Professor Tasman Crowe:

That is a very good question. The concern that it would slow everything down is, perhaps, what is behind things like the four-week consultation period and so on. There are a number of compelling reasons for urgency. We are very much in a biodiversity crisis and we cannot be dragging our heels for too long as things are being driven rapidly downwards. We are also facing an urgent need to ramp up our renewable energy supplies, so we want to be able to make some decisions very quickly. Some decisions can be made very quickly and are quite clear-cut, and we can say there will be ways in which the available evidence can be marshalled quickly, in fact.

I am part of that and am chairing another group that is currently undertaking an exercise to try to do that for the Irish Sea, that is, to garner all of the evidence available, come up with a potential list of features that could be appropriate for protection, go through an analysis process which models where marine protected areas, MPAs, could be or not be, and protect those features. On foot of that, there would be some areas which, if the model were run 100 times, would never come up. Very quickly, you would get an answer that there are certain areas in the Irish Sea that will never be important for conservation so a decision can be made more quickly in those cases. There will be other areas which will probably be bolted on and iron cast and come up every time. These protect some of the most sensitive and valuable features. Those will probably not need that much discussion either. There is a big spread in between, however, where the network could be reconfigured somewhat to move it around particular areas of interest for stakeholders, who could be consulted and with whom that could be discussed, and where a number of configurations of MPAs could be presented and explored with different stakeholders. This would relate to the ones which would present the biggest challenge to them, their industry or their community, and to ones which would be less challenging but would still enable overarching objectives to be met. That would be the kind of process I could envisage.