Water category and overall first prize winner, Pot-bellied Seahorse Portrait,  2024 Nature Conservancy Oceania photo contest. ‘To capture the subtle movement of the sea tulips while keeping the seahorse in focus, I chose a slightly longer shutter speed. This allowed the gentle motion of the water to blur slightly, giving a sense of the underwater environment.’ Photograph: Daniel Sly/TNC Photo Contest 2024

Welcome to OCF’s insights from the marine and coastal sector. This week we have summarised the most relevant stories for you from a range of Marine and Coastal Sectors, including; Fisheries; Offshore Wind; Offshore Industries; Conservation; Climate and Marine Pollution and more.

Fisheries

Using the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems Framework, a new study has concluded the European native oyster reef ecosystem type is collapsed, with no locations remaining in Europe where the habitat (high densities of oysters) extends beyond 0.1ha. Historically, oyster reef ecosystems persisted at large scales, with individual reefs growing as large as a football pitch and covering a total area larger than Greater London in European Waters. While this work confirms the absolute degradation of this critical marine ecosystem in Europe, it also serves to highlight the potential benefits of investing in large scale ecosystem recovery.

The FAIRR Initiative published findings from a first-of-its-kind investor engagement, backed by investors representing $75 trillion of assets under management, aimed at ensuring the world’s 7 largest seafood companies can trace the origin of all wild-caught and farmed seafood they sell and all aquaculture feed ingredients they procure. Despite all seven acknowledging the growing regulatory, reputational and operational risks linked to a lack of supply chain transparency, none have published plans to implement full-chain, digital and interoperable traceability systems, exposing their shareholders to these risks.

The International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) has published the ICES Roadmap for Marine Recreational Fisheries (MRF), to guide the development of robust MRF assessments through data and methodological improvements, in line with current and future management needs.

Norway and the European Union finalised a series of bilateral fisheries agreements for 2025, covering fishing quotas and mutual access in the North Sea, Skagerrak and include provisions under the Neighbourhood Agreement for Swedish vessels operation in Norwegian zones. A trilateral deal with the EU and Norway has secured UK fisheries over 290,000 tonnes of North Sea stocks, worth up to £310 million based on historic landing prices.

Marine Management Organisation (MMO) has published its annual UK Sea Fisheries Statistics 2023. The UK fleet stood at 5,418 vessels in 2023, marking a 54% reduction since 1993, and gross tonnage has dropped 37% in a similar period. Smaller vessels under 10 metres now account for almost 80% of the fleet, more than half of which were administered by England. In 2023, UK vessels landed 719,000 tonnes of sea fish valued at £1.1 billion.

The Scottish Government has responded to growing calls for improved protections for wild wrasse stocks, addressing concerns raised in petition PE2110. In a statement early this month, the Marine Directorate of the Scottish Government indicated no immediate plans to introduce Total Allowable Catch limits.

The Welsh Government has outlined a strategic plan for the fisheries and aquaculture sectors for the remainder of the Senedd term. The approach prioritises sustainability, stakeholder engagement and the integration of science into fisheries management.

NGOs ClientEarth, BLOOM, Oceana and Seas At Risk sent an open letter to new Commissioners Hoekstra and Kadis and shared their vision of a fair and just transition that not only decarbonises the fisheries sector but also shifts practices toward lower energy-intensity and lower impacts on already severely depleted fish populations and the ocean.

The Global Fishing Legislative Database is an interactive tool that helps the public answer a variety of important questions about what rules apply in every coastal country’s waters. It is still a work in progress with many countries still absent, but the hope is for the database to eventually capture the rules relating to fishing activities (encompassing marine and labour concerns) that apply to all coastal nations globally.

Offshore Wind

British oil giant BP has agreed a deal worth up to £4.5 billion to build offshore windfarms with Japan’s biggest power producer, in a shift that will allow it to gain some access to zero-carbon wind energy while focusing on fossil fuels. BP said in a recent statement they are significantly reducing  investment in renewable energy for the “rest of this decade”, but the new entity, to be named JERA Nex bp, will have a mix of operating assets and projects under development with a potential total 13 GW net generating capacity.

