the members meeting that three-quarters of the Hastings fleet are currently receiving just 7% of the quota allocation. The lion's share is going to large vessels which dominate representation by Producers Organisations.

OCEAN2012 also flagged up major concerns that subsidies are not fairly allocated for some of the same systemic reasons. If you want more information about how you can support the OCEAN2012 campaign locally, please contact the coalition here http://ocean2012.eu/pages/13-contact-us.

For more information about the continued process of European fisheries reform and the planned campaign of OCEAN2012, please download a full and detailed summary of the meeting.

Sainsbury's no longer claim their Scottish West Coast prawns are "sustainably sourced"

In an encouraging piece of consumer power Sainsbury's, the food retailer, have removed all mention of 'sustainability' from the packaging of their prawn products sourced from the Scottish Langoustine Project after The Community of Arran Seabed Trust (COAST) campaigners pointed out the dubious claims via Twitter.

Russell Cheshire and Lucy Wallace both flagged up the inconsistency via their Twitter feeds, prompting a quick response from '@SainsburyPR' — the Twitter address of J Sainsbury plc's marketing department.

In the November issue of their newsletter COAST published an exchange between COAST campaigner Russell Cheshire and the PR department of J Sainsbury plc.

Sainsbury's have since published the following statement on their Twitter feed which would seem to suggest that they no longer view their prawns as sustainably-sourced.

"We implemented our sustainability rating system in 2006 and assess every fishery we source from against that system including bottom trawl fisheries. The system includes an assessment of potential environmental impacts and as such the Scottish langoustine fishery is amber rated. We would only claim a fishery to be sustainable if it is certified by the MSC and we have been in discussion with fishermen in Scotland in respect to potential fishery improvements and MSC assessment."

Marketing literature on the Sainsbury's website, describing their Scottish West coast prawns as sustainably-sourced, has since been removed.

An estimated 100,000 salmon die in disease outbreak at Scottish West Coast fish farm

In late October an estimated 800-900 tonnes of farmed salmon died at The Scottish Salmon Company's St Molios fish farm in Lamlash Bay. Each fish weighed about 1kg, so up to 100,000 fish may have died, although numbers have not been officially disclosed.

The fish have since been removed by tankers off the island to Widnes in Cheshire for incineration and the Marine Science Fish Health Inspectorate in Aberdeen has confirmed the cause of death to be a severe and relatively uncommon outbreak of amoebic gill disease (AGD).

The Fish Inspectorate has also disclosed that it is tracking two other cases of AGD in fish farms across Scotland, one on the west side of Harris and one near Gigha.

Phil Thomas, chair of the Scottish Salmon Producers Organisation claim the disease outbreak is a naturally occurring event. "That claim is a good example of selective information by the aquaculture industry," explains The Community of Arran Seabed Trust's (COAST) Dr Sally Campbell. "The fact is that over-concentration of animal populations magnifies the infection risk often beyond the ability of humans to control. It is only a 'naturally occurring event' in as much as tuberculosis in humans is a naturally occurring event when pathogen (in that case a bacterium), host, (in that case human beings, often in large numbers), and environment (insanitary conditions, close proximity of people and people already susceptible due to overcrowding, poor diets and so on)."

AGD in fish is caused by an imbalance of host, pathogen (in this case several species of Amoeba) and the environment. There is direct link between the concentration of biomass and the ease of infection.

The Fish Inspectorate has confirmed that although the disease is controlled, the outbreak is not completely resolved. In other words the remaining fish are not in peak condition. Sometimes the gills of the farmed fish can become damaged by an algal bloom, which contains a lot of silicate (sharp edges) phytoplankton. These can damage the gills, which are very fragile and may make them more susceptible to AGD.

The well boat (or should we say sick boat) was in last week dosing the remaining fish to kill sea lice. To do this the remaining fish were pumped into the well boat for dosing with anti sea lice medication and then emptied back into pens, plus the seawater with the dosing chemicals.

Government report states that inshore habitats are vital for Scotland's West Coast fishery

A recent Scottish Government report which reviews the scientific knowledge of the West coast fishery, has lent weight to proposals for a Marine Protected Area (MPA) around the southern coast of Arran. "The West of Scotland Marine Ecosystem: A Review of Scientific Knowledge 2011" carries out a comprehensive review of the West coast. Amongst a range of findings, it describes the importance of the inshore habitat for cod and whiting stocks in the area, by gathering a wide range of data from analogous fisheries in Europe.

Inshore habitat is vital for West coast fishery. Picture — Howard Wood (Chair Community of Arran Seabed trust)

One study conducted in the Swedish Skagerrak archipelago calculated that the loss of 190 m² of eelgrass habitat may have resulted in the loss of 6.3 million juvenile cod recruits each year.

The report states that "in Scotland, areas such as maerl and eelgrass beds appear to be important as nursery areas for cod, but such habitats are easily damaged by human activities such as trawling."

The report, however, frequently acknowledges limitations of its findings due to a shortage of available data, "Although damage is known to have occurred around Scotland, we currently lack good data on the extent of habitat loss, and its consequences for cod populations."

The conclusions of the report have boosted the rationale for habitat protection measures in the Clyde. The Commiunity of Arran Seabed Trust (COAST) is proposing an angler and static gear-friendly MPA around its southern shores to protect vital habitat and historic spawning grounds from the damaging effects of dredging and trawling.

"Much of the content of this report is to be welcomed, but we cannot afford to wait for another round of scientific surveys before we take action to halt the damage currently inflicted on vital nursery habitats," said COAST chair Howard Wood. "The precautionary principle should dictate that bottom trawling and dredging should be precluded from large areas of our inshore waters or at the very minimum be subject to an environmental impact assessment. The common-sense principle says our seabed is knackered. And the good fishermen on the West coast know it's in their children's best interests to give it a rest."

Footnote: COAST has observed to us: "Although we welcolme the West of Scotland report, if you read it in its entirety, Marine Scotland Science who published the report has been very selective in the science they have used on prawn trawl, discards and nutrient enrichment from aquaculture — and as we have pointed out to Marine Scotland, there are as many scientific studies that argue the case against a particular conclusion as they are in support. Of course, that kind of selectivity in presenting the evidence was always going to be the problem when Government brought the Fisheries Research Service, directly as a Government Agency, into Marine Scotland Science. As prawn trawling and salmon aquaculture are seen by the Scottish Government as vital parts of the West of Scotland economy, they choose the science that suits their short term economic agenda."

Eco-label farmed fish "not better for environment" it is claimed

Farmed fish sold under the Marks & Spencer eco-label is no better for the environment than conventionally farmed fish, a study on the sustainability claims of major fish producers says. The report from the University of Victoria found that many of the so-called eco-labels were not much better than conventional farmed fish when it came to protecting the oceans, and some — including those produced under the Marks & Spencer brand — were actually worse.

"They have set criteria that currently sit below the normative performance of conventional industry," said lead author John Volpe, who heads the Seafood Ecology Research Group at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. "What this analysis makes clear is that the criteria a producer might meet to acquire the Marks & Spencer label is already below industry-wide practice."

A spokeswoman for Marks & Spencer said that the company was very disappointed by the report and that its commitment to sustainable fishing went beyond labels. "We have developed an industry leading aquaculture standard that we apply to all the farmed fish we use in our business, including that used as an ingredient in prepared food, which very few other major retailers do," said Emma Johnson.

She criticised the report for including only two retailers — Marks & Spencer and Whole Foods — on its list of 20 standards developed by organic associations, industry groups and supermarkets in the US, UK, Europe and Australia.

'How Green Is Your Eco-Label?' looked at the environmental impacts of farming 11 species of fish, including three varieties of salmon — Atlantic, chinook and coho — as well as Atlantic cod, European seabass, barramundi and turbot. It did not look at farmed freshwater fish such as tilapia.

Overall, most eco-labels for farmed marine fish produced no more than a 10 per cent improvement over conventional varieties. A third of the 20 eco-labels in the study were at the same level as, or below, standard industry practice, Volpe said. "When you start looking into how much time and money has been poured into the development of these labels, which are the banner of the sustainable seafood movement, and just how much return there is on the investment they are receiving, then on the whole it is quite modest," said Volpe. "That was a bit of a shocker to us."

The study, which was reviewed and was supported by the Pew Environment Group, used 10 factors to rate the eco-labels including feeding, antibiotic use and energy use.

Marks & Spencer scored at the bottom, or second from the bottom, on all four sets of rankings. Of any of the labels, it was the furthest from reaching the voluntary standards set by the Monterey Bay Aquarium seafood watch guide and the Blue Ocean Institute seafood guide. Both are seen as the authorities on sustainable farmed and wild caught seafood, and the Monterey Bay guidelines have been adopted by leading chefs and restaurants in the US.

Marks & Spencer described the guidelines used in the report as "niche standards".

"Whilst we believe the report is wrong to compare a standard we apply to all our sourcing with niche standards, it does not remove our commitment to further improve our standards in the future," Johnson said. She said the company had worked closely with the World Wildlife Fund to develop the Salmon Aquaculture Dialogue and that it was aiming to introduce it on a number of its supplier farms next year.

John Volpe said the researchers focused on the major producers, which included organic associations, industry groups and retailers. But he noted that Marks & Spencer faced a much higher bar on eco-label salmon than other producers on other types of fish. Conventional salmon farming had already come some distance to improving its environmental footprint, he said.

"It's like going on a diet," Volpe said. "Losing the first 10lbs is easier than losing the last 10lbs or the last 2lbs."

The study claims to be the first to take an in-depth look at how eco-labels on farmed fish stand up to conventional options in the marketplace. John Volpe said it was aimed at helping consumers find their way through a confusing thicket of claims from the fishing industry and supermarkets about the sustainability of their products.

A number of recent news investigations in America have focused on false labelling of fish, and Volpe argued consumers were more savvy at assessing claims made by beef or poultry farmers than seafood producers. Among the researchers' other main findings, organic labels are ahead of trade associations and retailers in living up to their sustainability claims — although a few do fall short.

The study warns that looking at the environmental footprint of a single fish farm, or group of fish farms, could be misleading. The overall impact of the farmed fish industry could overwhelm any of the efforts to reduce the toll on the environment.

Government Big Society 'Concern' over Flood Victims

Charles Tucker of the National Flood Forum attended the launch of the Ministerial Statement "Progress towards developing future flood risk management arrangements" on Monday 19th December, who issued the following Press Release on 21st December:

No Christmas Present for Flood Victims!

Flood victims and flooded communities will get no relief from insurance worries this Christmas, says the National Flood Forum. Worse, a Ministerial Statement from Defra issued on Monday 19th December suggests that government is set to leave flood insurance to an unregulated free market — a situation that even the Association of British Insurers says poses severe dangers for the most vulnerable.

Defra Minister Richard Benyon was due to announce his proposals on Monday for a new framework of flood insurance to replace the "Statement of Principles" ¹. But the Ministerial Statement (described as giving a "direction of travel") included nothing to suggest that government would take any steps to replace the SoP. "It was so vague it was totally unhelpful" said Charles Tucker, Chairman of the NFF.

He added "We feel very let down by this lack of leadership from government — and so will the thousands of communities throughout the country where getting insurance after a flood is becoming more and more expensive. We called on Government to take the lead to ensure that flood insurance was fair and affordable. Now they seem to be walking away."

The National Flood Forum — the UK-wide charity supporting and representing communities at flood risk — has worked closely with Defra, the Treasury, the Environment Agency, the Association of British Insurers, Local Government Association and others over the past 12 months to find a new Framework to replace the Statement of Principles.

Chairman, Charles Tucker said "All this time and effort will have been wasted if government fails to provide the leadership we expect from them. Flood victims will be dismayed and frustrated by the lack of any clear direction from government, after more than a year of discussions and workshops designed to find solutions to the ever-growing difficulty of finding flood insurance once you have been flooded. It's government's job to take the lead here — and we're desperately disappointed and frustrated that they are not doing so."

Fifteen months after the Flood Summit in September 2010, Monday's Ministerial Statement "Progress towards developing future flood risk management arrangements" fails to move any of the key issues forward — and particularly gives no indication of government action to shape the insurance market for communities at high flood risk.

¹ The "Statement of Principles" is the gentleman's agreement between the insurance industry and government which gives some assurance to property owners that they will be offered insurance again after a flood. It ends in 2013.

Dead Whale washed up at Old Hunstanton Beach, West Norfolk

The sperm whale which was found washed up on Old Hunstanton Beach today. Picture: Chris Bishop

A 40ft sperm whale with a large gash to its stomach was found washed up dead on a Norfolk beach on Christmas Eve . A spokesman for the British Divers Marine Life Rescue said it may have been the same whale which had been seen dead on the RAF's bombing range on the other side of the estuary, at Holbeach, Lincolnshire some weeks ago.

The number of injured sea mammals is decidedly on the increase. This past year many Seals, Dolphins and Porpoises have been found with fatal injuries that may or may not have been man-made. Scientists from the Zoological Society have already taken samples from the animal in the hope of identifying the cause of its death.

EU announces 2012 fishing quota scheme whilst Brussels NGO says "it fails the sustainability test"

Fisheries Ministers Fail Sustainability Test

Brussels, 19th December 2011. Fisheries Ministers have once again missed their opportunity to place European fisheries on the path to sustainability. Fisheries Council negotiations on fishing limits for 2012 have resulted in a decision to set Total Allowable Catches (TACs) at a level which exceeds scientifically recommended limits.

At the two-day Council meeting European fisheries ministers had the chance to take a big step towards the sustainable exploitation of European fisheries resources — and failed.

While progress has been made, it has been insufficient to achieve the European commitment to manage all fish stocks at Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) levels by 2015.

Despite the repeated pleas of Commissioner Maria Damanaki, the December tradition of ignoring scientific advice and setting unsustainably high fishing limits has not been broken. Whereas the proposal of the Commission for fishing limits in 2012 followed scientific advice for the majority of stocks, the Council followed this proposal for only 14 of the 75 decisions regarding stocks in EU waters. For all other cases they have set fishing limits higher than what was proposed, and in 53 instances this difference was more than 10%.

Ministers have also chosen not to follow the long-term management plan for North Sea herring and increased the TAC by more than 100% — whereas the plan foresaw maximum annual increases of 15%. Multi-annual plans make for better management than yearly bargaining. The Council therefore made a real mistake to disregard this long-term management plan, setting a dangerous precedent for other stocks.

According to the European Commission, Ministers' decisions have exceeded scientific recommendations by an average of 47% since 2003. Setting catch limits that do not exceed scientific advice is essential in order to achieve levels that can produce the maximum sustainable yield (MSY) by 2015 — a target that was set at the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002 and to which the EU and its Member States have committed themselves.

Dr. Monica Verbeek, Executive Director of Seas At Risk said: "Ministers remain under the illusion that overfishing will somehow save jobs. This disregard for scientific advice and for international commitments will undermine the future of the fishing industry and does not bode well for the ongoing reform of the Common Fisheries Policy."

The European Commission's proposal regarding fishing opportunities for 2012 was based on the goal of managing stocks at MSY levels by 2015, on following scientific advice, and on applying a precautionary approach in the case of data-poor stocks.

By opposing the Commission's proposals, Ministers made a mockery of stated ambitions to reform the CFP so as to achieve economically, socially and environmentally sustainable fisheries.

The outcome of this year's horse-trading regarding fishing opportunities shows once again that the system is flawed — the CFP reform process must put an end to this yearly disgrace if there are to be healthy fish stocks for fishers and the environment in the future.

MARINET observes: The comments expressed by Seas At Risk are accurate. The Fisheries Council (EU Council of Fisheries Ministers) continues to fail to heed scientific advice that the Common Fisheries Policy is permitting fishing at levels which fish stocks are unable to withstand.

The result is that our stocks and fisheries continue on their relentless decline, ultimately to commercial extinction — which some stocks, such as North Sea, Irish Sea and West of Scotland cod stocks, are already confronted by. All this is extraordinarily reminiscent of the total fisheries collapse that happened in the 1990s in the Newfoundland Banks in the North West Atlantic. The North East Atlantic is now confronted by the same grave possibility.

Why can Fisheries Ministers not understand this reality? Why can they not design a Common Fisheries Policy which observes scientific advice (in theory, an actual legal obligation — but no one has challenged them on this) and give support to the fishing industry and its fishermen so that they can build a conservation-based industry, rather than an over extraction-based industry? A conservation-based approach to fisheries will guarantee fish stocks for the future, both for the industry and for the public who rely on the CFP to deliver food security (the ability to meet all our needs for fish for all 12 months of the year, year after year — currently stocks are so depleted, we can only meet our needs for 6 months of the year and have to rely on fish imported from other seas) .

Reform of the Common Fisheries Policy — currently being considered by the EU's governmental institutions (Commission, Parliament and Council of Ministers) — must, MARINET believes, be conservation-based rather than relentlessly extraction-based in terms of the management of fish stocks. The CFP must have, as its overriding objective, the delivery of food security — the continuous ability to meet our needs for fish throughout the whole year from our own seas. To do this, we have to restore fish stocks to historically referenced levels (taking ecological and climatic changes into account) because we know that historic fish stocks (i.e. following World War II, and indeed earlier) were able to deliver food security). This means that we have to set quotas (known these days in scientific terminology as "maximum sustainable yield") at levels which will lead to the restoration of historically referenced levels. In turn, this will require serious restrictions on fishing for a period of time, indeed closure of certain stocks, and the use of closed areas (marine reserves) centred on spawning and nursery grounds so that fish stocks can recover to historically referenced levels and, most importantly, economic support and a new economic role for fishermen who are displaced so that they are offered the opportunity to become the managers of these marine reserves, patrolling them to prevent illegal fishing, and assisting in the management and collection of scientific data about the stocks and their restoration.

A Common Fisheries Policy built on this foundation will be conservation-based, guaranteeing both the fishing industry and the EU public an abundant and sustainable supply of fish into the future — a reality which the current CFP is doing it best to destroy.

The EU governmental institutions (Commission, Parliament and Council of Ministers) are talking about reform, but they have not yet embraced the primary principle that the CFP must deliver food security, and that therefore fish stocks must be restored to historically referenced levels with management being conservation-based, rather than extraction-based, in order to deliver this future.

MARINET is campaigning for precisely this objective — food security and conservation-based fisheries management where fishermen are given a new economic role and security so as to deliver this future. If you believe and support this objective, please contact us via our website.

Marine NGOs express caution over new EU Maritime and Fisheries Fund

In advice to the EU Commission and Parliament, marine NGOs in Brussels (Seas At Risk, WWF, Ocean2012, Bird Life Europe, Greenpeace and Oceana) have responded with support and caveats in connection with the announcement of a new EU Maritime and Fisheries Fund, COM (2011) 804 final. The NGOs' advice states:

"Europe's fishing grounds were once amongst the most productive in the world, but thirty years of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) have resulted in serious depletion of fish populations, ecosystem degradation, and damage to species, habitats and sites. Today, 63% of the assessed stocks in the Atlantic are overfished, 82% of the assessed stocks in the Mediterranean and 4 out of 6 assessed stocks in the Baltic.

"The European Commission recognised overcapacity as one of the key drivers of overfishing and estimates that in a number of fisheries, fishing capacity is two to three times the sustainable level. The Commission also acknowledges that subsidies have contributed to this imbalance through artificially maintaining excess fishing capacity. The 2011 European Court of Auditors' report confirms this, stating that fleet overcapacity is driving the depletion of fish stocks, threatening the wellbeing of our seas and the viability of the fishing communities.

"The role of subsidies as a driver for overfishing has been widely recognised, including at the international level. At the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, the international community committed to eliminate subsidies that contribute to illegal, unregulated, and unreported (IUU) fishing and overcapacity. Also, parties to the World Trade Organisation agreed to strengthen disciplines on fisheries subsidies, including through a prohibition of certain forms of fisheries subsidies that contribute to overcapacity and overfishing. Commitments to phase out environmentally harmful subsidies were also made at the 2010 meeting of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in Nagoya, and at EU level.

"The reform of the CFP and its financial instrument offers a critical opportunity to eliminate subsidies which contribute to overfishing and use them to support transition towards truly sustainable fisheries and towards achieving healthy marine ecosystems. The following document is an initial reaction by BirdLife Europe, Greenpeace, Oceana, the Pew Environment Group, Seas At Risk, WWF and the OCEAN2012 coalition to the Commission's proposal. In particular, it indicates which parts of the proposal these groups welcome, and where they have concerns and see room for improvement.

What NGOs support:

Where NGOs have concerns and see room for improvement:

Conclusions

Faced with concerted pressure from various stakeholders, the Commission has struggled to craft a proposal which responds adequately to the issues outlined in its 2009 Green Paper and to live up to its commitments to reduce overcapacity and provide effective support to promote a healthy and sustainable fisheries sector. We now look to the European Parliament to work with the Council to ensure that public aid will no longer be part of the problem, but will be part of the solution to address the current fisheries crisis.

EU creates €6.5 billion fund in subsidy and support for fishing industry

The European Commission has backed a funding policy that leaves largely intact its substantial support for the fishing industry, despite the Commission's own finding that subsidies were leading to destructive overfishing.

The Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, approved the creation of a €6.5 billion, or $8.8 billion, European Maritime and Fisheries Fund (EMFF) to finance its Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) from 2014 to 2020. Both the revised fisheries policy and its funding are due to be finalised in 2013 by a vote of the 27 E.U. member states.

