13 Feb 2024
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is seeking feedback on policies to update guidance on Marine Protected Area (MPA) assessments. In July 2021, Defra consulted on best practice guidance for developing compensatory measures in relation to MPAs. The UK government department are now consulting on draft policies to inform updated guidance using this […]
13 Feb 2024
Instruments deployed in the ocean starting in 2004 show that the Atlantic Ocean circulation has observably slowed over the past two decades, possibly to its weakest state in almost a millennium. Studies also suggest that the circulation has reached a dangerous tipping point in the past that sent it into a precipitous, unstoppable decline, and that it could hit that tipping point again as […]
13 Feb 2024
English seabird populations are in decline. Breeding populations have declined by at least 20-30% since the early 1990s and without intervention these internationally important seabird populations will continue to decline. The same can be said across the UK: the latest figures from the Seabirds Count (2015-2021) shows almost 62% of seabird species in decline across the UK […]
13 Feb 2024
The Scottish Government has an announced that an area of the Firth of Clyde will again be closed to most types of fishing activity in spring 2024 and 2025 to protect spawning cod. The closure has been in place each year since 2002 during the cod spawning season. While there has been variation, the closures […]
13 Feb 2024
The Seabed User & Developer Group (SUDG), an informal grouping of the UK’s key marine industries, have called on the UK government to put in place a moratorium on the biodiversity metric for intertidal habitats. Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) is a policy set out in the Environment Act 2021 and on 12 February 2024 it […]
12 Feb 2024
The first-ever State of the World’s Migratory Species report has been launched by the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS), a UN biodiversity treaty, at the opening of a major UN wildlife conservation conference (CMS COP14). The landmark report reveals: Nearly all (97 per cent) of CMS-listed fish are threatened with extinction. While […]
12 Feb 2024
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) have developed a metric that will give governments, businesses, civil society, and financial institutions the ability to measure whether their actions can help halt biodiversity loss and reduce global species extinction risk in oceans and seas. Developed in partnership with several organisations, scientists and experts from across the […]
11 Feb 2024
Fisheries scientists and marine biologists are calling on the World Trade Organization (WTO) to approve additional regulations that eliminate harmful fisheries subsidies. In a commentary published in the journal npj Ocean Sustainability over 30 renowned researchers remind the WTO that well-managed wild fisheries are pillars supporting food and nutrition security, livelihoods, equity, and cultural heritage, particularly in the […]
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