Building offshore wind projects in the UK and turning them into a profitable business has become “a lot more challenging” in recent years, said the vice president of portfolio development for offshore wind at EnBW, a German utility hit by inflation not long after securing a trio of gigascale projects.

Iberdrola-owned firm and Peel Ports Great Yarmouth signed an agreement that will see 64 offshore wind turbines assembled in Norfolk, creating a pre-assembly port for £4 billion.

The Marine Biological Association (MBA) will play a key role in an ambitious new project exploring the consequences of floating offshore wind farms (FLOW) on life throughout the marine food chain. The £3.5 million FRONTLINE project will employ state-of-the-art technologies, including autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), satellite remote sensing, digital video aerial surveys and seabird and fisheries tracking, to investigate how the rapid expansion of FLOW and climate warming is likely to affect oceanographic processes and marine life.

Offshore Industry

Shell and Equinor have announced they plan to form a new company by combining their oil and gas assets in the North Sea. Meanwhile, Shell has also decided to stop investments in new offshore wind developments as part of a review of the Shell Energy business, and has stepped back from several projects that were at the permitting stage. Shell CEO Wael Sawan claims these decisions are aimed at reducing costs and focusing on activities with the highest returns. As part of Sawan’s strategy, Shell plans to grow its liquefied natural gas division (who’s greenhouse gas footprint is 33% worse than coal) and steady its oil production by the end of the decade.

The UK Marine Management Organisation has granted marine licenses for cables in Portsmouth, flood defences in Kent and saltmarsh restoration in Suffolk, in the latest licensing round.

Conservation

The Institute of Fisheries Management and Environment Agency have successfully recorded a number of species living in a newly created saltmarsh habitat. The monitoring work is part of Tees Tidelands, a £30m programme of work to realign flood defences, restore mudflat and saltmarsh habitat and remove tidal barriers so migratory fish can return to rivers where they have been absent for hundreds of years. Last year’s survey recorded the highest diversity of species since monitoring began and that was maintained this year, with the thin-lipped grey mullet – discovered there for the first time last year – again present.

Four hectares of precious saltmarsh is being restored in a corner of the River Dart in Devon, with £200,000 of funding from the Environment Agency, Duchy of Cornwall, South Hams District Council and South Devon National Landscape. More than 85% of England’s saltmarsh has been lost in recent centuries to development pressure, land use change and coastal squeeze.

A recently published study challenges the 2023 prediction by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that coral reefs will decline by more than 99%, instead suggesting reefs could wadapt and avoid collapse, albeit with significant changes.  The findings nevertheless underscore the need to reduce local stressors and make rapid, deep cuts in carbon emissions to meet the Paris Agreement’s warming limit of 2° Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures.

JNCC has launched a new global indicator, designed to improve the management effectiveness assessments of protected and conserved areas (PCAs). The Management Effectiveness of Protected and Conserved Areas (MEPCA) Indicator aims to support tracking the achievement of conservation outcomes across marine, freshwater, and terrestrial environments.

Through their Marine Restoration Potential (MaRePo+) partnership project, Natural England published updated maps showing if and where there is potential to restore declining marine habitats and also benefit the threatened species they support. The updates include refined restoration potential models and adding in constraints mapping to show where restoration would not be possible.

Habitats include kelp beds, native oyster beds, horse mussel beds and sea pen and burrowing mega-fauna communities.

Earlier this month, China declared new “baselines” around Scarborough Reef, a large coral atoll in the South China Sea, in a pre-calculated response to the Philippines’ enactment of new maritime laws two days earlier to safeguard its own claims over the reef and other contested parts of the sea. This legal back and forth is a continuation of the ongoing sovereignty and maritime dispute between China and the Philippines (and others) in a vital ocean area through which one-third of global trade travels.

Conservation efforts aimed at boosting Scottish salmon populations may be doing more harm than good. Projects have focused on diversified habitat creation, but there is little evidence these efforts mitigate any substantiated threat to salmon, which mainly derive from climate change induced warming and changes in prey availability.

Climate

According to a new report from the Center for Coastal Climate Resilience at UC Santa Cruz, mangroves have been shown to provide $855 billion in flood protection services worldwide.