Maria Damanaki, the Commissioner for maritime affairs and fisheries, said in a statement that the fund would "increase economic growth and create jobs in the sector. No more money will be spent to build big vessels. Small-scale fisheries and aquaculture will benefit of this budgetary greening."

Conservationists said the Commission had made progress in some areas, but expressed disappointment with the details, saying overcapacity, the biggest problem facing fish stocks, was not adequately being addressed and noting that little financing appeared to be set aside for enforcement activities and scientific assessment.

In a working paper in 2008, the Commission noted that subsidies to European fleets contributed to pressure on fish stocks that in some cases "is two to three times the sustainable level." According to commission figures this year, 63 percent of stocks in Europe's Atlantic waters are overfished, as are 82 percent of its Mediterranean stocks and two-thirds of its Baltic stocks.

Some groups assert that without subsidies, a huge swath of the industry would be unprofitable. Oceana, a non-governmental organisation in Brussels, estimated in September that E.U. fishing fleets received total subsidies — mostly for fuel — of €3.3 billion in 2009, equivalent to 50 percent of the value of the total catch. And 13 E.U. countries got more in fishing subsidies than the value of their catch.

Fuel subsidies are important since the cost of diesel is a critical part of the calculus of how long a boat can remain at sea and remain profitable, and boats that remain at sea longer are more likely to overfish.

In one case, the Union spent €33.5 million from 2000 and 2008 helping to modernise the bluefin tuna fleet, money that went largely to the giant purse seiners that are capable of vacuuming up entire schools of the endangered fish.

Conservation groups assert that European fishing subsidies have long been subject to abuse, saying that much of the money ends up in the hands of the largest industrial fisheries. A Greenpeace investigation even found that Spain was subsidising a fleet owner who had been convicted of illegal fishing. The new funding policy would require that subsidies be cut off to anyone found guilty of illegal fishing, a nod to the so-called Johannesburg commitment, an E.U. pledge made in 2002 to phase out destructive fishing practices by 2012.

Markus Knigge, an adviser to the Pew Environment Group and the Ocean2012 coalition of conservation organisations, said Europe did not even know how it was spending its subsidies, because some of the most important fishing states, including Spain and France, had failed to carry out fleet assessments.

According to E.U. rules, "member states are obliged to assess overcapacity and put their efforts into eliminating it," he said. "But if you don't know where the overcapacity is, and you modernise the fleets, you may end up actually increasing overcapacity." Oliver Drewes, a spokesman for Ms. Damanaki, said he did not want to dismiss the concerns of conservationists, but "there are some innovative instruments being introduced here, and this is just the start of it. The way things are going to be designed in practice is what's going to make the music," Mr. Drewes said.

In one of the biggest changes, the fund proposal approved by the Commission would extend financial support for the first time to the growing aquaculture sector.

Funding, which is co-financed by member states, also aims to help fishers and their families diversify their sources of income, and includes a budget for retraining the spouses of fishers whose families depend on the industry for their livelihoods.

The new proposal drops so-called scrapping subsidies, used to decommission boats to reduce overcapacity. The policy has been widely regarded as a failure: the European Union has spent €1.7 billion on scrapping fishing boats since the 1990s, according to the commission, with no effect on the problem of too many boats chasing too few fish. The problem has been partly that as smaller boats are decommissioned, larger, more technologically sophisticated boats have taken their places.

The new proposal instead calls for spending on "economically and socially productive activities," including in fish processing, catering and tourism, as well as aid to small-scale coastal fleets. It will also be used to help fishers adopt improved gear to reduce discards. But even that, conservationists warned, could be used to make existing boats more efficient, further increasing overcapacity in the fleet.

EU Court of Auditors finds that CFP has failed to reduce the over-capacity of European fishing fleet

The EU Court of Auditors, in a report titled Special Report No 12/2011: Have EU Measures Contributed to Adapting the Capacity of the Fishing Fleet to Available Fishing Opportunities?, has found important weaknesses in the design and implementation of measures in the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) to reduce fishing over-capacity. The following are extracts from this Report:

"The CFP aims to promote sustainable fishing. The CFP thus includes measures to avoid over fishing and to limit the size of the fishing fleet. In its April 2009 Green Paper on the reform of the CFP, the EU Commission recognised that the 2002 CFP reform had not achieved this objective and attributed this to chronic overcapacity of the fishing fleets.

"The Court of Auditors' Special Report in 1993, No 3/1993, showed that fishing over capacity was already a significant problem 20 years ago. Some of the issues raised by the report are still relevant today.

"The Court of Auditors' Special Report in 2007, No 7/2007, concluded that fishing fleet overcapacity was encouraging over-fishing and was not being effectively reduced or accurately reported on by Member States. In addition, improvements in fishing technology were increasing the ability of the fleets to catch fish.

"Fishing is one of the few activities where rights of access are often not formally valued (in contrast to farming or mining, for example). This can encourage fishers to over-exploit resources and imperil their sustainability over the long term. In its April 2009 Green Paper, the EU Commission estimated that 88% of fish stocks were being fished at unsustainable levels and that of these stocks, 30% were outside safe biological limits. The UN's Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), the EU Commission, governmental and scientific sources have frequently referred to the inherent risk of over-fishing; and international law requires states to manage fisheries sustainably and reduce fishing overcapacity.

"Recent scientific findings, quoted by the EU Commission in its consultations on fishing opportunities for 2011, showed improvements in the sustainability of fish stocks, while indicating continuing serious problems. Box 1 illustrates that despite some recent improvements, the situation of many fish stocks is still critical.

BOX 1
International Council for the Exploration of the Seas (ICES) Advice on Fish Stocks in the North East Atlantic.

Note: According to Eurostat, catches from the North East Atlantic represent over 70% of all catches by EU fishing fleets.

"The EU Commission's policy is to achieve fishing at 'maximum sustainable yield' levels by 2015 and it has instructed ICES to provide scientific advice on that basis. Since 1995, there is a declining trend for EU fish catches (reduction from over 7 million tonnes to 5 million tonnes in 2009). According to the EU Commission's April 2009 Green Paper this decline is largely due to overfishing and forms part of a vicious circle involving fishing overcapacity and low economic performance of the fishing fleets.

"Despite the reduction in capacity of the fleets in terms of GT (vessel tonnage) and kW (engine capacity) and the efforts made to date to reduce fishing over-capacity, the Commission regards the remaining fishing fleet as still too big in terms of available fish resources. Member States' fishing fleets can catch significantly higher quantities of fish than are consistent with keeping fish stocks at sustainable levels. As a result:

"Fishing capacity as defined by GT and kW is a key concept used to monitor the size of Member States' fishing fleets, and implement fishing effort controls and measures to adapt fishing fleets to fishing opportunities. The relative simplicity of the fishing capacity definition facilitates its use for these purposes.

"However, in order to match fleet capacity with fishing opportunities, the real ability of the fleets to catch fish is more important than formal measures of capacity. 'GT and kW' are not reliable indicators of the ability of vessels to catch fish, especially considering the advances in fishing technology. Such advances were estimated by the Commission, in its mid-term review of the CFP of 2008, to increase the ability of fishing vessels to catch fish by around 3% per year.

"This was estimated by the Court of Auditors to result in an overall increase of 60% over the 16-year period 1992 to 2008. While the capacity of the EU fishing fleet in terms of GT and kW decreased by 29% in the same period, the effective capability taking into account the impact of technological improvements, is estimated to have increased by 14%.

"Furthermore, the Commission considers that the engine power expressed in kW is not being properly measured in many cases.

UK Government expects marine renewable energy to deliver 200/300 MW by 2020

In evidence to the house of commons energy and climate Change Committee on 12th December 2011 Greg Barker MP, Minister of State at the Department of Energy and Climate change made the following statement about the forecasted size of the UK marine renewable energy industry:

Greg Barker: "When the Coalition came to Government last year there were some very ambitious targets for marine. There were some large pots of money for marine. What is clear is that there was a total absence of delivery: neither were the targets anything close to what was potentially achievable by the industry, nor did they in any way reflect the actual progress that there had been on the ground.

"Basically, what I wanted to do was drive progress on the ground, which meant having a much more realistic strategy for deployment, implementation and funding. Also, we had to have an approach that took more into account than simply carbon abatement, particularly in relation to our 2020 target. Part of the reason for the lack of progress on the ground was that, at DECC, the wider context in which marine operated was very much the imperative of meeting our 2020 renewables targets. With the best will in the world, marine is not going to make a material contribution to meeting that very ambitious target. However, in the 2020s, and indeed in the 2030s and up to 2050, marine can make a very substantial contribution to our renewables portfolio. What is more, marine offers the UK a unique entry point into a global renewables market, in that the UK really is a global leader in this particular technology and there is a huge industrial potential that was not being reflected in the focus on marine.

"What I have endeavoured to do is drive forward the realistic deliverable deployment on the ground by working much more closely with the industry and being much more mindful of what we can help deliver at an industrial level, even if this is a longer timeframe than perhaps we have been used to in the past. If we do not start, we will never deliver that future potential.

"In terms of the roadmap you are right, Chair. The UK renewables roadmap quotes 200 to 300 MW by 2020, when the 2010 Marine Energy Action Plan suggested 1 to 2 GW. Some people have interpreted this as representing in some way a lack of ambition or a rowing back. The fact of the matter is the 200 to 300 MW by 2020 by no means represents a cap on our ambition. Instead, it is meant be a realistic most up-to-date projection, based on independent consultants' reports of what is actually in the pipeline and what is potentially deliverable. We are going to continue to monitor that, however, and if there is the opportunity to upgrade that realistic forecast we will certainly do so. I would be disappointed if the efforts we are making to drive progress in the sector do not result in an upgrade of the potential.

"The fact is that in May 2010, when we came into office, despite the high targets and the high numbers for potential funding, there were only 2 MW of marine energy devices deployed globally and almost all of that was in the UK. We are starting from an incredibly low base of actual deployment-effectively from a standing start-so we are trying to go from 2 MW to 200 to 300 MW. Certainly everyone that we talk to in the industry thinks this more realistic approach is going to actually deliver, and obviously it is delivery that is going to be the benchmark of success."

Plans to dredge Falmouth harbour likely to proceed

The dredging of Falmouth Harbour could begin in early 2013, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne has said.

The £20m dredging plan is part of Falmouth Harbour Commissioners (FHC) master plan to encourage cruise ships to use the port.

FHC has said the master plan will help create up to 800 jobs for Falmouth. Before the go-ahead is given, a scientific trial will have to establish that dredging will not damage protected seaweed beds.

Earlier this year, the plan had been blocked by the EU over environmental fears for the maerl [calcified seaweed] beds, which act as a nursery for commercial fish stocks. The beds only exists in a few coastal areas and can take thousands of years to form.

But FHC has said less than 2% of the maerl will be affected and it will be lifted before dredging and returned afterwards.

The Chancellor's Autumn Statement said a scientific trial to resolve the environmental issues had been agreed by FHC and the Marine Management Organisation (MMO). "A decision on the developer's marine licence application will follow if the trial succeeds," the chancellor said. "If this application is then successful, it is anticipated that development could proceed in early 2013."

Shipping CO₂ emissions should be included in UK carbon reduction targets

Greenhouse gas emissions from shipping should be counted in the UK's carbon targets, the government's chief climate change advisers have urged, because they will imperil efforts to control global warming if left to rise unchecked.

Including emissions from shipping is controversial, however — shipping and aviation were purposely omitted from the United Nations negotiations on emissions reduction, because of the difficulty of apportioning them to particular countries.

Carbon emissions from shipping should be counted in UK carbon targets, climate advisers warn. Photograph: Peter Maenhoudt/AP

Changing the rules on the UK's targets could mean Britain must cut its overall emissions at a faster rate than other countries, and will mean that other sectors — including road transport, agriculture and industry — have to cut their carbon by more than envisaged, to make up for the increase in emissions when shipping is taken into account.

The call for a rule change came from the Committee on Climate Change, the statutory body set up under the Climate Change Act to advise the government on how to meet the UK's 2050 target of an 80% cut in emissions, compared with 1990 levels.

The body — which some Conservative MPs wanted to axe — can only advise, but its advice is influential. This year, David Cameron was forced to face down opposition from some of his own party and sections of industry, in committing the UK to the stiff carbon budgets for the 2020s recommended by the CCC.

David Kennedy, chief executive of the committee, said: "It is clear that shipping emissions could well be significant, and so cannot be ignored — they should be included under the Climate Change Act. It is also clear that there is scope to reduce emissions, which would reduce costs of inclusion. In order to ensure this, the government should pro-actively support development of new policies aimed at encouraging investment in cleaner shipping technologies and more efficient operational practices."

According to CCC research published on Thursday morning, the UK's share of international shipping is likely to account for about 11% of the total carbon budget permitted under the Climate Change Act by 2050, representing about 18 megatonnes of carbon dioxide out of a total budget of 160 megatonnes, if the UK is to meet its government-set targets.

This would mean that emissions from other sections of the economy would have to be reduced, to compensate. That is likely to be unpopular with some sections of business, and there is likely to be a fierce battle over the CCC proposals, which MPs must decide on by the end of next year.

But the CCC insisted that there were many ways in which the shipping industry could be helped to reduce its greenhouse gas output. For instance, upgrades to engines and propulsion systems will improve efficiency, and new technology used to coat hulls can reduce fiction and cut fuel consumption. Ships can also be encouraged to travel more slowly, which would save fuel, while modern software can calculate more efficient routes, especially when combined with more accurate weather forecasts. Biofuels could also be used, though these are controversial.

Some of the more novel technologies suggested by the CCC include a form of return to the age of sail, using kites or new forms of sail to harness the winds.

One option to encourage the uptake of these technologies would be to include shipping in the European Union's emissions trading scheme, in the same way that international aviation is to be included from next year. However, that option has been put on hold by the European commission at present, in part because of the difficulties of pushing through the inclusion of aviation. The US, China and other governments are threatening a trade war with the EU over the issue, arguing that forcing airlines to buy carbon permits for what they emit amounts to a tax and is therefore illegal under international law.

Environmental groups say that continuing to exclude aviation and shipping emissions from international consideration makes a mockery of efforts to stave off climate change.

Another difficulty still to be resolved is accurately assessing emissions from shipping. The CCC suggested that including shipping in carbon targets could be put off until "progress has been made on a methodology to accurately reflect international shipping emissions." The shipping industry has been promising to co-operate on such an assessment for years, and to introduce voluntary initiatives to cut carbon, but to date these have had little effect.

Gulf of Mexico Bluefin tuna "probably okay after BP oil spill"

Last year's BP oil spill probably won't push the troubled bluefin tuna population in the Gulf of Mexico over the edge as some scientists had worried, a federal analysis shows.

Of all the potential damage from the 172-million-gallon (651-million-litre) spill in April 2010, scientists had been most concerned about how the oil spill would harm an already overfished species of large tuna. That's because about one-fifth of the spawning habitat where the Gulf's baby tuna were living was coated with oil, according to satellite records. Tuna less than a year old are most vulnerable to pollution.

An analysis by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), using two different projections from computer models, says that at most, such a spill probably would result in a 4 percent reduction in future spawning of the fish, but probably far less.

Bluefish tuna is considered one of the Gulf's signature species. A summit that begins Monday in Houston will examine the Gulf's health, including the government's restoration plans and the tuna's fate.

"It appears so far that the impact on the larval population is relatively small," said Clay Porch, director of sustainable fisheries for NOAA's South-east Fisheries Science Centre in Miami.

The agency's analysis, which was mentioned in two pages of a 114-page government update on overall tuna health released in May, is based on an assumption that 1 in 5 baby tuna was killed or unable to reproduce in the future because that's the size of the spill in the spawning area. That 20 percent potential loss of year-old tuna translates to 4 percent of the overall tuna population in the future. Overall population figures also have to factor in the fact that in general many baby tuna at that age die naturally. But that is probably way too high a figure, Porch said in an interview.

Instead of 20 percent of baby tuna being harmed, more recent analysis yet to be published said it should be 11 percent or maybe even 5 percent, he said. Those figures should be reduced even more for the overall future population of tuna, down nearer to 2 percent. At most that number should be 1 in 9 or even in 1 in 20 deaths of baby tuna, and that's only the effect on one year for the long-lived tuna.

Those smaller figures are based on larval surveys that have not been released publicly because of a potential court case with BP over damages from the spill, and more simulations "that are conditioned on real data," Porch said.

Porch said it's unlikely that the effect on tuna stock would hit 4 percent and "it is not an additional major source of stress" on the overall population of the bluefin tuna in the Gulf. Other work on baby tuna health will be published in peer reviewed science journals. But that's only the young. So far NOAA doesn't know how the spill affected adults and whether adults of all ages were killed or made infertile in massive numbers that could have a bigger effect on the overall population than the oiling of one year's worth of young, Porch said.

Boris Worm, a fisheries professor at Dalhousie University in Canada who has warned of problems with tuna populations in the past, said the NOAA figures are within the yearly variations of mortality for tuna. "So it will be a bad year, but not a catastrophic year," Worm said. "This wouldn't push them over the brink."

Former NOAA chief scientist Sylvia Earle, a renowned ocean explorer who has campaigned against overfishing of tuna, isn't convinced that bluefin tuna weathered the oil slick. "I think it's too early to celebrate a possible greater survival than had been predicted. These are, after all, models," Earle said. "The truth is we don't have enough information to be able to clearly say one way or another what happened to the 2010 class of baby tuna."

Gulf scientists have wondered for months about the health of the bluefin tuna, said Larry McKinney, executive director of the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi. "They are sentinel species that gives us an idea of the health of the open ocean, where we don't know a lot," McKinney said.

Marine Conservation Society questions the Government's commitment to protect UK seas

The Marine Conservation Society (MCS) is calling into question the Government's promise to protect English seas after Defra admitted it will fail to meet an international commitment of Marine Protected Areas by 2012.

The charity's concern follows a statement by Environment Minister, Richard Benyon, MP, on Tuesday 15th November 2011, of a delay to the public consultation, and therefore the designation, of Marine Conservation Zones (MCZ) around the English coast, because of a lack of evidence from the regional projects involved in the process.

MCS says the delay in designation of a network of MCZs in England until 2013, will be hugely disappointing to the million people involved in the three year long process, which has cost over eight million pounds. MCS says the written statement, from Environment Minister Richard Benyon, is both encouraging and concerning.

MCS Senior Biodiversity Policy Officer, Dr Jean-Luc Solandt, says the fact that the public consultation at the end of 2012 will include all sites recommended by the Regional Projects is good news, however getting to that point may not be plain sailing, because a new more robust evidence base is required for each site to ensure they are designated.

"Defra says advice from the Science Advisory Panel indicates a number of 'gaps and limitations in the scientific evidence base supporting the MCZ recommendations'. We want to know how many more millions, and how much more time will need to be spent to ensure Defra gets the evidence it is seeking. This is hugely frustrating, as the process has already eliminated some of the best sites for biodiversity protection because of over-riding economic interests of the industry stakeholders in the room."

MCS received over half a million messages of support for marine reserves during 2009. The charity had representatives on all four regional MCZ projects between 2009 and 2011 and provided evidence of wider society support for protection via its Your Seas Your Voice website.

Dr Solandt says that MCS, having been closely involved with the regional projects, believes they have considered all the best available scientific evidence for the sites, but this was not adequately described in the final reports; "We urge Defra to get together with key scientists and conservation agencies involved in the regional processes to review the available evidence used for each draft MCZ so that we can confidently designate key sites. Let's hope this saves the vast majority of UK sites that have been put forward."

MARINET observes: MARINET supports the concern expressed by the Marine Conservation Society.

However the problem arises because the UK Government did not hold true to its commitment, given to Parliament at the time of the Marine and Coastal Access Act legislation in 2009 which creates Marine Conservation Zones (MCZs), that the MCZ identification process would be "led by the science".

What this means is that if the Government's commitment had been honoured, then the Government's statutory nature conservations organisations (Natural England and JNCC) would have been required to state at the very beginning of the identification process where, on the basis of the science, they would have liked the MCZs to be located. Instead, the Government (Defra) allowed the commercial and industrial users of the sea and fishermen to record, before any other process got underway, all those areas where they would not favour MCZs being located.

As a result, only after commercial interests had been given their say, did the identification of MCZs in the remaining areas of the sea proceed. In other words, science and scientific knowledge did not lead the process.

Now, with the a set of MCZs having been submitted to Government (Defra, and Natural England/JNCC) it has become apparent that the scientific basis for the designations is not as robust as it should be. If the Government had led with the science, as it promised Parliament, and had not allowed commercial users of the sea an influential first say in the identification process then this delay, and the possible dilution of the designation of the final set MCZs, would not now be an issue of serious concern to marine conservation organisations.

We must trust that the UK Government will still hold firm to its commitment to be "led by the science". If this is so, confidence will be restored. However, at the present time the final outcome remains disconcertingly unclear.

Australia announces plan for world's biggest marine reserve

Australia has announced plans for the world's biggest marine park, intended to protect vast areas of the Coral Sea off the north-east coast and the site of naval battles during the second world war.

The Australian marine park will protect green turtle nesting sites. Photograph: Getty Images

The environment minister, Tony Burke, said the park would cover an area almost the size of France and Germany combined and would help to protect fish, coral reefs and nesting sites for seabirds and the green turtle.

"The environmental significance of the Coral Sea lies in its diverse array of coral reefs, sandy cays, deep sea plains and canyons," Burke said. "It contains more than 20 outstanding examples of isolated tropical reefs, sandy cays and islands."

