Ms Ellen McMahon:

I thank the Vice Chairman for the opportunity to address the committee today. The Sustainable Water Network is an umbrella network of 25 of Ireland’s leading environmental NGOs, national and regional, working together to protect and enhance Ireland’s aquatic resources.

We are in the midst of a climate and biodiversity emergency. The Government's own assessment of the health of our seas in 2019 found that only six out of 11 indicators are compatible with good environmental status. Our marine territory is ten times the size of our landmass and as an island nation, our seas and marine wildlife are at the heart of our culture, well-being and prosperity but I fear that we have turned our back on the seas. Critically, our ocean is the planet's largest carbon sink. It has absorbed 93% of the heat generated by industrial-era carbon dioxide emissions and it captures nearly 30% of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere every year. The marine environment plays a key role in reducing climate stress through carbon regulation and storage. It also provides opportunities for tourism and recreation, cultural heritage and education as well as physical and mental health benefits.

In 2019, the UN's biodiversity assessment stated that approximately 66% of the marine environment has been significantly altered by human actions. It also identified that while overfishing is a threat to the health of our marine environment, our seas are under increasing pressure from a wide range of stressors, such as pollution, invasive species and climate change. The situation in Ireland is stark. The latest review of the birds of conservation concern in Ireland by Birdwatch Ireland and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has shown that iconic and much-loved seabird species such as puffins and kittiwakes are globally threatened and experiencing significant declines in Ireland. Climate change, overfishing and changes to the food web are all playing a role in their decline. Approximately 13% of our seabed, which is almost the equivalent in size to the entire landmass of the island of Ireland, is disturbed by bottom fishing activity. Bottom trawling and dredging is only prohibited in three out of 90 of our marine special areas of conservation, SACs. Bottom trawling is one of the most damaging activities to our marine environment. It involves dragging heavy weighted nets across the sea floor in an effort to catch fish. In doing so, it churns up seabed sediments which are the planet's largest carbon stores. Bottom trawling is a major emitter of carbon with some studies showing that it emits as much carbon as the entire aviation industry.

At present, Ireland has designated a mere 2% of its seas as marine protected areas, MPAs. MPAs are geographically defined areas which involve the protective or restorative management of a natural area according to management objectives. We have failed to meet the UN's biological diversity target of protecting 10% of our marine area by 2020. The current programme for Government commits to realising the target as soon as practical and sets a further target for 30% protection by 2030. However, MPAs are not currently defined in Irish law, meaning our existing network only consists of EU marine sites such as SACs and special protection areas, SPAs. In 2019, the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government formed an expert advisory group to determine how to expand Ireland’s MPA network and the expert group's report, Expanding Ireland’s MPA Network, was published last year. The report makes a number of strong and welcome recommendations. A public consultation on the report is under way and we hope that the result will be ambitious legislation that provides for an ecologically coherent network of MPAs. Worryingly, we have heard that MPA legislation is about two years away from enactment. While we await this crucial legislation, large areas of our marine territory will be designated as activity zones for the expansion of offshore renewable energy, leaving MPAs to squeeze into the areas that remain. This disparity between offshore wind and MPAs has been facilitated through the national marine planning framework. We recognise the role that offshore renewable energy will play in decarbonising our economy and tackling climate change but MPAs are often overlooked in the role that they can play in addressing the twin climate and biodiversity emergencies. A recent report has highlighted that globally, the rewilding of key blue carbon marine and coastal ecosystems could deliver carbon dioxide mitigation amounting to 1.83 billion tonnes, or approximately 5% of the emissions savings we need to make globally.

We are routinely failing to meet EU and international targets for the protection of biodiversity. If we look to the UK and Northern Ireland, the North has designated approximately 38% of its inshore region as MPAs. Last year the UK published the Benyon report which looked at the establishment of so-called highly protected marine areas, HPMAs. HPMAs prohibit extractive, destructive and depositional uses and allow only non-damaging levels of other activities. The panel's headline recommendation to the Government was that HPMAs are an essential component of the marine protected areas network and that they should be included in the Secretary of State waters. We need the same in Ireland. MPAs and HPMAs can work for biodiversity, climate, our fishing fleet and our coastal communities. I urge Deputies, as legislators, to carefully consider the protection and restoration of our seas and marine environment in all of their decision-making, bearing in mind their duty to our future generations and the fact that in addition to reversing catastrophic biodiversity loss, all ocean action is climate action.