Professor Tasman Crowe:

The Deputy asked about the ocean environment policy statement. I am not party to the architecture that is envisaged but I would suggest it should strongly reflect the international obligations and commitments we have made. The EU requires member states to protect 30% of land and sea by 2030, of which 10% will have to be strictly protected. I envisage that being a clear objective in such a policy statement.

"Ecologically coherent" is a phrase that is frequently used in respect of networks of marine protected areas, which is what we are talking about at a national level. It would require a process of identifying the features that one wishes to protect, and there needs to be agreement on that at some level. We must consider which species, habitats, ecosystem services and biocultural features we are concerned to conserve. For many of those, there are already clear-cut objective grounds for their inclusion on such a list. They may, for example, already be listed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature red list of threatened species but may not be protected under the habitats or birds directives. The Oslo-Paris, OSPAR, Convention, which is responsible for management of the marine environment in the north-east Atlantic, has a list of threatened species and habitats that has been derived through extensive evaluation of evidence and so on against transparent criteria. Those clearly have a good argument for inclusion. There will be other priorities at a national level that we may wish to adopt, for example, to ensure we are making the best use of our environment in mitigation of climate change.

Carbon sequestration might be a high priority and we may specifically want to conserve habitats that are very effective in carbon sequestration.

On the ecological coherence question, once it is identified what it is we are looking to conserve, it is then a question of asking what the evidence suggests is the minimum amount of that particular kind of habitat or species that needs to be conserved, how big the areas need to be, and how well-connected they need to be for it to be a viable ongoing concern. There are, in a manner of speaking, properties to a network which capture those kinds of aspects. How much replication do we want? Do we want one piece of that habitat or two or three, because we do not want to risk that one piece being destroyed, and if other pieces are destroyed, that will be the only one left, and so on?

To me, it would likely have those kinds of provisions, with targets and clearly stated levels of those kinds of parameters in it. That would guide the process of choosing the protected areas. Is that a reasonable answer to that question?