The park would also cover ships sunk in the Battle of the Coral Sea, a series of naval engagements between Japanese, US and Australian forces in 1942, considered the world's first aircraft carrier battles. Three US ships were known to have sunk in the north-eastern area of the Coral Sea — the USS Lexington, the USS Sims and the USS Neosho, Burke said.

The government will finalise the limits that will be imposed on the Coral Sea marine park, which will be within Australia's economic zone, in 90 days.

The world's current largest reserve was established by Britain last year around the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, which includes coral atoll The Great Chagos Bank.

EU Parliament rejects Western Sahara offshore fisheries agreement

The EU fisheries in Western Sahara has been voted down in the European Parliament.

Reports made for the European Commission have shown that the EU fisheries in Western Sahara are a complete waste of EU taxpayers' money, and contribute to destruction of marine life offshore Western Sahara. EU fleet must now return from Western Sahara.

The plenary vote in the European Parliament over European Union fisheries in Western Sahara took place on 14th December.

The parliament voted over whether to accept the 1 year extension of the EU fisheries in Western Sahara. The agreement is entered into between the EU and Western Sahara's occupying power Morocco. The extension was approved by a tiny minority in the Council of Ministers in June, as the former 2007-2011 agreement expired in March.

Reports done for the European Commission have showed that the EU fisheries in Western Sahara are a complete waste of EU's taxpayers money, and contribute to destruction of marine life offshore Western Sahara. In addition, the Parliament's own legal service had already concluded that the agreement is in violation of international law, since Western Sahara is not part of Morocco, and the people of the territory have never approved the fisheries.

In November, both the parliament's Budget Committee and the Development Committee recommended that the fisheries be stopped. In the Fisheries Committee, the rapporteur Carl Haglund from Finland also recommended a rejection. However, a small minority of the fisheries committee managed to change the conclusion of the Haglund report so it appeared in favour instead of rejecting the agreement.

The vote was over whether to approve or reject the changed and nonsensical Haglund report which had been amended to accept the controversial fisheries.

The result was that 326 voted against the report, thus demanding the fisheries to stop, with 296 parliamentarians, mostly following the Spanish fishing interests, voting in favour of the Haglund report, and 58 abstained.

The consequence is that the EU fleet has to immediately stop fisheries in Western Sahara and return home from the occupied territories of Western Sahara.

"This is a complete victory for the Saharawi people. The parliament has refused to blindly follow the interests of the Spanish fisheries industry. We expect this to have consequences for the Parliament's handling of future agreements with Morocco that involve the territory of Western Sahara. The UN has clearly stated that the Saharawi people has a right to be consulted on such issues", stated Sara Eyckmans of Western Sahara Resource Watch.

Spanish fisheries interests are already pushing for a new and illegal 4 year fisheries agreement in the occupied waters from beginning of 2012. Morocco has lobbied hard for the continuation of the fisheries offshore the territory it illegally occupied in 1975.

Western Sahara Resource Watch has been working since 2006 to stop the EU fisheries in the occupied Western Sahara.

Evidence from S. Africa on how climate change affects fishing

African fishing is almost always done by men, with the women being left on shore to work in the canning and processing factories. Not in Ocean View, near Cape Town in south Africa. Here the South African fisher-women's association, drawn largely from some of the poorest townships, has 75 members aged 28-52. They each own a small 5 metre-long boat and go one mile out in the giant Atlantic swells two or three times a week to catch crayfish, or rock lobsters.

The fish sell in restaurants for a fabulous $60 a kilogram, but these subsistence fishers have strict quotas and see little of that after deductions. The women are allowed to land only 800kg of fish a year and can only go to sea in a short season and when the weather allows.

"That's not so often now," says Sahra Luyt, chair of the group. "The whole marine environment around here has begun to change since we started only about 20 years ago."

On the road to Durban COP17: Fisherwomen Association on the Kommetjie beach, Cape Town, South Africa

A member of the South African Fisher-women Association on the Kommetjie beach near Cape Town. Photograph: Thys Dullaart/Oxfam

According to the women, the seas have become rougher, the storms now blow up faster and are more intense, the sea water temperature has increased and the winds are stronger. "We are seeing fish that we never saw before, like sharks and octopus," says Luyt.

The women are not scientists and know that fish stocks are affected by quota systems, poaching, over-fishing by big foreign trawlers, and phenomena that effect global sea temperatures, such as El Niño and La Nina. But they are convinced that climate change now plays a part in their work.

"We the fisher people know what we see, and we can see changes. The lobsters are hibernating for longer, and their shells are softer and more fragile than they were. Their breeding cycles are being disrupted. The sea temperature is definitely warmer than it used to be. "The seas are much rougher these days and people are scared to go out. The wind comes up bigger than before. The weather patterns seem to have changed too." All this means there is a decline in the quality of the lobsters — which means there are fewer to catch and harder to sell.

African fishing is particularly vulnerable to climate change but very little work has been done to monitor temperatures, trends or changes, says Tabeth Chiuta, former IUCN director and now regional head of the WorldFish research group supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (Cgiar). An international study in 2009, led by Edward Allison identified 33 fish-dependent countries around the world as "highly" vulnerable to the salinisation of freshwater habitats, temperature rises and costal storms. Most were least developed countries, including Bangladesh, Guinea, Malawi, Pakistan, Peru, Senegal, Uganda, and Yemen. Not included were dozens of small island states and people who depend on subsistence fishing.

But with 200 million Africans believed to be dependent on fishing for a large part of their diet, the need for research is imperative, she says. "If sea temperatures increase by just 1.5C, the effect on coral reefs, where many fish breed, could be devastating. Climate change will affect ocean currents with sea levels rising and storms intensifying; it will have an impact on rainfall, river flows, and changing lake levels. It will further lead to the acidification of water sources, calcification and coral bleaching," said Chiuta.

Climate change could lead in some places to benefits, says Chiuta. Flooding can both destroy aquaculture facilities at the same time extend the range of fish breeding grounds. "There has been an over emphasis on looking at the potential effects of climate change on crops. Now it must be a priority to look at climate change and fishing. Most of the information we have is based on people's experiences. There is definitely sense in what local people say, but we really need to isolate the impact of climate change from the natural variability of the climate in Africa. After all, so many lives depend on it."

Japanese tsunami fund "used for whaling programme"

Japan has used funds from its tsunami recovery budget to subsidise its controversial annual whaling programme, environmental activists say. Greenpeace says 2.3bn yen ($30m; £19m) from a budget of 12.1 trillion yen is being used to fund extra security. Japanese officials argued when they applied for extra funding that whaling helped coastal communities.

A Japanese ship injures a whale with its first harpoon. Photograph: Kate Davidson/EPA/Corbis

The whaling fleet has reportedly headed for Antarctic waters, though Tokyo has not confirmed the reports.

There has been a ban on commercial whaling for 25 years, but Japan catches about 1,000 whales each year in what it says is a scientific research programme. Critics say those claims are just a cover for a commercial operation, and accuse the Japanese of hunting the animals to the brink of extinction only for food.

Activists from the Sea Shepherd group have attacked the fleet as part of their campaign against whaling. Last year Japanese abandoned its programme before it was completed, citing "harassment" from the group.

Earlier this year, the Japanese Fisheries Agency applied to the government for extra funding for its programme from the emergency budget aimed at helping communities recover from the devastating tsunami and earthquake. The agency argued that some of the towns and villages affected relied on whaling for their livelihoods. Activists say the agency's funding request was approved and it has spent the money on extra security and covering its debts.

Junichi Sato, from Greenpeace Japan, told Australia's ABC that there was no link between the whaling programme and the tsunami recovery. "It is simply used to cover the debts of the whaling programme, because the whaling programme itself has been suffering from big financial problems," he said.

The Australian and New Zealand governments have both criticised Japan's decision to continue whaling. They are both considering sending vessels to monitor the whaling fleet. Sea Shepherd activists have promised to carry on their campaign against the whaling fleet.

Campaign to make London a "sustainable fish city"

Sustainable Fish City reports on its website: "Sustainable Fish City is an initiative conceived and supported by an alliance of not-for-profit organisations already working on sustainable seafood issues. Some also run advisory or support services that can help businesses to develop sustainable seafood policies and practices. We want London to become the first ever Sustainable Fish City, to show what can be done if people and organisations make a concerted effort to change their buying habits. Find out more about the targets we aim to reach before we declare London a Sustainable Fish City."

Sustainable fish marketing undermined by confusing labelling

Confusing and meaningless labelling is undermining much of the positive work supermarkets are are doing to source and promote sustainable fish, according to a new survey, which claims some retailers show "a blatant disregard" to where their products come from.

Sustainable fishing : Cornish Fisherman Chris Bean catches a fish in his nets

Confusing labelling is undermining positive work done by supermarkets to promote sustainable fish, says the Marine Conservation Society. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

The greenest policies also often apply only to own-brand seafood and fish — not everything sold in store, including tinned and frozen fish — according to the latest supermarket seafood survey from the Marine Conservation Society (MCS).

The research sees the Co-operative and Marks & Spencer tying for the top spot, a gold rating, marking continued success for the Co-op, hailed by the MCS for "good" labelling and for selling nothing from the MCS "fish to avoid" list — which includes skate, eel and bluefin tuna.

M&S has the most comprehensive seafood policy of all retailers covering all fish sold in store, not just its own brand. But the MCS notes its labelling policy is still falling short, and needs improving.

Sainsbury's and Waitrose picked up silver, behind M&S and the Co-op. However, none of the other eight supermarkets which took part in the survey reached the bronze criteria, while some retailers refused to take part in the research at all.

Scoring reasonably well were Morrisons, Tesco and Iceland, but they all failed to meet the bronze criteria set by MCS, as many sell either too much fish from the charity's Fish to Avoid list.

The MCS, fisheries officer, David Parker said: "The 2011 survey has thrown up both positives and negatives. Some supermarkets are really working on their seafood polices with a positive attitude towards improvement — although most policies disappointingly only refer to their own brands. Many supermarkets are working hard on their farmed and wild caught fish sourcing. However, labelling continues to be a stumbling block for almost all retailers."

The MCS's complaints about labelling echo the findings of other research by Which? and environmental law group Client Earth.

Channel 4's Fish Fight campaign of this year — led by the food writer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall — highlighted the issue of sustainability, prompting a significant increase in sales of "alternative" species of fish and seafood at the end of January.

The Co-operative Ethical Consumerism report — due to published this Thursday — will show that last year, sales of fish from sustainable sources grew by 16.3%, from £178m to £207m. That was twice the rate for total fish sales which increased 8.2% in the same period.

Globally, 85% of fish stocks are fully fished or overfished, while only eight out 47 fish stocks in UK waters are currently in a healthy state.

Polar oceanographer explains the science behind climate change

The Open University reports: "The science of climate change has been much in the headlines again over the last few weeks. COP17 in Durban, climate sceptics questioning the science of global warming and the release of 5,000 further 'Climategate' e-mails have kept the arguments blazing. The Open University asked Dr Mark Brandon, Polar Oceanographer and Senior Lecturer in Environmental Science, to explain what scientists have observed about temperature changes and how it affects the Polar Regions."

Question: Satellite observations show the extent of Arctic sea ice has declined over the last 30 years, but that overall Antarctic sea ice has been expanding over the same period. Is there a problem then?

Answer: The changes in the Arctic sea ice are not balanced by the changes in the Antarctic sea ice. It is the volume of Arctic sea ice that is critical. We have extremely good records of the ice thickness and ice extent. It is a fact that the extent of sea ice in the Arctic is decreasing in both thickness and extent — so the volume of Arctic ice is decreasing — and these changes in the Arctic are huge.

In the Antarctic it is true that the extent of ice has increased — but by a relatively small amount and we don't know enough about the thickness to derive the volume. If you combine the Arctic sea ice and the Antarctic sea ice changes to create a record of the total global ice then you get this picture.

The global trend of sea ice downwards and about 36,000 km² per year. There has been a net loss of over a million square kilometres of global sea ice extent since satellite records began The mean volume of arctic sea ice has decreased by something around 50% since the start of the satellite record.

A recent publication in Nature described the loss of Arctic sea as: "The duration and magnitude of the current decline in sea ice seem to be unprecedented for the past 1,450 years"

Question: Is it true that polar bear populations are rising, and not falling as reported?

Answer: Many bear populations are dropping, as we say. Longer summers with no ice are probably the main reason why many polar bear populations are dropping. So what is happening to the bears? Different things in different parts of the Arctic, but here is what the Polar Bear Specialist Group of the IUCN Species Survival Commission say about it:

In 2009, of the 19 recognised sub-populations of polar bears, 8 are in decline, 1 is increasing, 3 are stable and 7 don't have enough data to draw any conclusions. Figure 1 below compares the data for 2005 and 2009.

It is clear that the area of red (bear population trend decreasing) has significantly increased from 2005 to 2009 and the area of green (bear population trend increasing).

Question: Recent research findings show that the increased evaporation from the Arctic ocean, as a result of warming, will cause more cloud cover, thus counteracting its adverse effect, so isn't that good news?

Answer: Cloud feedback is not thought to be as strongly negative feedback, so this argument is outdated and fundamentally wrong.

The idea is that clouds reflect the solar radiation from the planet which would mean there would be less reaching the ground to warm up. It is a nice simple idea but this view is outdated and very likely completely wrong.

It depends on where the clouds form. Low altitude clouds will reflect more heat whereas high altitude ones trap it. Overall there is an increasing amount of evidence that increasing the overall cloud cover will actually increase the warming.

Question: There have been reports of a modest increase in mean global temperature (about half a degree Centigrade) during the last quarter of the 20th century. For this century, the UK Met Office and World Meteorological Office said there has been no further global warming. Have we stopped the trend?

Answer: Global mean temperature is not polar mean temperatures and it is inaccurate to quote the former when referring to the latter

The global mean temperature is derived from averaging data from all over the planet. Some parts are warming and some are cooling. Overall the global trend is relentlessly upwards.

Focussing on a very short timescale, e.g. 10 years, would not be an accurate reflection of the global trend which is relentlessly upwards. So let's look at the Arctic. This is the trend of annual average Arctic temperature for a meteorological data set from the National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in the range 80-90N over the last 60 years.

UK government says more time is needed to identify MCZs, but NGOs express concern

Efforts to set up a network of protected areas around the UK's seas have been delayed, the government has admitted. Environment minister, Richard Benyon said the government was still fully committed to creating "marine conservation zones" in UK waters, but there were a "number of gaps and limitations" in the scientific evidence for the 127 proposed areas. But conservationists criticised the delay as "unacceptable" and warned the government was failing to protect important habitats and wildlife.

A small spiny seahorse (Hippocampus guttulatus) in a seagrass bed, one of the many species that could protected by the proposed marine conservation zones. Photograph: Lin Baldock/Natural England/PA

In a written ministerial statement, Benyon said that government bodies Natural England and the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC) would be providing their advice to government on the proposed zones six months later than planned. A public consultation on all the sites would be conducted towards the end of next year, with the first conservation zones designated in 2013, he said.

Some 127 proposed marine conservation zones (MCZs) have been drawn up by four regional groups as part of efforts to develop a network of areas designed to improve the protection of the marine environment. They range from a 2,200 square mile (5,698 sq km) site offshore in the south-west of UK waters which could be designated to protect seabed habitats, to around 100 acres (40.5 hectares) of coastal saltmarsh, saline reedbeds and mud flats in an estuary in the North Sea.

Benyon said that while the regional projects, made up of conservation organisations, fishing and marine industry representatives, leisure groups and other interested parties, had done excellent work, it was clear from the advice of an independent scientific advisory panel that there were gaps in the evidence supporting their recommendations. "It is important that we get this right. It is vital that we have an adequate evidence base for every site if we are to create successful, well-managed marine conservation zones. An adequately robust evidence base will be essential when we come to implement management measures."

He said the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs would be commissioning significant additional work, including an in-depth review of all the recommendations, and that extra resources would go to carry out seabed and habitat monitoring. He said some zones could be designated fairly quickly where there was enough evidence for them but others would need more investigation.

The Wildlife Trusts, which last week raised concerns that the government was set to push ahead with designating just 23 of the proposed areas, welcomed the news that all 127 would be in the consultation. But Joan Edwards, of the Wildlife Trusts, said: "Despite international evidence for the urgent need to protect our seas, the minister's statement will result in further unacceptable delay." She said Defra appeared to be changing the level of evidence required after two years of the process, and that if more data were needed it could be gathered during consultation or after designation. "We are disappointed that we now face a further delay of at least 12 months when more damage to marine habitats will continue to occur."

Kate Sugar, marine policy officer with the RSPB, said: "Two years ago, we were delighted that the importance of marine conservation — the Cinderella of UK wildlife protection — was finally recognised with the introduction of the UK Marine & Coastal Access Act. "However, the latest position looks like Cinderella has returned from riches to rags — as far as English waters are concerned — as the government shows no ambition for providing a comprehensive network of marine protected sites to protect species as diverse as seahorses, corals, seabirds, whales and dolphins in a timely fashion.

Call to protect 25% of our seas by marine reserves

Paul Gompertz, a director at Devon Wildlife Trust, writes in The Guardian, 9th November 2011: "Our marine environment is facing a defining moment. We are an island nation set in the midst of what were once some of the most productive seas on the planet. But a report earlier this year from the Independent Panel on the State of our Oceans (IPSO) warns us that the decline in the vitality of our oceans is in fact worse than our direst predictions. The pressing question is — what are we going to do about it?"

The collapse of our oceans will hurt a great deal more than easing the pressure from fishing and shipping. Photograph: Corbis

"Fishing used to be a battle against the elements in which every success was hard won and most fish escaped. While it can still be a battle against the elements, improved catch techniques and equipment mean that most fish don't escape. We may be getting better and better at catching, but it is taking more and more effort — about 17 times more than at the end of the 19th century, when the downward trend in fish stocks began in earnest.

"But hugely reducing the fish stocks isn't the only thing we have done over the past 100 years. We have also disturbed vast areas of sea bed and destroyed rich habitats which has further reduced the productivity of the seas. We have poured effluents and pesticides and mining residues into the sea via our estuaries. We have removed gravel and oil and sand and gas. We have caused the temperature of our seas to rise, disrupting marine systems. In short, we have exploited the sea mercilessly and everywhere. This once huge larder, climate regulator, heat exchanger and absorber of carbon is stressed beyond endurance.

"There is only one sensible answer for a human race intent on surviving as long as possible. We must nurse it back to health and productivity — we must manage it sustainably.

"One vital step in that management is to create marine sanctuaries, places where damaging human activity is not allowed. Who would argue against the idea that 25% of the sea should largely be left to its own devices, with human beings "only" allowing themselves exploitation of the remaining 75%? We have one last chance to get this right; can't we, in the interests of future generations and the health of our planet, confine ourselves to three-quarters?

"It would seem not. The proposal before the UK government to establish a network of marine protected areas covering 22% of our inshore waters is being undermined from every direction, largely on the grounds that short-term human self-interest is more important than long term sustainability.

"There are two broad threads to this argument. One says that we don't have enough evidence to define protected areas accurately, so until we can we should carry on as before. Damage until you can manage. However, the reverse now needs to be true. If we don't know enough about an area to exploit it without damage, we should keep out. If you can't manage, don't damage. At least one-quarter needs to be protected urgently, to avoid disaster. So let's protect the quarter currently being proposed, and then seek to refine the network of protected areas as more evidence becomes available.

"The other argument — one which is being advanced by some MPs in the south-west — says that some of the sites selected require too much human sacrifice — mainly economic sacrifice — to be realistic. This is perpetuating the very thinking which brought us to our current state of imminent collapse. There must be change, we must exploit less, we must ease the pressure on our seas. This means that some activities will be reduced. Less pressure from fishing, less pressure from shipping, less pressure from extractive industries. There are bound to be places where this will hurt. But it is manageable hurt. Collapse of our oceans is not manageable and will hurt a great deal for a great many people. We must choose the lesser of two evils now, while we still have the chance.

Sea Shepherd commences new campaign in the Southern Ocean

Sea Shepherd is about to commence its eighth campaign to the Southern Ocean this December to defend whales against the Japanese whaling fleet.

Asked in an interview on the Sea Shepherd website as to how many more campaigns Sea Shepherd proposes to undertake in the Southern Ocean to defend whales, Captain Paul Watson says: "That depends on how many times the Japanese whalers intend to return. As long as they attempt to kill whales in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary, we intend to continue returning to oppose them. Every year we have gone down stronger than the year before and every year the whalers have gone down weaker than the year before. Our objective from the beginning was to sink the Japanese whaling fleet economically — to bankrupt them. We have done that. They continue to operate only because of massive Japanese government subsidies. We return every year to save as many whale lives as possible and to negate any profits from whaling by the Japanese. We intend to continue to oppose the Japanese whalers until they permanently depart from the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. I will die a very happy man if I can help make this happen."

Asked about last year's campaign, called Operation No Compromise, in the Southern Ocean, Captain Paul Watson said: " Operation No Compromise was indeed a great success. We found the Japanese fleet early, we were able to block their operations and thus shut down their whaling activities. We chased the Nisshin Maru for over 3,000 miles until they finally gave up and went home six weeks earlier than they planned. Most importantly, the Japanese fleet was only able to take 17% of their kill quota and we saved 870 whales. Negated profits and saving the lives of hundreds of whales is a great victory indeed.