New studies have revealed ocean acidification is reaching deeper waters, sinking into marine regions as deep as 1,500 metres  and impacting ecosystems in a way that few have fully understood until now. Scientists are calling for global leaders to turn greater attention to growing concerns over ocean acidification, by addressing the global carbon emissions crisis and the impacts of climate change upon biodiversity and the environment.

The 2024 Climate Risk Landscape Report delves into the available tools for financial institutions to assess physical and transition climate risks and boost their institution’s resilience to related impacts. This edition provides best practices for tool utilisation, case studies, and recommendations to navigate the dynamic climate risk tools market. It also offers insights into the rapidly evolving regulatory developments around climate-related disclosure frameworks and recent market developments.

A new study set out to examine the effects of warmer seas on 21,000 marine species. Building a model that integrated species distribution data and future climate projections, they looked at two aspects: the emergence of thermal opportunities and the dangers of exposure to warmer water. Findings suggested thermal opportunities are expected to emerge earlier and more gradually, whereas threats from exposure to higher temperatures will arrive later but much more abruptly.

The Scientific Best Practice Guides are a series of explainers on current scientific best practices and gaps for carbon projects developed in six emerging Natural Climate Solutions (NCS) pathways. The second available guide provides an overview of how high-quality Blue Carbon projects apply the latest scientific advancements and tools to create projects with high integrity in their definition of baseline scenarios, measurement and quantification of emissions reductions and removals, estimation of uncertainty, and monitoring of project activities and permanence.

Science

Scientists have discovered massive marine forests in southern Chile’s Kawésqar National Reserve, formed by the red hydrocoral species Errina antarctica. These colonies, found at depths ranging from 1.23 to 33 meters (4 to 108 feet), are the world’s southernmost and shallowest known to date. Experts emphasize the importance of protecting these fragile ecosystems and hope the newly discovered forests will be considered in the reserve’s management plan.

A new study by the conservation charity World Wide Fund for Nature – Belgium, Harvard Institute of Public Health and Duke University’s marine laboratory reveals how conserving marine biodiversity directly impacts human wellbeing.  For 234 marine protected areas across the world that have been closely monitored since 1973, more than 60% showed improvement in both nature conservation and human wellbeing.

Bangor University has developed improved methods for identifying shipwrecks through their Unpath’d Waters project, and believe they have re-discovered HMS Stephen Furness, which sank in 1917 after being struck by a German torpedo off the coast of Northern Ireland. The project goal is to demonstrate the value of connecting marine archives with cutting-edge scientific data.

Wastewater recycling is playing an increasingly significant role in addressing the challenges of water scarcity in the US., and Peter Anin explores the socio-political complexities that surround the treatment and reuse of sewage for drinking water in his book “Purified: How Recycled Sewage is Transforming our Water”. Despite its proven technical feasibility, public perception is hindering wider adoption, and gaining public trust will have to be the cornerstone of implementing this strategy.

Recent research has revealed that Doggerland, a sunken swath of Europe connecting Britain to the mainland, was once home to bear, boar, red deer, and people. Once considered no more than a land bridge connecting two more interesting places, used by people to travel between Europe and modern-day Britain around 12,000 years ago, innovative archaeology is reframing Doggerland as a territory in which human communities lived and thrived for millennia. That was, until a warming climate and rising seas forced people to leave and it was forgotten.

Marine Pollution

Federal officials have proposed spending $210 million for 10 projects aimed at restoring fisheries, sea turtles and invertebrate species, including shrimp, crabs, reef coral and shellfish, that were damaged during the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in open water areas of the Gulf of Mexico. The money comes from an $8.8 billion settlement that BP entered into with the federal government and Gulf Coast states in 2016 to try to remediate some of the extensive damage.

Marine Media

Marine Scientist and Managing Editor of SeaVoice explores how listening to the ocean’s unique soundscape can deepen our understanding of the marine environment and reveal the hidden impacts of human noise under the sea.

Standout images from the 2024 Nature Conservancy Oceania photo contest. The 2024 contest saw close to 2,000 entries from photographers in Australia, New Zealand, the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea.