Perspective: MPAs & Brexit Jean-Luc Solandt, Bryce Stewart, and Alice Puritz
Open Channels: Brexit may be the single biggest constitutional change that will happen to the UK in its history. The UK government and civil service are still coming to terms with the process of change, the complexity of developing new laws, and the new political horizon of working with our European partners once the UK exits the EU.
The environment and MPAs are also in line for change. Indeed, what will become of the UK’s MPA network when over 50% of our sites were set up under EU laws? Designation of the UK’s first large, significant MPAs started because of EU laws drawn from the Bern Convention, an international treaty on protecting wildlife. These EU laws resulted in Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) for fauna and flora in the UK under the EU Habitats Directive, and Special Protection Areas (SPAs) for birds under the EU Birds Directive. In the marine area, these SACs and SPAs are known collectively as European Marine Sites, or EMSs.
How might Brexit affect the UK’s MPAs?
Two things the UK could do with its EMSs are de-designation (ending the sites’ status as protected areas) or re-designation (changing them to another type of MPA).
Civil servants in the marine program of the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) have said in public fora that they do not want to de-designate sites set up under EU laws. These individuals want to ensure this key element of the MPA network remains in place. European Marine Sites currently cover over 12% of UK seas, so losing these sites would be catastrophic for our country’s MPA network. These MPAs are also designated in areas of the most important habitats and species for European biodiversity and wildlife, which are also nationally important. So we believe their continued protection should be given the highest priority going forward.
The UK government has designated 50 Marine Conservation Zones (MCZs) since 2013 under the Marine and Coastal Access Act to protect additional nationally important species and habitats not already protected by European sites. However, the laws governing MCZs are weaker than those for EMSs. EMS legislation, for example, places protected areas where there are the most outstanding examples of EU importance, regardless of the presence of current or potential business interests. MCZs do not have that same siting requirement. And regulations to protect EMSs from damaging activities — including that developers, fishers, and heavy industries need to show their activities will not have adverse effects on the sites before being allowed to proceed — are more restrictive than those for MCZs. (Indeed, there is pressure from some commercial groups now to repeal or amend the UK law that transposes key EU environmental legislation into UK domestic legislation — which could weaken the relatively strong protections for the UK’s EMS sites.)
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