"From the beginning, our objective was to sink the whaling fleet economically by bankrupting the industry. We have accomplished that objective, as the Japanese whaling fleet is now tens of millions of dollars in debt. For all intents and purposes, we defeated the fleet economically. Unfortunately, we have not yet defeated the Japanese whaling fleet politically.

"Although we hoped that the whalers would not return in December 2011, we were prepared for them to do just that, knowing that they could only do so with huge Japanese government subsidies. The whalers have been given their subsidies including the equivalent of $30 million USD specifically budgeted to oppose Sea Shepherd. What does this mean? We shall soon see when we return to the Southern Ocean in December."

Asked about whether Sea Shepherd is alone in the Southern Ocean or receives any other assistance, Captain Paul Watson replied: "Yes we are alone. We have repeatedly requested co-operation from Greenpeace. They refuse to acknowledge us. We have asked for New Zealand and Australia to send ships down to at least observe the situation and to be on hand in the event of a tragedy. After all, many of our crew members are Australians and New Zealanders. But I suppose that if what we do was not dangerous, difficult, or controversial everyone would be down there. Being alone down there is not a problem, it would be nice to get some support but we do what we do with the resources and support base that we have available to us. However, it is irritating that governments obstruct us and that Greenpeace publicly condemns us. It is especially irritating that Greenpeace also raises tens of millions of dollars each year from the public to save the whales of the Southern Ocean and yet they have not sent a ship there for years.

"When I think of the whales that we have saved, and the whales that we will be able to save once again this year, I have no doubt that our strategies and tactics have, and will continue to prove successful. I'm not interested in winning a popularity contest; our concern is to save lives despite the criticisms and the controversy. The bottom line is that we have never injured anyone, we have no intention of injuring anyone, and we operate within the boundaries of the law. Saving lives lawfully without inflicting physical injuries to the whalers is what I think to be a very responsible and effective approach.

"We are also experienced in being self-reliant and safety for our crew is of paramount consideration. We have not suffered any serious injuries despite seven voyages to the most hostile and remote seas in the world."

The full text of the inteview with Captain Paul Watson can be read on the Sea Shepherd website.

Note: For further details about the protection of whales and their survival in the oceans, also visit the MARINET "Planet Ocean" webpage www.marinet.org.uk/planetocean.html.

Whales, dolphins and seals now visiting British seas due to ocean warming

The waters around the British Isles could soon be home to several new species of mammals as a rising number of foreign visitors are being reported around our coasts. Experts believe the rare sightings of cetaceans from tropical climes could mean sea creatures are scouting for new territories to settle as global warming takes effect on sea temperatures.

A melon-headed whale, which normally lives in tropical waters, was spotted in the English Channel

A melon-headed whale, which normally lives in tropical waters and eats squid, was spotted in the English Channel. Photograph: Gerard Soury/Getty Images

Animals from the tropics, including the dwarf sperm whale, the pygmy sperm whale, and the Fraser's dolphin have all made recent appearances here, and the Cuvier's beaked whale, another warm-water species, has been recorded increasingly regularly in the west of Britain. The melon-headed whale, a squid-loving relative of the killer whale, has been seen in the Channel, off the coast of Brittany. Before too long we may see giants such as the 16-metre gray whale nudging into deep water around Cornwall and into the Irish Sea.

"We are now seeing a number of species far from home, and they probably will continue to recur with increasing frequency," said Peter Evans, director of the Sea Watch Foundation. "Several are normally found off west Africa. For the moment they tend to be seen at times of year when our sea temperatures are at their warmest. Whales and dolphins can cope with a wide range of temperatures but their fish and squid prey tend to be more constrained, and their ranges are extending significantly northwards."

He said cetaceans would follow their favourite food, and many species rare in colder waters just a decade ago had moved into British seas. This autumn a dwarf sperm whale was spotted in Mounts Bay, Cornwall, while a pygmy sperm whale, its close relative, was found beached on Seil island, near Oban. "They were both very big surprises: they are rarely seen even where the populations are known to exist," said Evans. "If the fish are extending their range, as we know many are, then the whales and dolphins will follow. Anchovies, for example, were really quite scarce in the North Sea 10-20 years ago. Now they are widespread and may be why the common dolphin is now a regular in the North Sea. The behaviour of different fish, if they shoal or don't shoal, for example, requires a fair bit of understanding, so once a species has learned a feeding strategy they will follow rather than learn a new technique for a new prey."

Evans believes we may soon see a visitor that disappeared from the Atlantic in the 17th century — the grey whale. "They migrate up the west coast of north America, from Mexico and California up to the Arctic and, of course, could go no further. But now the Northwest Passage is open it is very possible they may cross the North Atlantic. "Gray whales were seen last year off the coast of Israel and off Barcelona this year. Such a remarkable appearance in such a strange location reinforces the pattern we are seeing."

Twenty-nine species of dolphin and whale have been recorded this century in British or Irish territorial waters. The common dolphin, striped dolphin, minke whale and humpback whale are among those species where numbers sighted have increased since 1980.

But it is not just the whales moving north into warmer seas; we are also seeing mammals coming down from colder climes. Bearded seals from the Arctic have been seen off the coast of Fife, east Scotland, said Callan Duck, a senior research scientist at the Scottish Oceans Institute at St Andrews University. "The change in climate and the food chains is definitely having an impact in the species we are seeing, but I think you have to remember to factor in how much better we are at spotting and recording these mammals. Good digital cameras are really accessible now, and so everybody has the opportunity to identify what they have seen — so the whole process of reporting sightings is much more accurate and efficient."

MARINET launches new "Planet Ocean" page on its website

The Marine Network of Friends of the Earth, MARINET, has launched a new page, Planet Ocean, on its website which features film, visual material, and key educational information about the range of British marine life and the issues affecting British seas.

The illustrated feature on Whales, courtesy of material from the BBC, Sea Shepherd and elsewhere, explains the conservation status of the main whale species in our oceans, and charts the present situation regarding these mammals' protection and survival.

The Guide to British Marine Animals explains the main types and classes of marine animals to be found in British seas, and is illustrated courtesy of photographs by the marine photographer, Paul Naylor.

The "Ocean Planet" booklet is an original MARINET publication, with simply written text and many illustrations. It outlines the special importance of the seas and oceans to the ecological stability of our planet, the severe pressure that this planetary ecosystem is now under, and recommends radical changes in the perception and management principles for our seas and oceans. The ideas expressed here are fully researched, and are at the cutting edge of new thinking in solving the ecological crisis currently facing The Earth — or, The Ocean Planet.

The video on Marine Aggregate Dredging, courtesy of a range of British television programmes on this subject, is a film record of the evidence and arguments which surround the very controversial practice of supplying our construction aggregate (sand and gravel) by dredging the seabed for this material.

The evidence shows that enormous damage is caused by this activity, both to our coasts via erosion and to the habitats and ecology of our seas. The video's message is clear : this is an unsustainable extractive industry, and we are paying an enormous environmental and ecological price.

The MARINET website www.marinet.org.uk provides a premier news service, and is a marine library of considerable depth available to both students and campaigners, and it is now archived by the British Library. Details of how to join MARINET, free of charge, are on the website.

Duchy of Cornwall to contest legal ruling over oyster bed in Fal estuary

Prince Charles is to challenge a judicial ruling that threatens to expose the environmental impact of the private estate that provides his £17m-a-year income. The Prince's lawyers have sought leave to appeal against a judgement made earlier this month that concluded the Duchy of Cornwall should release environmental information about its operations because it is effectively a public authority.

The Prince of Wales is to challenge a ruling which threatens to expose operations about the environmental impact of his private estate. Photograph: Geoff Moore /Rex Features

The ruling promised to lift the veil of secrecy around the prince's £700m hereditary estate that has been in place for hundreds of years, and allow the public to use environmental freedom of information laws to inquire about its activities. It was handed down by John Angel, principal judge at the information tribunal after a test case brought by an environmental campaigner in Cornwall.

Michael Bruton was concerned about the duchy leasing waters for farming non-native oysters in the Lower Fal and Helford intertidal area. He asked the duchy what assessments it had made of the environmental impact of the lease. The duchy refused to answer, saying it was a private estate.

But the judge said he believed that no assessment had been carried out and ruled the Duchy must release information because it was a public authority. He said a key reason it should be considered was that it provides public funding to the Prince of Wales, it operates as the harbour authority in the Scilly Isles and has the role of dealing with intestacy and company failure in the county of Cornwall, which were effectively public rôles.

Clarence House has confirmed that Jonathan Crow QC, Charles' attorney general, and the duchy "have sought permission to appeal the decision which found that the Duchy is a 'public authority' for the purposes of the Environmental Information Regulations [Act] 2004".

Michael Bruton said he would fight any appeal and has launched a fundraising campaign to meet his legal bills which are likely to run into the tens of thousands of pounds and more if the case reaches the high court. "The duchy should be open about its environmental impact because the Prince of Wales has made his career out of saying environmental protection is key to man's survival on the planet," he said. "It is a great pity that we don't know whether the duchy practices what he preaches."

The latest legal battle over Charles's secrecy comes as the information tribunal deliberates on a separate case in which the Guardian is fighting the information commissioner and government ministries over the refusal to release correspondence from Charles to ministers in seven Whitehall departments under the Freedom of Information Act.

Health warning after norovirus found in 78% of British oysters

Elderly and "vulnerable" people with health problems and pregnant women should avoid eating raw oysters, the government food watchdog has advised after research revealed that 76% of British-grown shellfish are infected with norovirus.

Three out of every four oysters grown in Britain contain traces of norovirus, the study for the Food Standards Agency found. Photograph: Regis Duvignau/Reuters/Corbis

Publishing the research — the first of its kind in the UK — the Food Standards Agency (FSA) urged consumers to be aware of the risks of eating fresh oysters.11The study, conducted on behalf of the FSA, found that 76% of oysters tested from UK oyster-growing beds had traces of the infectious bug, which causes symptoms such as vomiting and diarrhoea that typically last for not more than two days. The FSA said it was "difficult to assess" the potential health impact of the findings because their research was not able to distinguish between infectious and non-infectious viruses in the samples.

The research is part of continuing work by the FSA, and will feed into a study being carried out by the European Food Safety Agency in order to advise the European commission on what a legal safe level for norovirus in oysters should be.

Andrew Wadge, chief scientist at the FSA, said: "This research is the first of its kind in the UK. It will be important to help improve the knowledge of the levels of norovirus found in shellfish at production sites. The results, along with data from other research, will help us work with producers to find ways to reduce the levels of norovirus in shellfish, and work within Europe to establish safe levels."

He went on: "Although oysters are traditionally eaten raw, people should be aware of the risks involved in eating them in this way. The agency advises that older people, pregnant women, very young children and people who are unwell should avoid eating raw or lightly cooked shellfish to reduce their risk of getting food poisoning."

As part of the study, scientists from the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (Cefas) took samples from 39 oyster-harvesting areas across the UK over two years. They tested 844 samples in total for norovirus DNA. Every harvesting area had at least one norovirus-positive oyster. Of the 643 samples that tested positive, 335 had low levels of the virus (less than 100 virus copies per gram). The other 308 samples had medium or high levels of the virus. Nine samples registered virus levels of over 10,000 virus copies per gram.

David Lees, the lead investigator at Cefas, said: "Norovirus is a recognised problem for the sector, and this study provides important baseline data to help the industry and regulators to focus on the key risks."

In 2009, the Michelin-starred Fat Duck restaurant, owned by Heston Blumenthal, was forced to close after more than 500 people fell ill with norovirus. Raw oysters and clams were later identified in a damning report by the Health Protection Agency as the main source of the contamination.

Oysters filter large volumes of water to get their food, and any bacteria and viruses in the water can build up within them. They are subject to "purification" controls before and after harvesting which help remove these.

Demand for British-grown oysters has soared in the last couple of years, driven by issues around sustainability and ethical sourcing and after serious shortages in France. Retailers have sought to reassure consumers after the latest findings from the FSA.Waitrose said in a statement: "Food safety is our absolute priority and we're in full support of this research. All our oysters are from a co-operative of known farms in Scotland who follow strict industry guidelines, and it is important to note that the FSA research looks at oysters from oyster beds, not those on sale ready for eating. Government advice hasn't changed, and we would support the recommendation that the young, elderly, unwell and pregnant should avoid eating raw or lightly cooked shellfish."

Between 600,000 and one million people in the UK catch norovirus every year. It is the most common viral cause of diarrhoea and vomiting in the UK, according to recent agency research. It is highly infectious, but the illness is generally mild and people usually recover fully within two to three days. There are no known long-term effects.

Amid fears in the industry that sales in the British oyster market — worth £20m annually — might be affected by the new findings, the main trade body sought to reassure consumers. David Jarrad, director of the Shellfish Association of Great Britain said: "Just because we know about it [norovirus] does not mean that we should be frightened by it. The more important and meaningful figure, in our view, is that low levels of the virus were found in 52% of the positive samples."

But a group of leading chefs, headed by Raymond Blanc, were so worried by the implications of norovirus that three years ago they approached a company to find out if a norovirus-free oyster could be produced. The Cornish Shellfish Company now grows them, although the more intense purification process means consumers pay up to double the price. Dr Steve Kestin, director of the company, said: "I am not surprised by the 76% figure from the FSA. There is clearly a problem with norovirus, which is why we are producing an oyster which is safe for consumers to eat."

Scientists ask the public to help decode whale "songs"

Marine scientists have launched an appeal asking wildlife enthusiasts for help in decoding the secrets of whale song in a global "crowd-sourcing" experiment. Experts in the UK and north America are asking "citizen scientists" to study and sift through about 15,000 recordings of calls by pilot whales and killer whales around the planet, to see if new phrases, meanings and dialects can be uncovered.

Killer whale have very complex calls or repertoires, experts say. Photograph: Amos Nachoum/Corbis

The Whale Project, launched by Scientific American and the online citizen science organisation The Zooniverse, is similar to the first major attempt to use crowd-sourcing by amateur astronomers to help discover new galaxies by studying images taken by the Hubble space telescope in July 2007.

Participants visiting whale.fm will be asked to study and then compare the sound wave patterns, or spectrograms, of calls made by whales in different pods and families of whales around the world. They will be asked to identify identical or very similar sound wave patterns, and will be able to play back each sound excerpt to help them match segments. Every sound recording is linked to a specific location in the sea, or geotagged, allowing scientists to precisely place clusters of calls in the areas where specific families of whale are known to inhabit.

Prof Ian Boyd, one of the project's collaborators from the University of St Andrews' sea mammal research unit, said scientists had discovered that people were often naturally much more able than computers to see similarities in complex spectrograms. "The first thing we want them to do is compare the images because what the human brain is very, very good at doing is comparing images, and is much better than a computer," Boyd said. "For someone like me who's tone deaf, who isn't very good at telling sounds apart, we're very, very good at making distinctions between small changes in shapes and objects."

He said pilot and killer whales had very complex calls or repertoires. Marine scientists now wanted to investigate the differences in each group's calls, like a dialect, and whether they could discover different kinds of messages from analysing these calls. "If these animals have some form of linguistics or language tradition, we're wanting to try to find the words within that repertoire of sounds. We don't know what they mean but what we do find is they have different lexicons; different groups have different types of sound, and they probably inherit these sounds from their parents. It's like a dialect. We want to be able to compare them; both these species have such complex sorts of sounds, and some of these sounds are repeated again, again and again. So they are not random."

Every matched group of sounds would be compared with the whales' location and activities that the whales were involved in. "We want to try and take that back to the context where they're produced, such as hunting or social situations."

Scientific American has previously run "citizen science" projects to track dragonfly swarms, the Gulf oil spill and a "great sunflower project", recording their observations of the natural world. Mariette DiChristina, the editor in chief, said: "One doesn't need a science degree to be a citizen scientist. All you need is a curiosity about the world around you and an interest in observing, measuring and reporting what you hear and see."

Cairn Energy fails to find oil off Greenland

A $1bn (£640m) bet by a British firm to find commercial quantities of oil in the Arctic has ended in failure and there is now mounting speculation there will be no more drilling by Cairn Energy next year.

Greenpeace Kumi Naidoo Boards The Leiv Eiriksson one of Cairn Energy oil platform in the Arctic

Greenpeace activists preparing to board a Cairn platform in the Arctic in a protest over drilling for oil in the pristine environment. Photograph: Jiri Rezac/Greenpeace

The controversial exploration off Greenland was physically opposed by Greenpeace but Cairn has been forced to retreat by complex geology and growing criticism in the City. Shares in the business, which was set up by the former Scottish rugby star Sir Bill Gammell, fell by as much 6% at one point today to make it the biggest faller in the FTSE-100 index of leading companies after admitting no significant finds with its two latest wells off Greenland.

Simon Thomson, Cairn's chief executive, said the company remained optimistic about the region generally but was looking for partners to take on some of the risk. Well placed sources admitted there may be no drilling in 2012.

Cairn made spectacular discoveries in Rajasthan, India — which were sold off, partly to fund a new drive into the Arctic — but the City is now losing patience.

Angus McPhail, an oil analyst at the investment bank Investec, said: "They've drilled four wells — they haven't found anything. I think the company probably needs to refocus on another area, like Sri Lanka or [the] east Mediterranean." Others noted that Cairn was now in discussions with potential partners about buying into its Greenland licences — showing its diminishing commitment to going it alone in the far north.

Richard Slape, an analyst with Canaccord Adams, said: "People are going to question why Cairn is seeking to farm out after drilling a bunch of dry holes rather than 18 months ago. They will find somebody to come in [but] it may not be on such good terms as they would have got before."

The biggest criticism came from Greenpeace, which has repeatedly urged Cairn to abandon its operations on the grounds that they pose a huge risk to a region of paramount environmental importance. Vicky Wyatt, a Greenpeace campaigner, said: "However the company tries to spin this, Cairn's Greenland misadventures have been an unmitigated disaster from day one, the company squandering a fortune drilling one dry hole after another. These results show that the incredible technical, economic and environmental risks of operating in the Arctic simply aren't worth it. Cleaning up a BP-type oil spill in the remote and freezing 'high north' would be impossible, with the devastating consequences this would have for the wildlife and people that live there. Other oil companies, like Shell, who are planning to move into the Arctic, should pay close attention to this news. Instead of drilling for the last drops of oil in some of the most extreme and hostile places on the planet, we should be using less oil in the first place."

Cairn has spent $1bn hiring rigs and other equipment to drill wells over the last two years. The pristine nature of the environment and the fact that the drilling took place after BP's accident in the Gulf meant Cairn had to take more care than ever before. A well placed source said the company may not drill at all next year — regardless of whether it picked up a partner — and might concentrate instead on seismic tests. But he added: "No definite decision on this has yet been taken."

£2.4m funding secured for Norfolk fishing heritage

To the delight of the fishermen and their organisations, Brussels Environmental chiefs have just confirmed that the European Fisheries Fund (EFF) will be donating a lump sum of £2.4m to the traditional fishermen and linked businesses trading along a sixty mile stretch of the Norfolk coast between Thornham and Caister-on-Sea. It will be provided under the auspices of the UK's Marine Management Organisation (MMO) and employed to open up new markets, provide infrastructure, boost competitiveness and to ensure that the environmental impact of fishing remains minimal.

The grant will be made to the areas fishing concerns, mainly crab. lobster and shellfish, to help provide the infrastructure for marketing, for education and in getting European protection for the Cromer crab, as part of a bid to help save the threatened industry, with a longer-term vision to create a fisheries training school.

Specific projects include a visitor and heritage centre, protection for the Cromer crab, new equipment for twenty launch and landing points around the 59-mile stretch of coast, and financial support such as the creation of a fishermen's micro-finance scheme to help businesses connected to the fishery develop in the future. Further planned is a fisheries and communities engagement programme, managed by North Norfolk Business Forum, which exists to promote and encourage uptake of the projects, applied for by businesses and individuals within the target area.

Government confirms Coastguard Centres closure

Ministers confirmed on Tuesday 22nd November that despite the massive reaction, the waves of protest and the 9,000-strong 'Coastguard SOS' petition against the closures, their plans to close eight vital regional coastguard co-ordination centres at Walton-on-the-Naze, Great Yarmouth, Swansea, Portland in Dorset, Clyde and Forth in Scotland, Liverpool, Brixham in Devon are to go ahead, so leaving no coastguard presence anywhere along the entire East Anglian coastline. This despite the overwhelming argument of the experts and the governments own promise of consultation in good faith.

Together with the many thousands who understand the resultant threat, the decision was met with 'utter dismay' by Norfolk and Suffolk Euro MP Richard Howitt, who has warned that the decision will lead to another disaster like the Marchioness or the Gulf of Mexico on the East coast. He is now writing to the European Commission calling on them to review whether the decision could breach EU rules on maritime safety and coastal protection.

What with the oil transfer at sea ban recently reversed by the government, the removal of the flood sirens, the implementation of the SMP now permitting the ceasing of defences for vital areas, the continuation of offshore aggregate dredging, the rising sea level, the worsening weather and the recent further 25% cut in the sea defence budget, the future for the East Anglian coastline and the inland Broads area now looks very bleak.

Already this year the beaches have been stripped of over 2 metres of sand with dunes, sand-cliffs and sea wall defences undercut and the first tidal surge causing flooding came about on 27/28th November — and the worst of the winter has yet to come!

