Group Decisions
A few years ago, I reported back from an introductory meeting of the Finding Sanctuary Project. In the intervening time much progress has been made and I caught up with the project last week to see how things are developing.
There are seldom times when you get a totally fresh start at something; a clean slate, virgin territory. In terrestrial conservation things have been done a million times before, there are established methods and several thousand kilos of enlightened writing on those methodologies. Sure enough, the tried and tested is often not particularly suitable or effective, but its the way things are done and there’s nothing more comforting than conformity.
Look out to sea however and the landscape is very different. For one thing its much wetter and much of what conservationists seek to protect is hidden from view. On the plus side however, you are starting form scratch.
Finding Sanctuary was initially a pilot project, when the Marine Act was no more than a glint in a politician’s eye. Over the past two years the success of the project has spawned three other similar schemes operating in regions across the country. All of the projects are looking to achieve the same goal, to preserve and enhance the wealth of marine wildlife to be found off our coasts.
The scale of the task facing the project team is so immense as to make it virtually impossible to appreciate, but if you simplify things, it can become tangible. The thing which really stands out about the Finding Sanctuary process is its role as a facilitator; not an enforcer, a lobby group or a specialist advisor. The decisions will be made by a group of people involved in all things marine - fishermen, divers, yachtsmen, potters and the like - and their decisions will be based on the best possible information collected and presented for them by the project.
So the project officers arrange workshops where people’s use of the sea, for both business and pleasure, is mapped and recorded. They also collect all the best known data for locations of marine habitats and species and record this. By comparing the two, it should be possible to see where biodiversity protection can be implemented easily, and those areas where things will be slightly more difficult.
Protecting areas at sea is much more difficult to the same exercise on land. No matter how remote or inaccessible a location on land, the chances are you won’t need to put on a special suit and breathing apparatus to get there. At sea you can’t fence things in, and enforcing almost 40 thousand square kilometers of ocean is a massive task, and that’s just for the South West operation. This makes it most important to get the right solution from the outset.
Its a political reality that these protective measures are being brought in, fact, but what this process has allowed people is the chance to influence where these Marine Conservation Zones will be placed and what level of protect each will enjoy. By engaging with the process, everyone has had the ability to influence it.
Of course it would be naive to think that all business and recreational users of the sea can put their lines on a map and the space in between be put to one side for ‘nature’. Inevitably there will be occasions when one interest and another will come into direct conflict and the steering group will not be able to reach a consensus. Then it will be a political decision to be handed over to an elected member of government, so lets hope as few of these scenarios slip though as possible.
Guidelines for all the regional projects will come from a central body, to ensure continuity across the regions. This group will confirm details like percentage protection for certain key habitats, or what level of protection is necessary for each site to be protected. There are some fragile locations that will require total protection from all activities, while others merely need a seasonal closure to certain activities or a speed limit to ensure their biodiversity value is safeguarded.
Everyone is invited to participate in the process, either by attending one of the face to face sessions run by Finding Sanctuary or by feeding into the interactive map. I know it all sounds a bit like iConservation, a bit buzzwordy, but this map is interactive, so why not call it such. Log on to the Finding Sanctuary interactive map and you can see all the current data displayed on screen, as well as submit your own information for consideration.
And therein lies the motivation for everyone getting involved, there was a fear that some sectors might sit on their hands and not identify areas - for whatever reason. The danger would be that the final map might end up with a gaping hole in it, apparently unused and superfluous to socioeconomic needs. If this area also contained a critical wildlife location then it would seem to be a neat fit and a MCZ drawn up for it. To make sure that all interests are observed, all interested parties need to be open and honest in the process.
So there’s the process in a very simplified nutshell, at which resolution it seems perfectly logical, verging on simple even. In the real world of course things are never as clean and simple as one may like. From this information gathering process areas of the sea will be identified for protection as Marine Conservation Zones, and eventually we will become as complacent about living on the coast next to a Marine Conservation Zone as we are of living in the shadow of Dartmoor National Park. It will become part of the scenery, albeit a highly valued part.
Compromise is never 100% satisfactory to any single group, that’s why its called compromise and not capitulation. It would seem that in this model a potentially robust method of reaching meaningful compromise might be achieved. I for one will follow the rest of this fascinating project with great interest.