The Norwich Evening news published the sad news of the governments crass decision on Tuesday 22nd November. It can be read here.

UN investment fund considering investment opportunities in the Arctic region

Guggenheim Partners, a privately held investment firm based in the US, which manages more than $125bn worth of assets on behalf of its clients, has confirmed it is setting up a new fund dedicated to making investments in the Arctic region.

Multi year ice cracks before the prow of icebreaker in The Arctic

Multi year ice cracks before the prow of a Russian icebreaker en route to North Pole, Arctic. Photograph: Galen Rowell//Corbis

The news has been criticised by environmentalists who fear that it will further accelerate the exploitation by oil and shipping companies of the region which is being made even more accessible by climate change.

The fund was first revealed over the weekend at a conference held by the Juneau World Affairs Council in the Alaskan capital on the "politics of climate change". Alice Rogoff, the publisher of Alaska Dispatch who is married to one of America's wealthiest men, Carlyle Group co-founder David Rubenstein, told the conference that she had learned Guggenheim Partners was planning a fund "worth billions". She added that it might concentrate first on building a privately funded icebreaker, which could then be leased to the US coastguard.

There have been growing calls in Alaska for a $1bn "heavy" ice breaker which could be used not just to help tackle any possible oil spills and perform search and rescue duties, but also further secure new shipping routes into the area. Shell confirmed last year that it is already building two of its own icebreakers in preparation of it being granted an extended permit to drill in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas from next year onwards.

Mead Treadwell, Alaska's lieutenant general, said the fund was a "major announcement" for the region, adding that the Alaskan Arctic also currently lacks a deep water port. Without such a port available, he said, oil companies would incur extra costs by having to supply a "flotilla" of support vessels when drilling at sea.

The Guggenheim Partners website posted a link to an Alaska Dispatch story about the fund, but a company spokesman refused to provide any specific details. "We are in the very early planning stages for an Arctic investment fund," said Jeffrey Kelley. "At this point in time it would be premature to comment further about potential structure or investment parameters."

A permanently secured route through the Bering Strait up into the Arctic would be a major boon to shipping companies and resource extractors. Last month, Nordic Bulk Carriers, a Danish shipping company, said it would save a third of its usual costs and nearly half the time shipping goods if a route to China was available through the Arctic instead of via the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean.

Ben Ayliffe, an Arctic campaigner for Greenpeace, criticised the fund: "We shouldn't be surprised that the industry which got us into the worst global economic crisis in living memory now has the planet's last great wilderness in its sights. But, even by its own standards, it would seem exceedingly short-sighted to pour billions of dollars into the extraction of climate-changing fossil fuels just as scientists warn that the Arctic's summer sea ice is entering what they call a 'death spiral'."

Exploiting Lancashire's coastal shale gas would "wreck climate change targets"

The UK will fail to meet its climate change targets if industry and politicians back controversial new plans to go ahead with widespread drilling for shale gas, according to a report which has just been published.

The drilling rig of Cuadrilla Resources searches for shale gas, near Blackpool, Lancashire

Cuadrilla Resources's shale gas drilling site near Blackpool, Lancashire. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

About 2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas trapped in dense shale rocks is estimated to lie beneath Lancashire according to Cuadrilla Resources, the main shale gas company operating in the UK. Further exploration in Wales, Scotland and other parts of England could add substantially to this total.

But burning it for fuel results in large-scale carbon dioxide emissions, and scientists from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research, in a report commissioned by the Co-operative Group, warned that exploiting even a minor proportion of this gas would generate so much carbon dioxide that the government's greenhouse gas emissions targets would be rendered unreachable.

Exploiting even one-fifth of the Lancashire shale gas reserves alone would produce about 15% of the total carbon dioxide that the UK can produce between now and 2050, if government targets are to be adhered to. Those targets state that CO₂ emissions are to be cut by 80% by 2050.

Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at the Tyndall Centre, at the University of Manchester, said: "The government faces a difficult choice — to lead a new and low-carbon energy revolution or stick with high-carbon fossil fuels, forgo its emission targets and relinquish its hard-won international reputation on climate change."

Proponents of shale gas say it could cut emissions by displacing higher-emitting fossil fuels such as coal, and could increase the UK's energy security by providing a "home-grown" source of gas, even as the UK's reserves in the North Sea are rapidly running out. Cuadrilla estimates that shale gas could create about 6,500 jobs in the UK.

However, the industry — with only a few exploratory wells yet drilled — has already struck controversy, as earlier this year two small earthquakes occurred close to the Cuadrilla drilling operations. A subsequent report by Cuadrilla, published earlier in the autumn, found that the drilling operations were probably the cause of the seismic activity, though they said this presented little danger to the inhabitants.

Lobbyists for the gas industry have also seized on the potential of shale gas to argue within Whitehall and Brussels that investing in gas could be cheaper than opting for renewables. The government pledged this summer to make it easier for new gas-fired power stations to be built.

Green campaigners are concerned that not enough is known about the effects of shale gas exploration. Drawing on experiences from the US, where widespread shale gas exploration has ripped up landscapes, they warn of the potential for water contamination, gas leaks, the release of heavy metals and other harmful substances, as well as increased greenhouse gas emissions.

Paul Monaghan, head of social goals at the Co-operative, said: "It is shocking how little scrutiny and thoughtful consideration has been demonstrated by the UK government and its environmental agencies when it comes to shale gas. Not least because, evidence is now emerging which indicates that gas derived from shale may have a significantly greater carbon footprint than previously thought, seriously questioning whether it can play any role in the transition to a low-carbon economy. The calls from 'big gas' for the abandonment of renewables targets must be rebuffed, and here is the science to do just that."

The new report also found that the amount of investment needed to exploit gas reserves — about £32bn — would be enough to build 2,300 offshore wind turbines, which would produce enough renewable energy to meet government targets. Shale gas exploration also supports fewer jobs than renewable energy generation — hundreds of thousands of jobs could be created in offshore wind, solar power and other green energy, but drilling shale gas wells requires minimal manpower.

Tony Bosworth, energy campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said: "If ministers give shale gas the green light it could wreck UK climate targets and keep us all in hock to soaring energy bills. The only solution to our broken power system is to develop the nation's home-grown clean energy supplies and cut energy waste. David Cameron must free us from the shackles of the big energy companies keeping us hooked on dirty fossil fuels — and support clean British energy providers instead."

Atlantic sharks are heading for extinction, but only 1% are protected

Only a tiny fraction of sharks caught in the Atlantic — less than 1% — are under protection, even though most shark species are heading towards extinction, a report by Oceana warns.

A female mako shark being finned at a shark fishing camp, Santa Rosalia, Mexico

A female mako shark. Conservationists have called for limits on shark fishing. Photograph: Brian Skerry/National Geographic/Getty Images

Officials from 48 Atlantic fishing countries have met in Istanbul this week to try to protect bluefin tuna, swordfish and other large fish. But existing conservation efforts are only saving a tiny proportion of sharks, the report from the Oceana conservation group said.

"It's just the tip of the iceberg, and there are a lot of shark species, many of them vulnerable species, that are still being caught and killed," said Elizabeth Griffin Wilson, a senior scientist at Oceana.

Conservation groups at the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna (Iccat) meeting are pushing for a ban on the catch of porbeagle and silky sharks — which are at extreme risk — as well as catch limits on other species such as the shortfin mako shark.

Three quarters of the wide ranging shark now being caught in the Atlantic are under threat, the report said. But Iccat countries to date have only limited protection for specific shark species such as the bigeye thresher, hammerhead and oceanic whitetip sharks. There are no limits on the fishing of 15 Atlantic shark species even though some — such as the silky shark — are close to extinction. Conservationist groups hope the Istanbul meeting will build on recent momentum on shark conservation.

The White House has sought the Senate's approval for a new international treaty that would make it easier for countries to crack down on any illegal catches being brought to port. The state of Florida is expected to adopt new protection measures this week. The European Union last week banned all fishing for porbeagle shark in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. But it is a race against time. Sharks were not built for reproduction. They can take take years to reach sexual maturity, and produce only a few pups. And highly mobile animals are notoriously difficult to protect.

"You just can't manage them one country by one country because they cross international boundaries," Wilson said.

Atlantic fishing countries reported catching more than 68,000 tonnes of shark in 2009, or more than 1.3 million animals. Most were caught inadvertently by vessels targeting tuna and other fish.

Populations of some species, such as the porbeagle, which are caught for their meat as well as their fins, have fallen by 99% since the middle of the last century. Scientists estimate it could take up to 34 years for populations to recover — even with the new EU protections. Fishing of porbeagle sharks continue in Canadian waters, Wilson said.

Three other shark species are also at high risk: silky sharks, shortfin mako, and blue sharks, the report said.

New Zealand's marine oil spill disaster averted

Salvage crews are preparing to remove containers from a cargo ship that ran aground on a New Zealand reef nearly six weeks ago after pumping all remaining oil from the vessel and averting an environmental disaster.

Salvage crews are to begin removing containers from the grounded Rena. Photograph: Maritime New Zealand/EPA

Government ministers and local politicians hailed the work of the teams after they managed to remove all but a few traces of oil from the Liberian-flagged Rena, which ran aground off Tauranga, in North Island's Bay of Plenty, in heavy seas on 5th October.

In the following days, several hundred tonnes of oil spilt into the sea after a fuel tank ruptured, washing onto beaches and affecting birds and other wildlife. There were fears that the badly damaged 47,000-tonne vessel could completely break apart, spilling a further 1,600 tonnes of fuel and causing an environmental catastrophe. But the Rena stayed intact as salvage workers spent weeks pumping the heavy fuel oil from its tanks to an adjoining tanker, and this process was almost complete, Maritime New Zealand said.

The next stage of the operation would involve a crane barge being put into position to begin the tricky job of removing cargo containers from the ship. An accompanying shoreline clean-up has been sufficiently successful for local beaches to be expected to reopen later in the week.

The country's prime minister, John Key, said the operation had been "very, very successful", the New Zealand Herald reported. "I think the people of Tauranga will be very happy they haven't had the environmental disaster that some predicted," Key added.

The local mayor, Stuart Crosby said: "The salvors have done an amazing job under treacherous conditions to avoid an environmental disaster. I guess we've all gone through a series of emotions that we all do in this type of event. There has been disbelief, frustration, anger, and now relief — relief that the oil has been taken away by these great people."

However, the operation to remove the containers remains long and risky, Maritime New Zealand said. It is likely to take several months, during which time the Rena could still break up. "The salvors are taking this time to make sure that all the equipment and systems are ready and working properly before commencing operations. They also need good, calm weather to operate effectively, with safety being the top priority," the salvage unit head, Arthur Jobard, said. "Once the testing has been successfully completed, the salvors will be lowering men down in a cage to ready the containers for removal. However, as we have seen with this entire operation so far, the speed at which the salvage team can work depends on many different factors. This includes weather and how complex it proves to be to access the containers, many of which are badly damaged and in very precarious positions." He said this meant it would be "impossible to predict exactly how long it will take to safely remove all of the containers on board — but realistically, it is likely to take several months of patient and careful work".

EU proposes to forbid EU vessels from removing shark's fins at sea

Europe's governments have been urged to back a global ban on EU fishermen removing shark fins at sea.

Shark finning — cutting off a shark's fin and discarding the body — is driven by a profitable market for the delicacy of shark fin soup in Asia.

A general ban on the practice has been in force in the EU since 2003, but with exceptions which allow some countries to issue fishing permits for removing shark fins as long as both the fin and body are landed and that the total fins caught do not exceed 5% of the live weight of sharks caught. The UK ended such permits in 2009, but the EU is one of the world's largest suppliers of shark fins to Asia, largely because of the volume exported by Spain and Portugal.

Now the European Commission has proposed a total ban, to be applied to EU vessels, anywhere in the world.

A fisherman cuts the fins off of a shark at a fish market. Photograph: Kambou Sia/AFP/Getty Images

Maria Damanaki, commissioner for maritime affairs and fisheries, said: "By closing the loophole in our legislation, we want to eradicate the appalling removal of shark fins and provide much better protection for sharks." She said controls would be stepped up, making it harder to hide "finning", and she urged EU governments and MEPs to speed the legislation through.

Once approved, the move means vessels fishing in EU waters — and all EU vessels fishing in the world — must land sharks with fins attached to the body.

Ali Hood, the Shark Trust's director of conservation, said: "The Shark Trust will look to the UK government to show leadership among the member states and champion the adoption of a 'fins-naturally-attached policy', with no exceptions."

EU director of Humane Society International Joanna Swabe warned: "It is imperative that no attempt be made by any EU member states or MEPs to water down this legislative proposal. A 'fins-naturally-attached' policy, without exception, is the only way to end the cruel and wasteful practice of shark finning." The organisation says the permit system has become the norm, rather than the exception, for the Spanish and Portuguese longline fleets.

Ricardo Aguilar, research director at Oceana, the international marine conservation organisation, said: "By opting for a fins-attached approach, the European Commission has heeded the advice of experts worldwide: landing sharks with their fins still naturally attached is the only possible way to guarantee that finning does not occur. Furthermore, if all sharks must be landed with their fins attached, it will be much easier to identify the species caught, and therefore, to gather critical data about the status of shark populations."

Globally, up to 73 million sharks are killed each year to satisfy the demand of the international shark fin market. EU nations combined catch the second-largest share of sharks — 14% of the world's reported shark catches.

Seal Laceration Deaths — further input

The spiral 'corkscrew' lacerations found on the dead seals washed up along our East Anglian coastline (see www.marinet.org.uk/archive/archivelatestnewsfiles/ltsd.pdf) was well covered on Saturday 19th November and repeated the following day, in a programme televised on National Geographic Wild entitled 'The Seal Ripper'.

It examines the deaths of up to 1,000 or more seals washed up on Sable Island off the Canadian coast and the investigations that have been carried out indicating that these deaths were/are being caused by the Greenland Sharks now hunting in shallow water, their behaviour having been modified by the collapse of the fisheries in the North West Atlantic and the shark's need to find an alternate source of food. Seal remains were indeed found in the stomachs of the sharks caught.

The Greenland Sharks, previously deep water bottom scavengers, are now apparently hunting seals resting below water. It is proposed that using their electro receptors and sense of smell, they spring an ambush when the seals are sleeping . They have jaws that can cut in both directions acting like a reciprocating saw, so when attacking/eating the seal their jaws can create the cork screw lacerations found.

It would seem that maybe these animals have now migrated to the North East Atlantic where the fisheries are also collapsing, so indicating yet another catastrophic human activity caused by creating imbalance in the marine food chain.

Once both the marine and land ecosystems are compromised beyond repair the demise of humanity is assured — but who listens or cares? Politicians are more concerned about the Euro, the financial markets and exploiting the Earth's resources etc. to even notice.

Russia and China want to start exploring for minerals in Antarctica

The opening manoeuvres may have begun. During the Antarctic Treaty consultative meeting in Buenos Aires last June, Russia stated its intention to start prospecting for minerals, oil and gas in the white continent and surrounding seas. The document submitted by the Russian delegation listed the key points of the "strategy for the development of the Russian Federation activities in the Antarctic for the period until 2020, and longer-term perspective".

Who claims which bit and for what? Pine Island glacier, Antarctica Photograph: Andy Smith/British Antarctic Survey

Whether or not this document ruffled feathers among the 48 treaty nations nobody knows, since the meetings are closed to outside observers and the contents of the discussions are not disclosed. However the Russian document was discreetly posted on the treaty secretariat's website.

The Russian project to carry out "complex investigations of the Antarctic mineral, hydrocarbon and other natural resources… both on the continent and in surrounding waters" would jeopardise the Antarctic's special legal status and go against the Madrid protocol, which makes this near-virgin territory a "natural reserve devoted to peace and science". At present, any form of prospecting and mining is, in theory, forbidden.

Faced with the need for raw materials and against a backdrop of tensions with China, which is firmly placing its own pawns on the icecap, the former Spanish president, Felipé Gonzalez, and two former prime ministers, Bob Hawke (Australia) and Michel Rocard (France), have launched an appeal to ratify the Madrid protocol. In other words to do everything possible to persuade the stragglers to sign.

To date, 14 signatory states have yet to ratify the protocol, signed in the Spanish capital in 1991, which became effective seven years later. If those countries were to rally around the protocol, which is the principal environmental protection section of the Antarctic treaty system, it would gain more diplomatic clout. But would it be enough to prevent a rush to the Antarctic seabed? Following the declared Russian intention to do precisely that, an Australian thinktank, the Lowy Institute for International Policy, has recently published a report urging the Australian government to protect its national interests and "open discussions with like minded states in anticipation of sovereignty and resource issues being revisited in 2048". (That being that date when the Madrid Protocol can be reviewed by the treaty nations.)

Australia, like France, New Zealand, Norway, the UK, Chile and Argentina, has territorial claims on the Antarctic that were frozen by the treaty. It is one of the strange aspects about the legal setup that while the territorial claims of the seven states are frozen, they are not actually challenged. Each state maintains its claims, but is committed to not exercising them.

Rocard, who, like Hawke, was one of the architects of the protocol, is confident that it will hold up. The protocol may be revised after 2048 if three-quarters of the 12 consultative states (who have a casting vote in the treaty system) agree. But according to Rocard, the world will be feeling the effects of increased global warning by then and getting oil and gas from the Antarctic will no longer seem so relevant.

"Today everyone is panicking because we are heading for a shortage of natural resources," said Rocard. "And no coercive measures have been factored in to the treaty system to prevent anyone doing whatever they want."

Like all international treaties this one depends on the good will of its signatories and it could be seriously undermined if one country were to take liberties with the text. If Russia's aim was to test reactions with its document, it failed to trigger any official protests from the signatory nations at all, so that point should be taken very seriously. And all the more so since it comes at a time when China is reinforcing its own position in the Antarctic. China's new base in Kunlun stands at an altitude of 4,000 metres and overlooks all the other research stations. That is a powerful symbol because there is apparently no clear scientific justification for the site, according to the consultative parties who authorise these research stations, supposedly on the sole criterion of scientific benefit."

The patriotic titles of its stations… imply a latent nationalism in China's policy," observed the Lowy Institute in its report. "There are even reports that Kunlun station features a sign stating 'Welcome to China' implying Chinese territoriality and denial of Australia's claim." The Chinese station is located right in the middle of territory that Canberra considers to be Australian.

EDF, owner of British Energy, found guilty of spying

France's state energy firm EDF has been fined €1.5m by a Paris court for spying on Greenpeace. Its head of nuclear production security in 2006, Pascal Durieux, was given a three-year sentence with two years suspended, and a €10,000 fine for commissioning the spying. The Nanterre court also sentenced the security No 2 in 2006, Pierre-Paul François, to three years, 30 months suspended. EDF has also been ordered to pay €500,000 in damages to Greenpeace.

Yannick Jadot, Greenpeace's then campaign director, had his computer hacked into by a firm hired by EDF energy. Photograph: Jean-Sebastien Evrard/AFP/Getty Images

The judge further handed down a guilty verdict on Thierry Lorho, head of Kargus, a firm employed by EDF to hack into Greenpeace's computers. He got three years in jail, two suspended, and a €4,000 fine.

EDF is the world's biggest nuclear energy supplier; it owns the UK nuclear power operator, British Energy, and is a major sponsor of the London Olympics. It was charged with complicity in concealing stolen documents and complicity to intrude on a computer network.

EDF and Greenpeace have fought for years over France's power production, more than three-quarters of it nuclear. According to confidential court testimony released by a French website, Mediapart, two years ago, EDF had organised surveillance not only of Greenpeace in France, but broadly across Europe since 2004.

In 2006, EDF hired a detective agency, Kargus Consultants, run by a former member of France's secret services, to find out about Greenpeace France's intentions and its plan to block new nuclear plants in the UK. The agency hacked the computer of Yannick Jadot, Greenpeace's then campaigns director, taking 1,400 documents.

An EDF official had no immediate comment. In the trial, EDF said it had victim of overzealous efforts, and had been unaware anyone would hack a computer. "The fine and the damages awarded send a strong signal to the nuclear industry that nobody is above the law," said Adélaïde Colin for Greenpeace France. "In the runup to the next presidential elections… voters should keep this scandal in mind."

The outrage among anti-nuclear campaigners echoes that which emerged when it was revealed that France's secret services were behind the bombing of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior 26 years ago. Moreover, safety is a very live issue since Japan's Fukushima disaster. In March, only weeks later, EDF boss Vincent de Rivaz said its plan to build four reactors in the UK would be unaffected, starting at Hinkley Point in Somerset.

At present, the four EPR are being built in Finland, France and China are well behind schedule, hampered by construction problems and billions over budget, in the case of EDF's reactors in Finland, and France.

Speaking from alongside the new Rainbow Warrior, currently on its maiden voyage and docked in London, Greenpeace UK's executive director, John Sauven, said: "The evidence presented at the trial showed that the espionage undertaken by EDF in its efforts to discredit Greenpeace was both extensive and totally illegal. The company should now give a full account of the spying operation it mounted against its critics. As one of the six companies with a monopoly over electricity supply in this country and a major sponsor of the Olympics, EDF has a duty to come clean. The length of the sentences handed down shows just how seriously the judge views what the French state owned company did."

EDF has raised its target for nuclear generation in France and reported a 3.2% rise in sales.

Five of the Eight Bluefin tuna species are "threatened"

We provide here a photograph of the Atlantic bluefin tuna, courtesy of The Guardian, (see photograph 10).

Five of the eight species of tuna are in the threatened or near threatened categories.

Tuna is a species of high economic value, and is widely fished. For further details about Tuna, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuna.

New Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) scheme proposed for Peterhead, Aberdeen

Two major energy companies have combined forces to bolster the case to build the UK's first carbon-capture project at Peterhead power station near Aberdeen. The power company SSE and Shell, the fuel producer, have announced their alliance after the recent collapse of £1bn proposals to fit carbon-capture and storage (CCS) plant to Longannet coal-fired power station, one of Europe's largest coal-powered stations.

CCS : New Carbon Capture Technology Is To Be Tested In Scotland

A scientist holds a pressure monitor, beside a new carbon capture test unit at Longanet power station. Two energy companies have joined forces to bolster the case for CCS. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

UK ministers have insisted they are still committed to funding a pilot project but the collapse of the Scottish Power scheme at Longannet has damaged confidence that the UK will build carbon-capture plant. A decision on another major CCS project, at a new coal-fired station at Hunterston in Ayrshire is now expected to be delayed for at least a year after receiving a record number of objections. Councillors in North Ayrshire are anticipated to vote against the project later on Wednesday, forcing the Scottish government to order a lengthy public inquiry.

The Peterhead gas-fired power station is owned by SSE and was one of the first to be mooted for carbon-capture. A small pilot project there by BP to make hydrogen and pump the CO₂ into North Sea seabed was scrapped because of a lack of UK government support. It is one of several British schemes in the running for European funding, including the Ayrshire Power project at Hunterston.

Shell and SSE said they would now accelerate their planning and designs for Peterhead, to retrofit CCS equipment to one of its three 385MW combined gas cycle turbines. The CO₂ would then be piped to Shell's Goldeneye gas field in the North Sea.

Ian Marchant, the chief executive of SSE, said: "If long-term targets for reducing emissions are to be met, CCS technology must be applied as widely as possible. We therefore welcomed the UK government's decision to include gas-fired generation plant in its CCS demonstration programme. However, the development of a commercial-scale CCS demonstration project presents significant challenges and will require appropriate levels of support from both the EU and UK government."

The Peterhead alliance was welcomed, if cautiously, by WWF Scotland, the Scottish Labour party and Friends of the Earth Scotland.

Alex Salmond, the first minister of Scotland, said this could be "game changing" technology. "CCS technology could transform carbon-reduction efforts across the world, particularly in fast-growing economies. As such, it has the potential to become a significant export industry for these islands, and for Scotland in particular," he said.

A spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said the joint venture at Peterhead was a welcome reflection of the strong commitment to CCS in the UK. "Gas CCS will be an important part of our future energy mix and there are a number of promising projects, both gas and coal, in Scotland and England. We will be considering projects through an open and transparent selection process to be launched as soon as possible."

The Wildlife Trusts fear that the number of Marine Conservation Zones may be drastically reduced

The wildlife in England's seas is facing a serious threat, warns The Wildlife Trusts.

The long-awaited network of Marine Conservation Zones, promised by Government for 2012, is in danger, according to the conservation organisation, which has been instrumental in marine campaigning and research. It is urging the public to write to Under-Secretary for Natural Environment and Fisheries, Richard Benyon MP, in support of Marine Conservation Zones.

After years of pressure from NGOs and with huge public support, The Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009 promised a coherent network of protection around the coast of England by 2012. Now 127 marine sites around England's coast have been recommended by four regional stakeholder groups to become Marine Conservation Zones next year.

The recommendations are the result of two years of consultation with more than one million stakeholders involved including fishermen, conservationists and businesses. This has been the first 'Big Society' experiment where local stakeholders have decided together which areas of sea should be protected.

There is a concern that Government's Statutory Nature Conservation Bodies (Natural England and the Joint Nature Conservation Committee) will recommend to Government that only a fraction of the 127 recommended sites are designated. This would result in a much smaller and less effective network of Marine Conservation Zones, leaving vulnerable and precious areas unprotected.

Joan Edwards, The Wildlife Trusts' Head of Living Seas, said: " A huge amount of work has been done to get a broad agreement on this network needed for the health and future productivity of our marine environment. Now, however, in the final stages the Government has lost it's direction and is proposing to over-ride the recommendations of local stakeholders and cut the 127 sites down to an unrealistic 30 in contradiction with the aims of the new Marine and Coastal Access Act. With Wildlife Trusts all around the UK, we are lobbying hard for the successful completion of a process that will make the difference between the life or death of our seas. We need to demonstrate the weight of public support for the Marine Conservation Zones to Government. This is a once in a lifetime chance. We can't afford to let it slip away."

The Wildlife Trusts is urging people to write to Richard Benyon and ask for Government to create the proposed network of 127 sites in England. It has produced some guidance on writing to the Minister.

Government claims that 88% of UK bathing waters now meet EU Guideline standard

Nine out of 10 beaches and bathing spots in England and Wales met EU standards for water quality in 2011, new government figures show. But campaigners claimed "meeting an outdated and inadequate standard is nothing to shout about".

2009 Blue Flag Beaches : Poole beach Dorset

Water quality meets EU standards at 90% of beaches in England and Wales. Photograph: Alex Sudea/Rex Features

Statistics from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the Welsh government show that just 10 out of 502 beaches and inland bathing sites in the two countries failed basic water quality standards. A record 88% of the bathing waters, a total of 447 sites, met European standards, up from 86% which met that grade last year.

"Almost all of our beaches meet the minimum standards now, compared to just three-quarters in 1991," said Christine Tuckett from the Environment Agency.

But Andy Cummins, from Surfers Against Sewage, said: "Many beaches may be meeting woefully inadequate water quality standards set down 35 years ago, but this still leaves bathers exposed to significant numbers of sewage spills, with possible serious health implications." Cummins said Defra figures showed that the basic standard, met by 97.8% of all beaches, still meant a one in seven chance of contracting gastro-enteritis.

Blackpool central and south beaches, St Anne's North, St Anne's Pier, Heysham Half Moon Bay and Fleetwood, all on the Lancashire coast, failed the basic water quality tests, as did Walpole Bay, Margate, and Ilfracombe Capstone and Combe Martin on the north Devon coast.

Tuckett said: "But new, stricter standards will come into force in 2015, and we are working with water companies, farmers, local authorities and beach managers to tackle persistent sources of pollution and make sure that as many beaches as possible pass these standards."

"We are moving in the right direction," said Cummins. "The top end of the new standards will give you some pretty good water quality." He noted that the government ratings were retrospective, unlike SAS's real-time sewage alerts, which immediately warn bathers of pollution washed out to sea by heavy rain.

The Environment Agency said it had helped secure further investment from the water industry for environmental improvements, some of which would be spent on bathing water. Over 90 projects will improve water quality at 37 coastal locations, it said, while scientific investigation will help identify sources of pollution at a further 44 sites.

The agency is also working with farmers to reduce the amount of animal waste washed into rivers, streams and ultimately the sea, and with local authorities to address pollution from roads, homes and business, which can be caused by appliances such as dishwashers or toilets being incorrectly plumbed.

A report in April from the Marine Conservation Society found that the amount bathroom rubbish flushed down toilets and ending up on Britain's shoreline has risen by 40% over the previous year. Cotton buds, condoms, sanitary towels and tampon applicators were among the most common items recovered.

MARINET observes: The annual statistics on UK Bathing Water Quality have always been, and remain, very misleading for the following reasons:

Record level of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2010

The global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide has jumped by a record amount, according to the US department of energy, a sign of how feeble the world's efforts are at slowing man-made global warming. The figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago. "The more we talk about the need to control emissions, the more they are growing," said John Reilly, the co-director of MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change.

Emissions from a coal-fired power station. The output of greenhouse gases has jumped by the highest amount on record. Photograph: John Giles/PA

The world pumped about 564m more tons (512m metric tons) of carbon into the air in 2010 than it did in 2009, an increase of 6%. That amount of extra pollution eclipses the individual emissions of all but three countries, China, the US and India, the world's top producers of greenhouse gases. It is a "monster" increase that is unheard of, said Gregg Marland, a professor of geology at Appalachian State University, who has helped calculate department of energy figures in the past.

Extra pollution in China and the US account for more than half the increase in emissions last year, Marland said.

"It's a big jump," said Tom Boden, the director of the energy department's Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre at Oak Ridge National Lab. "From an emissions standpoint, the global financial crisis seems to be over." Boden said that in 2010 people were travelling, and manufacturing was back up worldwide, spurring the use of fossil fuels, the chief contributor of man-made climate change.

India and China are huge users of coal. Burning coal is the biggest carbon source worldwide and emissions from that jumped nearly 8% in 2010.

"The good news is that these economies are growing rapidly so everyone ought to be for that, right?" Reilly said. "Broader economic improvements in poor countries has been bringing living improvements to people. Doing it with increasing reliance on coal is imperilling the world."

In 2007, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its last large report on global warming, it used different scenarios for carbon dioxide pollution and said the rate of warming would be based on the rate of pollution. Boden said the latest figures put global emissions higher than the worst case projections from the climate panel. Those forecast global temperatures rising between 4 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit (2.4-6.4 Celsius) by the end of the century with the best estimate at 7.5 degrees (4 Celsius).

Even though global warming sceptics have criticised the climate change panel as being too alarmist, scientists have generally found their predictions too conservative, Reilly said. He said his university worked on emissions scenarios, their likelihood, and what would happen. The IPCC's worst case scenario was only about in the middle of what MIT calculated are likely scenarios.

Chris Field of Stanford University, head of one of the IPCC's working groups, said the panel's emissions scenarios are intended to be more accurate in the long term and are less so in earlier years. He said the question now among scientists is whether the future is the panel's worst case scenario "or something more extreme".

"Really dismaying," Granger Morgan, head of the engineering and public policy department at Carnegie Mellon University, said of the new figures. "We are building up a horrible legacy for our children and grandchildren."

But Reilly and University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver found something good in recent emissions figures. The developed countries that ratified the 1997 Kyoto Protocol greenhouse gas limiting treaty have reduced their emissions overall since then and have achieved their goals of cutting emissions to about 8% below 1990 levels. The US did not ratify the agreement.

In 1990, developed countries produced about 60% of the world's greenhouse gases, now it's probably less than 50%, Reilly said. "We really need to get the developing world because if we don't, the problem is going to be running away from us," Weaver said. "And the problem is pretty close from running away from us."

Pollution can make storms at sea, such as cyclones, more likely

Powerful tropical cyclones that cause large numbers of deaths and massive property damage around the Arabian Sea are becoming increasingly common as a result of pollution, scientists say.

Aftermath of floods unleashed by a tropical cyclone in Pakistan

Flooding in the aftermath of a tropical cyclone in Karachi, August 2007. Pollution may increase the likelihood of such storms. Photograph: Rizwan Tabassum/AFP/Getty Images

Analysis of the intensity of storms between 1979 and 2010 suggests that thick layers of haze have created atmospheric conditions that intensify cyclones and increase the chances they will reach land.

There has been a sixfold increase in fine aerosol emissions locally since the 1930s from forest fires, domestic heating and diesel use, creating a layer of pollution 3km thick over the Indian Ocean.

It has long been known that high wind shear — a large difference between the speed of winds near the sea surface and those higher up in the atmosphere — can prevent storms from forming or prevent existing ones from intensifying. Dr Amato Evan of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, US, and his colleagues suggest that the giant pollution cloud reduces the surface temperature of the Arabian Sea, which in turn reduces wind shear and triggers the formation of more powerful cyclones.

"We have found a clear connection between human activity and changes in atmospheric conditions that create favourable conditions for the formation of large tropical cyclones," said Evan. "In my mind that's a big step forward. Every analysis we did pointed in the same direction. We only have 30 years of data, but we have used data from multiple different sources, so I'm confident our results are robust."

Evan's team used three sets of data on the maximum wind speed of the 10 tropical cyclones that occurred in the region between 1979 and 1996 and the 10 that developed between 1997 and 2010. The median maximum speed increased from 23 metres per second in the first period to 41 mps in the second. They used numerical modelling to develop their theory and unpick the underlying causes.

The study found wind sheer had dropped from an average of 11 mps in the period 1979-96 to eight mps in 1997-2010. All the five strongest storms, which exceeded 50 mps, have occurred since 1998. In that year a major cyclone resulted in thousands of deaths and the inundation of numerous salt mines in India.

Other large cyclones since then have made landfall and caused loss of life and billions of pounds' worth of property damage in Pakistan, Iran and Oman.

"Storms that are more intense have a longer lifespan, so the probability that they are going to make landfall goes up," said Evan.

Dr Ryan Sriver of Pennsylvania State University, US, said that while the research shed "much-needed light" on the topic, the findings should be interpreted with caution. In an article published alongside the new research in the journal Nature, Sriver said: "This is a very small number of events to use as a basis for estimating climate trends."

Whale meat on sale at Icelandic airport

Up to 70,000 Britons who visit Iceland each year have been given a stiff warning by the Foreign Office not to bring home any whale meat, saying to do so is in breach of international law protecting endangered species.

Importing whale meat into the UK or Europe is in breach of international law. Photograph: Reuters

Penalties of imprisonment or fines up to £5,000 could be meted out by the courts, says the Foreign Office, because importation into Britain and other EU countries is illegal under the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species (Cites).

The government has added the warning to its advice on travelling to Iceland after being alerted to the fact that whale meat is on sale at Keflavik airport. Environment department Defra, responsible for border checks on illegal food imports, said: "There have been no reports of whale meat on sale in the UK or being seized at the border."

Icelandic whalers are trying to win tourists over to their point of view, offering them the chance to go to see with them, feel harpoons and eat whale meat and blubber.

New MCS research shows 31,000 raw sewage discharges in England and Wales!

Research by the Marine Conservation Society using the Environmental Information Regulations has revealed that far more raw sewage discharges exist than those hitherto known. It was previously thought there were some 22,000 discharges — the vast majority of which are known as combined sewer overflows (CSOs) and emergency overflows (EOs). However, using Environmental Information Regulations in obtaining information from the Environment Agency and water companies, the MCS have discovered that the Environment Agency uses another four terms for raw sewage discharges that are not widely understood by the public. Taking these into account, the number of raw sewage outfalls in operation in England and Wales are actually more like 31,000, instead of the usually published figure of 22,000.

CSOs and EOs are designed to act as emergency outlets for overloaded sewerage systems during periods of heavy rainfall, but can discharge at other times as well, to lakes, rivers, estuaries and coastal waters. The research shows that numerous CSOs around the UK coastline discharge well in excess of the permitted amount of ten times per annum, with one CSO discharging to the Kent coast for more than 1,000 hours during the May — September bathing water season last year.

The MCS Press Release covering the revelation can be read in full by visiting the Marine Conservation Society.

Fracking for gas did likely cause two minor earthquakes, but reserves of frackable gas are vast

Two earthquake tremors in north-west England earlier this year were probably caused by controversial operations to extract gas nearby, a report by the company responsible has concluded. The two tremors — magnitude 2.3 and 1.5 — which were felt by people just outside Blackpool, but did not cause any known damage, were reported in April and May. Since the second event, Cuadrilla Resources has stopped "fracking" operations — where water and chemicals are injected into rocks at high pressure to extract gas from the cracks.

A segment of Bowland shale extracted by Cuadrilla Resouces at Singleton. A company report said it is probable the fracking caused the tremors. Photograph: Paul Thomas/Bloomberg/Getty Images

The news came as protesters against the controversial new energy source halted work at a Cuadrilla gas exploration rig at Banks, near Southport, Merseyside. Four members of the environmental campaign group Frack Off unfurled banners after climbing climbing the rig at around 5.30am on Wednesday. Others remained on the ground.

In a separate protest in London, around 50 anti-fracking activists gathered from around 3pm outside the Copthorne Tara hotel in Kensington in an attempt to disrupt an industry conference organised by by SMI international. Two dozen police kept demonstrators away from the conference on the hotel's first floor which was attended by delegates paying £1,500 per head.

The report, by a team of European seismic experts not usually employed by the company, concluded it was "highly probable" that the two main tremors and a series of aftershocks were caused by Cuadrilla's operations at the Preese Hall-1 Well in Lancashire. It said, however, that the cause was an "extremely rare" combination of factors including a pre-existing fault in the rocks, and that it was "unlikely" to occur at other sites in the Bowland Basin, where Cuadrilla is hoping to exploit an estimated 200 trillion cubic feet of shale gas. "If these factors were to combine again in the future, local geology limits seismic events to around magnitude three as a "worst-case" scenario," added a company statement.

The report, which also recommends an early warning system so the company can monitor work more carefully or even stop operations if seismic activity is felt in the future, will be sent to the Department for Energy and Climate Change and the British Geological Survey for approval before the company can resume operations at Preece Hall.

The study was criticised, however, by opponents of fracking, who called for a full investigation by the government before Cuadrilla or other companies are allowed to continue operations in the UK. "An early seismic detection system won't be enough to make local people feel safe — there should be no more fracking in Britain until the health and environmental impacts are fully understood," said Tony Bosworth, senior climate campaigner for the group Friends of the Earth.

Nick Molho, head of energy policy at WWF-UK, said: "We're extremely concerned by the way in which shale gas is being painted as a 'wonder gas' which will slash energy bills in Britain and help tackle climate change. Shale gas is still a fossil fuel, and a new dash for gas could see global temperatures skyrocket. There's also no evidence that it will have a big impact on energy bills, which have in fact been driven up in recent years by a rising gas price."

Prof Andrew C Aplin at Newcastle University said safety and pollution risks could be "handled" by good regulation, but said: "The social issue of whether the public want onshore drilling is a different matter, requiring public discussion. We should all realise that our lifestyles demand energy and that there are no easy answers to where that energy will come from."

Opinion is split over the huge and growing gas fracking industry in north America. Opponents say the industry contaminates groundwater and adds to greenhouse gas pollution from burning fossil fuels, leading to the practice being banned in some places, including France. Supporters say fracking is safe, and contributes valuable energy at a time when conventional gas and oil supplies are supposed to be running out and prices soaring.

A report into fracking by MPs, published in May, said that shale gas in the UK could improve the country's energy "self reliance" and reduce use of highly polluting coal-fired power. But said it was "unlikely" that the industry could improve energy security or lower prices, and warned that it could damage government efforts to boost renewable energy generation. "On balance", the committee recommended fracking should be allowed to go ahead so long as it was well-regulated and closely monitored.

Cuadrilla announced in September that it had "gas in-place" in its licence area in Lancashire of 200 trillion cubic feet — more than the entire UK proven gas reserves previously, and many times the British Geological Survey's previous estimate of the entire UK shale gas potential. A report commissioned by the company also estimated that the operations would create 5,600 jobs, about one-third of them in Lancashire.

Cuadrilla said groundwater in Lancashire was protected by layers of rock between the aquifers which are up to 300m deep and their operations which occur as far below as 3km underground.

A Department of Energy and Climate Change spokesman said: "Cuadrilla's geomechanical study was given to the Department of Energy and Climate Change today. The implications of this report will be reviewed very carefully — in consultation with the British Geological Survey, independent experts, and the other key regulators, [the Health and Safety Executive] and the Environment Agency — before any decision on the resumption of these hydraulic fracture operations is made."

Waveney District Council capitulates to SMP

Already having been approved by the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), signed off by the Environment Agency, and adopted by Suffolk Coastal District Council last week, Waveney District Council's cabinet met on Wednesday 9th November to (rather as anticipated) formally adopt the county's Shoreline Management Plan (SMP) covering the stretch of coast between Lowestoft Ness and Felixstowe. This will mean that no active intervention will come about, so abandoning Covehithe, Benacre and other large and precious areas to continuing erosion leading to their total loss.

Prior to the Waveney District Council Cabinet meeting Peter Boggis submitted a warning note to all the councillors present, pointing out that proposals in the SMP "were a minefield" and could expose Waveney DC and maybe the ratepayers of the area to a £9,000,000 fine from the EU for Environmental infraction etc., as all persons involved in a decision making process that causes damage or deterioration to a protected site are liable to infraction proceedings under the EU Habitats Directive. This risk is brought about by Waveney DC choosing to take on (under pressure from their political partners) an abuse ongoing from 1994 of the Wild Bird and Habitats Directive 92/43/EEC, a duty they have ignored at the environments and now the publics risk.

By not applying the 'Precautionary Principle to prevent Habitat Deterioration' on Natura 2000 Sites in their area the proposed SMP ensures further deterioration, prior to the establishment of mature compensatory habitat elsewhere. Such is unlawful, as their first duty should have been to prevent the situation from arising, a measure they have ignored at the environments and now the publics risk. One such complaint already exists with the EU Commission and another is being drafted due to WDC's actions, which is likely to be followed by action in the European Court.

Peter further pointed out that it cannot be sensibly said that the coastal area from Kessingland to Southwold fails to qualify as an historic natural environment, or is not of significant conservation or landscape quality interest. It is a beautiful area, only spoilt by the deterioration caused by environmental mismanagement. The proposed SMP erodes the very reason for it to be a Natura 2000 site, with most special long established flora and fauna. A similar situation exists in the Blyth Estuary. This has also been condemned to destruction by the adoption of plans based on spurious scientific presumptions and without mature compensatory habitat in place, hence abandonment is similarly unlawful.

DEFRA's approval of the statement of case is conditional upon the adoption of an action plan which ensures that "at no point habitat losses exceed habitat gains".

At present no such action plan has been adopted, and therefore the condition of the Secretary of State's approval has not been met. It is clear that the Environment Agency's Regional Habitat Creation Programme cannot provide mature replacements for all of the habitat including bittern and marsh harrier within the Special Protection Area which the SMP intends, as it will be lost over the life of the plan. Suitable sites for the establishment of the required area of mature replacement habitat previously identified by Natural England do not exist within Suffolk nor even beyond.

Both the Environment Agency and the Secretary of State have failed to address the issue of the abandonment of the lagoons comprised in the Special Areas of Conservation. That is the subject of an outstanding complaint to the European Commission, as the withdrawal of protection from European sites of nature conservation cannot be sustained as a matter of European law; the integrity of Natura 2000 requires that coastal lagoons of the type principally located on the East Anglian coast shall be protected or at the very least recreated prior to their destruction. Thus, to purposefully allow the deterioration of European nature conservation sites without mature compensatory habitat provided in advance appears to be a clear breach of European law, and one which the European Commission will most likely recognize and so take appropriate action against the UK.

Furthermore, without a valid IROPI (Imperative Reasons for Overriding Public Interest) the deterioration of the Natura 2000 sites effected by the SMP is unlawful. The IROPI that has been produced appears invalid on several grounds, the most important being that of Public benefit. An IROPI must demonstrate clear public benefit, but there is no public benefit in an SMP which encourages deterioration of Natura 2000 sites by just to allowing them to be replaced by sites elsewhere, at possibly greater cost than taking reasonable action to protect them in situ, this the UK's responsibility since 1994. Endeavouring to cover up past created environmental errors by those responsible and then adopting an unsafe SMP with its impacts would also risk of EU action. Thus, destruction of what is left has no public benefit and abandonment and relocation without a public benefit is also clearly unlawful.

Furthermore still there has been no will on the part of the SMP partners to seriously consider feasible alternatives. These have presumably been ignored because of dictatorial internal pressure to satisfy the whims of some members of the Partnership.

Finally there is one other future problem, that for future generations at Southwold. The SMP includes the planned destruction of the sea wall immediately north of the pier, causing Southwold to become an evermore exposed promontory as the coast erodes back, which will sharply increase the aggressiveness of the wave action on the Southwold sea defences, some of which are already proving to be inadequate.

The Thursday 10th November Eastern Daily Press report by Mark Boggis entitled 'Waveney shoreline management plan adopted' describes the basis of the meeting, and can be seen on the EDP24 website

EU plans for stronger regulation of offshore oil and gas activities

The European Commission has put forward draft rules to improve the safety of oil and gas activities in the EU. It has also proposed to implement a Barcelona convention protocol on offshore pollution in the Mediterranean.

The draft regulation closely resembles a text leaked to the press. It contains a number of requirements that the commission says take into account the learning from an investigation into last year's BP oil disaster. The law would extend the environmental liability directive to cover all EU marine waters, including exclusive economic zones within 370 kilometres from coastal areas. This also applies to parts of the continental shelf under member states' jurisdiction.

Operators would have to submit a "major hazard report" to national authorities, which will include a risk assessment and evidence of the installation's ability to cope with an oil leak. They would also be required to prepare an emergency response plan.

These documents, to be updated every five years, would be checked by national authorities and independently verified by a third party organisation. Member states would also be required to set penalties for offenders. The penalties should be "effective, proportionate and dissuasive", in line with rules on environmental crimes.

As reported before, no mandatory insurance would be required. But according to an EU source the commission is conducting a cost-benefit analysis on the matter, which suggests mandatory insurance may be considered at a later stage. The cost of a major accident in European waters is estimated at €205-€915m per year.

"It is essential that an uncapped compulsory insurance requirement be integrated into EU law to ensure the full financial liability of operators," marine conservation group Oceana said on Thursday. NGO Client Earth made a similar call.

An EU offshore authorities group would also be set up to encourage best practice sharing and contribute to improved safety standards. However, this falls short from what the European Parliament and environmental groups would like to see.

MEPs and NGOs want to give the European Maritime Safety Authority (EMSA) greater powers to oversee third party verifications and inspections under the new regulation. A parliament resolution states EMSA's remit should be extended to cover prevention and response to pollution caused by oil and gas offshore activities.

UK and Norway sign North Sea energy agreement

Energy ministers from Norway and the United Kingdom today signed a joint agreement to co-operate further on renewables, oil and gas and the use of technology such as carbon capture and storage, to ensure energy security and manage emissions. UK Energy Secretary Chris Huhne signed the agreement with Norwegian Minister for Petroleum and Energy Ola Borten Moe in London.

Norwegian Minister for Petroleum and Energy Ola Borten Moe and UK Energy Secretary Chris Huhne signing the agreement

Norwegian Minister for Petroleum and Energy Ola Borten Moe and UK Energy Secretary Chris Huhne sign the joint energy agreement

Ministers affirmed their "commitment to support industry in the future development of our oil and gas resources in the North Sea using the best technology available to manage emissions, protect the environment and maximise recovery of resources". They also agreed to continue to support efforts to develop interconnection between the UK and Norway.

UK Energy Minister Charles Hendry said: "Our energy security is enhanced by close links with Scandinavia and Europe. As North Sea neighbours, the UK has long enjoyed close and beneficial ties with Norway based on the development of oil and gas. And as renewables and CCS (carbon capture and storage) develop further, it is increasingly vital that we work closely in these areas too. Today's agreement confirms the importance of Norwegian natural gas to UK energy needs as an essential part of our longer term energy security, and it boosts co-operation on CCS and the development of renewable energy and interconnection."

Shale gas reserves in Lancashire said to be "vast"

Richard Black, Environment correspondent for BBC News, reports 21st September 2011: "The total amount of gas that Cuadrilla estimates to be in the shale formation it's been exploring is huge. It's more than 10 times the reserves known to exist under the UK's part of the North Sea — more than the total known in all UK fields, in fact.

"But total gas isn't the same thing as useable gas; and how much of it can be extracted is another matter, as the company acknowledges. Before it can extract any of it, it will have to satisfy the government (and local residents, perhaps) that the process is safe, which might not be straightforward given the association that has been mooted between "fracking" and small earthquakes close to the existing exploratory wells.

"Then there is the question of whether the economics work out. If it is extractable at a good price, there is a large chance that this one field will put a major dent in the government's climate change ambitions, which depend most of all on switching electricity generation to low-carbon fuels — which shale gas most definitely is not."

BBC News also reports, 21st September 2011: "An energy firm which has been test drilling for controversial "shale gas" in Lancashire has said it has found vast gas resources underground. Cuadrilla Resources began testing for gas on the Fylde Coast in March, using a technique known as "fracking". It said it had found 200 trillion cubic feet of gas under the ground, which if recovered could provide 5,600 jobs in the UK, 1,700 of those in Lancashire.

Opponents to the process believe it produces damaging carbon emissions. A small protest, organised by Campaign Against Climate Change, was held outside The Imperial Hotel in Blackpool on Wednesday, where Cuadrilla met to announce its findings.

Fracking involves the hydraulic fracturing of the ground using high-pressure liquid containing chemicals to release the gas.

Campaigners have warned developing the fossil fuel could draw investment away from the UK's potentially huge renewable industry.

The gas is found in shale formed from deposits of mud, silt, clay and organic matter. The process has caused controversy in the US on environmental grounds, where there have been claims from some householders that the subsequent release of gas has caused illness and polluted drinking water.

In Lancashire, the tests were halted in June when two earthquakes occurred in the nearby Blackpool area. Cuadrilla said it was expecting to find out within the next 30 days whether or not its work contributed to the tremors.

Cuadrilla's chief executive, Mark Miller, said the process would not pose a threat to UK groundwater. He said the company hoped to drill up to 400 wells in Lancashire to extract some of the gas it had found under the ground in the area. Mr Miller said thousands of highly skilled jobs would be created, with posts paying an average wage of £55,000.

Cuadrilla hopes to drill as many as 400 wells over the next nine years and up to 800 over 16 years if gas extraction is successful. Mr Miller said they could be grouped in units of 10 on each football pitch-sized site, reducing their impact on the landscape. He said each well is drilled and then fracking takes place over several weeks, after which the well can potentially produce gas for up to 30 to 50 years. "When they are done right, someone driving by on a country road or walking their dog, it will be hard for them to see our sites as they will blend in with the Lancashire countryside," he said.

Phil Thornhill, from Campaign Against Climate Change, was one of those protesting outside the meeting. He said: "Those jobs could and should be in green energy. We need a revolution in the economy to really deal with climate change effectively. We need to be moving much quicker than we are to a low carbon economy, that would be a lot of jobs, a lot of development. They could create jobs in renewables if they put the investment there." A spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) said it had to ensure any operations which went ahead were properly regulated. "We welcome the news that Cuadrilla believe there to be good quantities of gas contained in the shale covered by their licence," he said. "Our priority is to ensure that their operations are properly regulated and they face the same rigorous regime that all oil and gas operators must adhere to. The shale gas industry in the UK is in its infancy, and the eventual scale of the recoverable gas from this site is still unclear, but nothing will temper the government's firm and unbending commitment to safety and environmental protection. Any development must sit with our plans for a strong portfolio of energy sources as we move to a low carbon economy, including renewables, nuclear and clean coal and gas."

Radioactive pollution from Dounreay "will never be completely cleaned up"

Radioactive contamination that leaked for more than two decades from the Dounreay nuclear plant on the north coast of Scotland will never be completely cleaned up, a Scottish government agency has admitted.

Dounreay was shut in 1993 but radioactive contamination will 'never be completely cleaned up'. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) has decided to give up on its aim of returning the seabed near the plant to a "pristine condition". To do so, it said, could cause "more harm than good". At a board meeting in Stirling, the Scottish government's environmental watchdog opted to encourage remediation "as far as is practically achievable" but to abandon any hope of removing all the radioactive pollution from the seabed.

Tens of thousands of radioactive fuel fragments escaped from the Dounreay plant between 1963 and 1984, polluting local beaches, the coastline and the seabed. Fishing has been banned within a two-kilometre radius of the plant since 1997.

The most radioactive of the particles are regarded by experts as potentially lethal if ingested. Similar in size to grains of sand, they contain caesium-137, which has a half-life of 30 years, but they can also incorporate traces of plutonium-239, which has a half-life of over 24,000 years — meaning that is the time period for half of the material to break down.

The particles are milled shards from the reprocessing of irradiated uranium and plutonium fuel from two long-defunct reactors. They are thought to have drained into the sea with discharges from cooling ponds. In 2007, Dounreay, which is now being decommissioned, pleaded guilty at Wick sheriff court to a "failure to prevent fragments of irradiated nuclear fuel being discharged into the environment". The plant's operator at the time, the UK Atomic Energy Authority, was fined £140,000.

Since 2008, over 2,300 radioactive particles have been recovered from the seabed, with 351 removed by a remotely operated underwater vehicle this summer. Since 1983, over 480 particles have also been found on three local beaches and the Dounreay foreshore.

Sepa recommended in 1998 that the seabed around Dounreay should be returned to a "pristine condition". Since then, it pointed out, the contamination had been extensively investigated and new regulations on radioactively contaminated land had come into force. "It is now widely accepted that a literal return to a pristine condition is a far from simple or even achievable concept," a Sepa spokeswoman told the Guardian. Trying to achieve it might also cause more harm than good. There is the potential that ecosystems may be destroyed on trying to get to something which does not pose a significant hazard."

An expert committee set up by Sepa warned in 2006 that disturbing the seabed could cause particles to escape and be swept ashore, putting members of the public at risk. The most radioactive particle found "could have had life-threatening consequences if it had been ingested", the committee said. Sepa's board agreed to change its policy to encourage further remediation "provided that this achieves more good than harm and accepting that at some sites it will not be practical to return the land to a pristine condition".

Dounreay, which is now managed by a consortium including the UK engineering firm Babcock, welcomed Sepa's new policy. It was still aiming to remove "the majority of the most hazardous particles, together with the removal of any other particles encountered," said the site's senior project manager, Phil Cartwright. "The best practicable environmental option, which was welcomed by the government agencies, is focused on doing more good than harm and was publicly discussed on the basis that it would never be possible to retrieve every particle."

Friends of the Earth Scotland, however, attacked the development. "Once again, we see the nuclear industry causing a problem it can't solve, and dumping the cost and consequence on the rest of us," said the environmental group's chief executive, Stan Blackley. "Nuclear power is neither safe, clean, cheap nor low-carbon and it continues to cause problems and cost the taxpayer a hidden and open-ended fortune. Let's learn from our past mistakes and consign it to a lead-lined dustbin."

Has "The Times Atlas" overstated ice loss in Greenland?

Climate scientists and polar researchers from across the world have rallied, mobilised and responded to a massively incorrect press statement by HarperCollins, the publisher of the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World. According to HarperCollins, the atlas is "turning Greenland 'green' because the new edition has had to erase 15% of Greenland's once permanent ice cover".

Times map of Greenland compared against MODIS satellite image

The new Times map of Greenland (left), and the satellite image from August 2011. The contours on the satellite image show ice thickness at 500-metre intervals (red — 0 metres, blue — 500 metres). In the atlas, the unit commonly used is altitude, but here, the margin of the ice sheet is outlined using the blue contour. Scientists question this definition, as a large area mapped as ice-free is clearly ice-covered. Photograph: Times Atlas/NASA/Modis

The press release quickly spread across the global news, leaving many scientists flabbergasted. How on earth could the Times Atlas obtain such high number? The Greenland Ice Sheet contains 2.9m cubic kilometres of ice — enough to raise the sea level by 7 metres if it were to melt. A 15% reduction in size would be about a 1-metre rise — enough to cause flooding over a third of the Netherlands.

Since flooding of this magnitude has not taken place in recent years, scepticism was immediate in the glaciological community. Something must have gone seriously wrong when the new map of Greenland was compared against the previous version from 1999.

What happened next is something new. Scientists from around the world quickly expressed their frustration with the questionable claim. Jeffrey Kargel from the University of Arizona wrote on the cryolist, an e-mail distribution list used by many students, researchers and academics, that "a number like 15% ice loss… is simply a killer mistake. This is not a scientific error, but it could be perceived as one."

Graham Cogley, a professor of geography at Trent University in Ontario, Canada, replied "the claims here are simply not backed up by science", and concluded "this pig can't fly".

At the Scott Polar Research Institute, seven scientists including myself issued a press statement on the University of Cambridge website explaining "a 15% decrease in permanent ice cover since the publication of the previous atlas 12 years ago is both incorrect and misleading. A sizeable portion of the area mapped as ice-free in the atlas is clearly still ice-covered."

Meanwhile, scientists from across the world continued the exchange of e-mails via the cryolist. Ted Scambos, a senior scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre, said: "I'm worried that the importance of the changes that are going on will be lost on the public, because the true value of what the ice sheet has lost compared to this 15% number sounds very small."

And he is right, because the true loss of permanent ice in Greenland from 1999-2011 is about 0.1%. This sounds minuscule. Why worry?

The answer is that it is a small fraction of a very large number. The current annual loss of ice from Greenland is about 200 cubic kilometres per year. This is about 0.007% of the total ice volume, but the same as 6mm/decade in terms of sea level rise. This is a substantial number which excludes losses from other ice sheets and ice caps, and mountain glaciers, which tend to melt faster.

So we should worry about climate change and its impact, not only on the Greenland Ice Sheet, but ice masses across the world as a whole. A recent study published in Nature shows a rapid decline of glaciers and ice caps in the Canadian Arctic. In Antarctica, a number of ice shelves have collapsed, exposing glaciers to the marine environment and causing them to flow much faster than their original pace. Many readers will probably already be familiar with the continuing decline of European glaciers.

Yet in recent years, Greenland has been on the top of the list when it comes to large and sudden glacier change. The past ten years have seen record melt year after year. The margin of the ice sheet is clearly thinning. Numerous glaciers have retreated abruptly, exposing new lands and causing faster transfer of ice from ice sheet interior to the ocean. For glaciologists working in Greenland, climate change is very real.

Atlases such as the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World can and probably will play an important role in the communication of climate change, but it is absolutely essential that the communication is based on facts and scientific evidence.

The substantial consequences of making inaccurate or exaggerated claims in the climate change debate came to light after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change incorrectly stated in their last assessment report, that Himalayan glaciers could vanish before 2035. Although this mistake was not made within the actual assessment of the physical science basis of climate change, the unravelling of this mistake nonetheless lasted more than a year and was damaging not just to the IPCC, but the wider scientific community.

In the aftermath of what is often referred to as 'Himalayagate', scientists are well aware that one big error can cloud a thousand truths. This is why the science community tackled the Times Atlas mistake swiftly and effectively.

HarperCollins issued a press statement retracting the claimed magnitude of ice loss, but maintained that they stand by their maps. But to scientists, the representation of the Greenland Ice Sheet in the latest atlas, without explanatory text, will continue to be misleading.

Is there a jellyfish plague in UK seas? If so, why?

Britain's beaches are increasingly facing some unusual visitors, with research suggesting jellyfish numbers are on the increase in UK waters.

Jellyfish numbers appear to be on the rise in UK waters, research suggests. So why is the sea turning into "jellyfish soup"?

It's not only beach-goers who have to watch out. Torness nuclear power plant in Scotland recently had to shut down after moon jellyfish blocked the water intake system. Several tonnes of the creatures had to be cleared out.

Some areas, including the Irish Sea and the east coast of Scotland, have been invaded by so many they now resemble a "jellyfish soup", says the Marine Conservation Society (MCS). So why do they appear to be on the increase? According to research there is strong evidence that an increase is linked to three main factors — pollution, overfishing and possibly climate change.

Pollution such as sewage and fertilisers run off the land and into the sea, causing increased nutrients in the water. This can boost jellyfish numbers as the nutrients increase plankton which they feed on, along with fish.

Overfishing means jellyfish do not face their usual predators and competitors, which usually regulate population growth. Large fish, which eat jellyfish, have been drastically reduced by bad fishing practices, says Ocean 2012, a pressure group which campaigns to stop overfishing. So have smaller fish which compete for food with the stingers.

It is argued that climate change can cause more favourable conditions for jellyfish, with their adaptability giving them an advantage over some other sea creatures.

It is difficult to estimate the jellyfish population in UK waters because very little research has been done and in the past they were ignored in long-term fishing surveys, says Dr Victoria Hobson, from EcoJel, a project researching the distribution and abundance of jellyfish. Its current study has been running since 2008.

"This also makes it difficult to get a handle on how numbers have changed," she says. "Even in recent years people are doing a lot more watersports so are spotting more. With the development of smartphones it is also much easier to report those sightings. It makes it difficult to interpret if there are actually more jellyfish or just more sightings."

The MCS has been running a national jellyfish survey since 2003, where the public report sightings. Dr Richardson agrees it's probably too early to draw any firm conclusions from the data, but says a few other organisations have been doing systematic at-seas surveys over recent decades and they have shown a rise in jellyfish numbers in UK waters. "Our survey reflects that," he says. "Some of the people who have been reporting jellyfish to us say they have lived by the coast for years and never seen anything like it. This year we received our first reports of the huge but harmless barrel jellyfish off north Wales back in early January. This species has occurred in huge numbers in the Irish Sea and beyond ever since, with reports received from north Somerset to the Firth of Clyde."

There are hundreds of types of jellyfish, with a few common species in the UK. These include the moon jellyfish, which can grow to the size of a saucer, and the barrel jellyfish, which can get as big as a large household dustbin. Some do sting, but in most cases it causes just a mild rash. The occasional Portuguese man o'war has been spotted in UK waters and its sting is far more serious.

A group of jellyfish is called a "bloom". Scientists say it is difficult to measure blooms because of the sheer numbers involved and the fact jellyfish spend time at depth, as well as on the surface. But a bloom of barrel jellyfish can cover an area the size of Carmarthen Bay in Wales and numbers can run into hundreds of thousands, says Dr Hobson.

EcoJel's project involves tagging jellyfish to study their movements. Monitoring jellyfish numbers is important because they are an indication of the state of oceans. If they overtake fish and start to dominate an area — as they have off the coast of Namibia — this causes environmental and economic problems, says Dr Hobson.

In 2007 a jellyfish invasion wiped out Northern Ireland's only salmon farm, killing more than 100,000 fish. At the time a spokesman said the attack could cost the company more than £1m. They can also have an impact on tourism. In 2008 the Red Cross treated 400 people for jellyfish stings in a single day on a beach in Malaga, Spain. But one consequence to come from the growing numbers is increased sightings of leatherback sea turtles, which feed on them, in UK waters. Dr Richards says there has been an unusually high number of sighting in 2011 — six in six days recently. "That's an amazing number, it's definitely a good year for turtles."

North Pacific and Alaska Humpback Whale population recovering from near extinction

Humpback whales of the North Pacific and Alaska have rebounded dramatically from near extinction half a century ago and now number at least 21,000 animals, according to the most comprehensive count of the species ever undertaken.

"Results confirm that the overall humpback whale population in the North Pacific has continued to increase and is now greater than some prior estimates of pre-whaling abundance," wrote the 19 co-authors from Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, California, Mexico and Japan in a paper published this week in the journal of Marine Mammal Science.

This updated population figure is about 15 times greater than the 1,400 whales thought to remain alive in the region after the species was decimated by mid-century industrial whaling, and at least 1,000 more animals than the biologists estimated in 2008.

"We feel the numbers may even be larger since there have been across-the-board increases in known population areas and unknown areas have probably seen the same increase," said Jay Barlow, the lead author and a marine mammal biologist with the south-west Fisheries Science Centre in La Jolla, California.

Humpback whales have been listed as endangered by the United States for decades, but populations throughout the world have increased since whaling was banned in 1966. NOAA Fisheries announced in 2009 it would review the status of the species' listing under the Endangered Species Act.

Before commercial whaling, as many as 125,000 humpbacks swam the world's oceans, divided into the broad populations in the North Pacific, the North Atlantic and Southern oceans. Decades of industrial style whaling in the middle of the 20th century wiped out 90 percent of the population to about 5,000 worldwide by 1966, including the 1,400 animals in the North Pacific, according to this genetic study. Once whaling ended, the species began to rebound.

Note: — For further information about whales, please visit MARINET's special feature on "Whales and their Survival" in our new Planet Ocean section.

Safety concerns over cockle harvesting in Ribble estuary

The Lytham St Annes Express reports, 27th October 2011: "Reckless cocklers have diced with death in a desperate attempt to get to the rich pickings in the Lytham estuary. But the shocking disregard for their own lives may well have put a stop to the cockle harvest. For the cockle licence issuing authority has exclusively revealed to the Express that it is seeking legal advice to have the cockle beds closed on safety grounds. Around 100 cockle pickers battled for their lives in high winds on Monday night when a massive search and rescue operation was launched on the Ribble Estuary.

Cockle pickers are rescued from Ribble Estuary in Lytham by the coastguard and RNLI

"Ten people had to be rescued as rapidly fading light, high winds and towering waves meant around 30 boats working the cockle beds struggled to get back to shore. Distress flares were fired into the air as desperate cocklers found their fishing boats filling with icy water.

"Calls for tough action have repeatedly been made into what is a multi-agency cockling operation, following a flood of complaints. And Dr Stephen Atkins, chief executive North West of the Inshore Fisheries and Conservation Authority (IFCA), which issues the licences, said: "The problem is IFCA isn't really able to take action on safety grounds. We are there to look after stocks and the marine environment. At the end of the day, I'm not sure we can close the beds on safety grounds. But I'm getting legal advice on that to see if we can do that." He said he was reluctant, as it would hit the livelihoods of responsible cockle fishermen, after the beds opened in September following a 20-year ban.

"On Tuesday Fylde Council met police and senior IFCA officers to review recent events. IFCA will meet again in early December to review police and council evidence into the impact on the local community. Calls for greater harvesting controls will include a temporary ban, safer mechanical harvesting and daylight working only. Council Leader David Eaves said: "In the meantime we will continue to work with the police, IFCA, Coastguard and other relevant agencies to minimise the impact as best we can with the tools we have available." Dr Atkins explained that cockling off the Fylde was unusual in that: "They use boats to get out to the cockle beds. I have not experienced that before. It is a dangerous stretch of water."

"Meanwhile, powerless Fylde Council feels as though it has its hands tied as tragedy could be lurking just around the corner. Councillor Tommy Threlfall, cabinet member for the environment and partnerships, wants a meeting with Fisheries Minister Richard Benyon to press for the right to restrict the number of licences. He said: "The discussion we want with Mr Benyon will cover the issuing and policing of permits to ensure that cocklers are licensed and trained in working safely. We will ask if it is possible for the council to have an input into how many licences are issued. We will examine if it is possible to retain a proportion of licences for local fishermen who know the local conditions. We will ask if we can raise any money from cocklers to offset our costs in monitoring their activities. Another idea we would like to pursue is closing access to the beds if there are safety concerns."

Fylde chief executive Phil Woodward said: "This meeting will give us the opportunity to lobby for a longer-term change in the legislation relating to cockle harvesting, which, to be effective, meaningful and contain timely controls, should be vested in the local district council that has a greater understanding of local circumstances and the community impact of this operation and is locally accountable unlike many of these other agencies."

Duchy of Cornwall ordered to reveal oyster farm data

The Duchy of Cornwall, which comprises the Prince of Wales's business interests, has been ordered to disclose environmental data from an oyster farm.

The decision by an information tribunal redefines the duchy, a 700-year-old private institution, as a public body, leaving it open to further challenges. The ruling came after a legal battle against the farm near Falmouth. The tribunal said the duchy had not carried out an environmental assessment of the farm.

The potentially far-reaching decision defining the duchy as a public body under environmental regulations was made by the First-Tier Tribunal on information rights, a court that deals with disputes relating to freedom of information.

Michael Bruton, co-founder of the Port Navas Quay Conservation Committee (www.preserveportnavasquay.co.uk), had asked the duchy to disclose information about the Port Navas Oyster Farm under legislation which requires public bodies to reveal their environmental record. He had challenged the cultivation of non-native oysters in the historic beds and had demanded to know what environmental assessments were made by the body that provides the Princes of Wales' income.

The area used for the oyster farm is an officially designated conservation zone which includes a protection plan for native oysters.

Mr Bruton argued that the area's conservation status required the duchy to properly assess the potential effect of introducing Pacific oysters.

In its ruling, the tribunal said: "As we understood the duchy's evidence, no Environmental Assessment of the oyster farm had been carried out." It said the duchy had been wrong to withhold information about the farm because it should be regarded as a public body with a duty to disclose environmental information.

The duchy effectively dates from the 14th Century when Edward III created a perpetual body to generate income for each heir to the throne. Its precise workings and legal arrangements are steeped in history and tradition. During the challenge, it argued that it could not be considered a public body for the purposes of environmental legislation because it was set up to provide a "private inheritance" and was an "entirely private operation". But the tribunal ruled: "In a modern day context, the duchy is carrying out the public function or service of providing an income for the undertaking of an extremely important constitutional role for the UK."

A Duchy of Cornwall spokesperson said: "The duchy is reviewing the Tribunal's reasons for reaching its conclusion with a view to establishing whether to appeal the decision."

Graham Smith of campaign group Republic, which wants the Royal Family to be subjected to the Freedom of Information Act, said: "It sets a precedent and hopefully will subject Prince Charles's business dealings to greater scrutiny. It does remind us that Prince Charles does try to have it both ways, being a public figure and, when it suits him, a private enterprise. This reminds us that what the Duchy of Cornwall does is of public interest and it is wholly appropriate that they are subject to these regulations."

EU Fisheries Commissioner suggests fish "discards" could be food for the poor

Fish from European waters will be distributed to the poor as an alternative to throwing them away at sea, the EU fisheries chief told MPs, as part of a sweeping reform of marine policy.

Maria Damanaki, the European commissioner for fisheries, said that as part of a proposed new deal with fishermen aimed at ending the wasteful practice of discarding edible fish at sea, lower value fish could be distributed to charities and other public organisations. Appearing before the House of Commons select committee on environment, food and rural affairs, she said: "We can use these for charitable purposes, [though] we will have to give fishermen compensation if they give fish to the poor."

Damanaki is seeking the most wide-ranging reform of the EU's common fisheries policy since it was formulated more than four decades ago. Key to the reforms will be an end to the practice of discards, by which as much as two-thirds of the catch of some species are abandoned at sea, almost all of them to die. About 1m tonnes are estimated to be thrown back each year into the North Sea alone. Discards are a by-product of the rules on fishing quotas — when fishermen exceed their allowance, or net species for which they lack a quota, they must throw the excess back.

But the commissioner faces stiff opposition from fishing groups and some member states, because forcing fishermen to land all their catch will mean lower incomes. Current practices allow fleets to discard damaged fish, or lower value species, for which they receive less money, in order to maximise their profits.

Damanaki called on consumers to urge governments, retailers and the fishing industry to abandon discards and manage the EU's fish stocks more sustainably. "We could not do this without the support of consumers," she said. "I would encourage people to make responsible choices [in the fish they eat] and keep up the pressure."

Earlier this year, hundreds of thousands of people signed a petition against discards spearheaded by Guardian food writer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

Damanaki also wants an end to subsidies paid for scrapping fishing vessels. Although about €1bn was spent on compensation for fishermen who agreed to scrap their vessels between 2007 and this year, the total capacity of the EU fleet rose by 3% a year over that period — in part because fishermen used their compensation money to invest in bigger vessels.

There is already a ready-made model for distributing excess goods from Europe to charities and people on low incomes, in the form of the food for the poor initiative, that covers agricultural products. Lower value catch that cannot be eaten could be turned into fish-meal, used as feed in fish farms. In addition, fishermen would have to receive compensation for any juvenile fish they caught, because allowing them to sell such fish would act as a perverse incentive to catch them.

A few types of fish that can survive after they are thrown back, such as small sharks, would still be allowed to be discarded, under the plans.

But Damanaki acknowledged that the levels of compensation would be difficult to set. "You have to give some money, enough [to encourage fleets] to be honest, but not too much — you want them to use selective gear [that would exclude smaller fish]."

The fisheries commission is seeking €6.7bn in budget for the next seven years, which will be used to help fishermen move out of the industry and find new ways to make a living, such as by turning their boats to leisure uses or pursuing innovative schemes such as rounding up plastic from the seas for recycling. Money will also be made available to build new infrastructure, such as cold storage facilities, to ensure fewer fish go to waste.

Damanaki's proposals are now under consideration by the European Parliament and the EU Council, and will be debated next year. If they pass without a mauling by member states, they could become law as soon as the end of next year.

New EU rules to reduce risk of oil spills

The European Union plans to crack down on oil companies, with orders to improve safety to prevent a spill like that in the Gulf of Mexico last year.

North Sea oil rigs. At least 486 UK installations will be covered by the new rules Photograph: Getty

The measures, from the European Union's energy commissioner, Guenther Oettinger, will force companies drilling in EU waters to release details of their safety procedures, place new liabilities on them in the event of an accident, and require them to prove they have the money to clean up any spills that do occur. However, the European Commission has stopped short of extending the tougher new rules to the overseas operations of EU-based companies, after pressure from oil companies and the UK government.

"Oil companies have to be fully liable," Oettinger told the Guardian. "We want to make sure that the highest standards are put in place."

At least 486 UK installations will be covered by the new rules, more than in all of the other member states combined.

The rules apply to all drilling sites within 200 miles of the coast, the first time EU regulations on oil drilling have been extended so far. Previously they were limited to 12 miles. They would cover the boundary with international waters where the legal standing of wells is unclear, and mean virtually all offshore oil drilling operations within the EU will be covered. Oil drillers will have to use a higher standard of equipment, and will have to prove they can pay for any damage they cause, either through an obligation to buy sufficient insurance or by paying into a fund — it will be left to member states to decide which one. Companies will also have to submit to independent third party auditing.

However, the Commission will not force European companies to adhere to the same standards in their overseas operations, a step some activists had called for in order to improve the sometimes woeful safety record of European oil companies in developing countries.

For instance, this year the Guardian uncovered in Nigeria evidence of oil leaks for which Shell was partly liable, amounting to a greater volume of spillage than in the Gulf accident. If the EU had extended its rules as urged, Shell would be forced to reveal details of its practices and prove it was using the same stringent safety controls it uses in the North Sea.

Oettinger said such a sweeping change was outside the scope of the current directive, and extension would be hard to formulate in legal terms as it would involve complex areas of international law. But he vowed to put pressure on companies to pursue "best practice" and to co-operate with other countries to achieve this, particularly around the Mediterranean. If European companies did not voluntarily extend their EU safety practices to other areas, he indicated, this issue could be looked at again.

The EU will stay out of rows over where drilling should be allowed to take place. At present, several companies are seeking to explore areas near the Shetland Islands and in Greenland where their wells would be in far deeper water than normal, and potentially in environmentally sensitive areas. Activists oppose these operations, warning of the dangers of leaks occurring where they are difficult to reach, and where they could damage pristine habitats. Greenpeace has mounted several protests against Cairn Energy this year in an attempt to stop its operations in Arctic waters.

The new energy directive may face a difficult ride through the rest of the legislative process, as the UK government is known to be wary of some of the plans. If it is accepted, it could be in force by the end of next year. The Department of Energy and Climate Change said: "Today the UK has a robust, proven national regime with decades of experience in regulating the offshore industry. The lessons of Piper Alpha led to a dramatic improvement in the regulatory system in the UK and more generally in Europe. We know that the commission is considering proposals which might result in a greater regulatory burden on the UK industry. We will continue to work with the commission towards a pragmatic approach which does not reduce the standards of the very robust regulatory system which we already have here."

The proposed new rules were a direct response to the explosion last spring at BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, which killed 11 people and caused the biggest offshore oil spill in US history, wreaking devastation over a wide area.

UK scraps key "carbon capture and storage" project

The British government has cancelled plans to fund a carbon capture and storage (CCS) demonstration project at Longannet in Scotland, signalling the technology remains too costly and undermining Britain's ambition to become a clean technology leader.

"A decision has been made not to proceed with Longannet but to pursue other projects with the 1 billion pounds ($1.5 billion) funding made available by the government," the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) said in a statement.

CCS is still a commercially unproven technology but is widely seen as a key mechanism to fight climate change by trapping and burying greenhouse gas emissions, while maintaining stable energy supply.

The government said it plans to use the money to fund other CCS projects following the launch of a new bidding process in England and Scotland. Ministers will meet industry leaders in a forum on 2nd November to discuss further steps, DECC said.

"At a time when North Sea revenues are coming in at record levels, it was surely not too much to expect that the Treasury would make the necessary funding commitment for Longannet to go forward," said Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond, who supported the Longannet CCS project. The cost would have been less than a tenth of this year's alone estimated North Sea revenues of 13.4 billion pounds."

A source close to the talks between Longannet developer Scottish Power, owned by Spain's Iberdrola, and the government said two weeks ago the two parties were unable to agree on how much up-front funding the government should provide, stalling negotiations. The Longannet coal-fired power station has a capacity of 2,400 megawatt (MW) and is Britain's second-largest coal-fired power plant behind Drax's 3,900 MW power station in Yorkshire.

"This announcement is very frustrating and damaging for the credibility of the UK CCS demonstration program," said Nick Molho, head of energy policy at WWF-UK.

The UK plans to become a world leader in clean energy technology, and CCS is central to plans to reduce carbon emissions. But tough government spending cuts to curb sovereign debt have made it difficult for the state to commit huge sums of state money to new technologies.

UK calls for Iceland and the Faroe Islands to reduce their mackerel quotas

The Guardian reports, 21st October 2011: "The UK has won backing from Ireland in its call for Iceland and the Faroe Islands to reduce the quotas they unilaterally awarded themselves for mackerel in the North Sea, or face sanctions, to ensure the stocks are fished fairly.

The UK has called for Iceland and the Faroe Islands to reduce their mackerel quotas. Photograph: H Taillard/Corbis

"Richard Benyon, UK Fisheries Minister, has said he wants to reach agreement with Iceland and the Faroese on managing mackerel stocks, but warned that if they continued to fish at the same level they were doing this year, the fishery could be in danger by 2014.

"Mackerel is vitally important to the Scottish fleet in particular, and it's not right that they should lose out when they have played by the rules. We had a very constructive meeting with the Irish delegation, who feel the same as we do that if Iceland and the Faroe Islands don't stop taking more than their fair share then the sanctions proposed by the Commission must be considered as soon as possible."

UK pressure forces EU to abandon automatic fish quota reductions

The Guardian reports, 21st October 2001: "The European Commission has dropped proposals that would have seen an automatic cut in fish quotas where there is not enough information about stock levels.

The UK had opposed the plans for a 25% reduction in quotas for stocks which were lacking in data, as part of efforts to make the EU's fisheries more sustainable, because officials said they were not based on science.

The proposals could have hit important UK fisheries including Rockall cod, Irish Sea herring, haddock and plaice, and West of Scotland whiting and pollock.

The Commission also said quotas would not automatically revert to the same level as the previous year for stocks without sufficient data, but each would be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

UK fisheries minister, Richard Benyon, said he was glad to see some "realism" in the decisions being made at today's EU Agriculture and Fisheries Council in Luxembourg.

Speaking on the ditching of proposals for an automatic cut to stocks without sufficient data, Benyon said: "Just because the data on a stock doesn't give the full picture, that doesn't mean slashing the amount which you're allowed to catch by a quarter is the right response. The UK fully supports the Commission's ambitions to ensure that fish stocks are sustainable in the long term. But we can't support proposals which have no basis in science and could risk increasing discards from otherwise healthy stocks."

Cuts to quotas could mean fishermen may be forced to throw overboard fish they caught from stocks which may well be healthy — because they did not have the quota to cover the catch.

MARINET comments: This is a serious climb down by the EU Commission on its draft CFP Reform proposals. The proposal for a 25% automatic cut in the annual catch quota for stocks where there is no scientific data was made by the EU Commission because currently decisions as to what is a sustainable yield from these stocks are being made "blind" i.e. on the basis of no scientific data about the size of the stock or its reproductive status. Member states are required by the EU Commission to inform the Commission of the biological status of each of the various fish stocks within their area, thus enabling a scientific decision to be made about what is a sustainable level of fishing. However, the EU Commission has stated [Fishing Opportunities COM(2011) 298 final] that it lacks such scientific advice from member countries in around two-thirds of all fish stocks (ref. COM(2011) 298 final, Section 4.1) and that member states are failing in this obligation to submit scientific data.

Given this reality, MARINET has in fact recommended to the EU Commission that in the case of fish stocks where no such data exists — because member states are witholding this information or are not prepared to meet their responsibilities to undertake proper scientific assessment — the EU Commission should close the fishery and issue no annual catch quotas at all for the stock until the member state supplies the necessary scientific data to enable a sustainable fish catch quota to be determined. This is the "precautionary principle" in action (a legal requirement under EU and international law) and is the only sensible means to ensure that the historic saga of over-fishing and all its attendant adverse consequences are brought to an end.

MARINET believes that it is wholly disingenuous of the UK government to assert that the EU Commission's limited CFP Reform proposal — the 25% quota cut for stocks with no scientific data — is an action that has "no basis in science". This assertion is absurd. The truth is that the UK government is concealing the scientific data or failing to collect it for many of its own fish stocks, and is thus the real party at fault. It is the UK government who is insisting on the CFP being run on unsustainable principles — indeed, illegal principles because the precautionary principle (the need to take preventative action when no scientific data exists in cases where reasonable concern exists that damage may be caused) mandates that fisheries be closed or restricted in such circumstances — and it is therefore the UK government which is subverting the true aspirations for effective CFP reform. It is also very regrettable that the EU Commission has climbed down under pressure, and thus become a party to this illegality.

For CFP Reform to genuinely mean something and to pursue policies which will restore health to our seas and fisheries, this decision has to be revisited and reversed by both the UK government and the EU Commission. The credibility of the CFP Reform process is currently in serious jeopardy.

Boost for North Norfolk Fisheries?

Under the heading 'North Norfolk fishing industry hopes for £2.4m investment' Lucy Clapham wrote in the North Norfolk News of 24th October of the possibility of £2.4m of European funding to boost its fishing heritage, in a bid to keep the dying industry afloat and support its dwindling work force.

Environmental chiefs in Brussels are currently considering this bid, which if granted is hoped to provide a sustainable future for fishermen along the 66 mile coastal stretch from Brancaster to Hemsby, and inshore businesses linked to the traditional trade. A detailed plan has been submitted by the North Norfolk's Fisheries Local Action Group (FLAG) with a proposal to the European Fisheries Fund, showing how it would spend the cash on areas that include infrastructure, marketing, education and getting EU protection for the famous Cromer crab and to create a fisheries training school.

Suffolk CC adopt the SMP

As part of an article by Craig Robinson in the East Anglian Daily Times of 1st November entitled 'Suffolk Coastal: Council agrees to launch formal consultation on car parking shake-up' Craig Robinson reported that members of Suffolk Coastal Council agreed to adopt the Shoreline Management Plan (SMP), which claims to outline how flood and erosion risk should be tackled along the Suffolk coast.

The councillors decided to restrict discussion to just those parts of the plan that affected their district and not neighbouring Waveney, which is set to look at the proposals next week. Following assurances that the SMP was not set in stone and that it would be subject to regular reviews to allow flexibility for unforeseen circumstances, the plan was adopted for the Suffolk Coastal part of the shoreline.

Would MCZ RAs boost tourism?

Following the attack on the NET Gain MCZ RA's by some fishermen and coastal councillors as earlier placed on our website, a leading marine conservationist, Rob Spray, has responded by staunchly defending the proposed 'no-go' conservation areas along the Norfolk coastline claiming they are tiny and likely to boost tourism.

Diver and photographer Rob Spray, a volunteer with the Marine Conservation Society, dismissed as "absurd" claims that the stretches, known as Reference Areas (RAs), could have a devastating impact on the local economy because human activity would either be banned or strictly controlled within them so that they could return to a natural state. He pointed out that the six RAs recommended for Norfolk are "ridiculously small" and would definitely not interfere with activities such as seal boat-trips. He believes that if the RAs were established, they would actually boost the tourism economy by enhancing Norfolk's reputation as an unspoilt place of natural beauty.

He voiced his views ahead of an invitees-only meeting (to which MARINET was not invited) called by Blakeney Parish Council to discuss two of the RAs which affect Blakeney and neighbouring Morston. Some of the representatives from coastline user groups and other interested parties have been asked to attend, along with officers from Natural England, one of the key organisations involved in the government Marine Conservation Zone (MCZ) Project.

He said that the concerns expressed were "completely unfounded" adding "The areas are small. They are not where people arrange commercia

Latest News