When we. Oh, yes.
Well, you might say that. Good afternoon, and welcome to this afternoon's talk is part of Oxford Green Week.
Welcome to the Oxford Martin School. We're very lucky to have today two speakers on protecting the high seas,
particularly lucky to have Alex Rogers on dry land because that's not so common.
Alex is the science director for Rev Ocean. He's also was the founding director of the Sustainable Oceans programme here at the
Oxford Martin School and is a visiting professor at the Department of Zoology here.
He's internationally recognised for his expertise in deep sea ecology and human impacts on the oceans, and has worked extensively with governmental,
intergovernmental and non-governmental organisations from Greenpeace to the UN International Seabed Authority.
And he's just published a new book,
which is over in Blackwell's in some numbers apparently called The Deep The Hidden Wonders of Our Oceans and How We Can Protect Them.
And Alex Is is also consulting on BBC series Blue Planet and has been down.
He was telling me to over 3000 metres in the submarines, so we will hear from Alex for about 40 minutes.
We are, and he will talk to us about how the a network of marine protected areas in the high seas might look like.
And then we're going to hear for about 10 to 15 minutes from William Gwilym Rolands,
who is an expert on how we might enforce such an area of protected areas on the high seas because Gwilym is an expert on Earth observation,
data and satellite imagery. Also part of the Oxford Martin programme on Sustainable Oceans.
And after both have spoken, they will come back up here and we'll have plenty of time for questions.
So if you could save your questions for the end and now hand over to Alex for insight.
It's. So thanks, everyone for coming.
I am going to talk to you about the high seas and particular thanks for making it in the dreadful weather at the moment.
You probably feel like if all three nations get in. So I thought I'd just start by talking about what the high seas actually are.
And essentially it's the waters beyond 200 nautical miles from the coast of Iceland.
So it's outside of the control of any single state in terms of use of resources.
And just to complicate matters in legal terms, the water column is actually treated differently to the seabed,
saying the water column is termed the high seas, whereas the seabed is termed as the area.
And the reason for that differentiation will become clear a little later in the talk.
So all of the pale blue area you can see here on this map is what we call the high seas or areas beyond national jurisdiction.
So the colour picks on this map for the exclusive economic zones of states at least a couple of bits over water.
And it's a huge ecosystem, covers about 60 percent of the ocean area and nearly three quarters of the ocean's volume.
So it's pretty much the biggest ecosystem on Earth.
So where did this concept of the high seas actually come from?
Well, you might be surprised to hear that actually came as from a justification for an act of piracy.
And this was during the war between the Portuguese and the Dutch and Dutch actually seised the
Portuguese vessel and justified it through this concept of Maurizio Parents Freedom of the seas.
And there have been various arguments as to whether this is a good thing or not through the ages.
But this has led to some rather strange, historic artefacts in terms of our zoning of the ocean.
So, for example, if I just flip back here to the area, which is conceived as state territory three nautical miles from the coast,
that was the distance over which you can fire a cannon from the shore and defend your waters.
So really, my story, I guess, starts with the first modern oceanographic expedition lack of HMS Challenger in 1972 to 1876.
Challenger was the first real modern oceanographic expedition in sample geology,
biology, physical oceanography, and the ship pretty much went all around the world.
Apart from the Indian Ocean,
which you'll notice it managed to completely steer around the historical consequences of which we're still suffering from today,
and I'll talk about that in a minute as well. Since Challenger, we've learnt a lot about the oceans.
We know something about what the sea floor actually looks like.
It's not completely flat. It's from chains of mountains, canyons, ocean trenches.
So really quite a varied topography.
But it's quite interesting that we've only actually accurately mapped something like 10 to 20 percent of the sea floor.
So a lot of what you see here are best estimates, some of which are based on old soundings back from the 18th century or even further in the past.
And this first picture of the ocean floor really was put together by Priestley's is Anne Marie Tharp,
working on very primitive echo soundings post the Second World War,
and Murray thought literally through what she thought at the bottom of the ocean looked like from these echo soundings.
Although we now know much more about the ocean, there's no floor we don't know.
And this is just one example you see here.
It's estimated that there are about two million species in the ocean, of which we described about 200000.
So 90 percent of life in the ocean is undescribed, and most of that hasn't been seen really by humankind.
And if you look at the distribution of records of species in the ocean and this diagram kind of shows a graphic representation of time.
So the warm colours here are where there are lots of species records in the cold colours where there's very few.
What you see is as you move away from the land and deeper into the ocean, and we know less and less in terms of what's out there.
And that also extends to ecosystems as well.
And in fact, the deep water pelagic, which is the water column between the surface and the seabed, is the least explored ecosystem, probably on Earth.
We've only investigated about 0.000 one percent of that particular ecosystem seamounts, which I'll talk to you in a minute about.
We've investigated about one zero zero two percent of sea mounts are underwater mountains, and these are very important habitats in the ocean.
Is that biological hotspots? So what we do know and what we have learnt about the ocean is that it produces a huge range of ecosystem services for us.
And these are from very simple things simple to understand, such as the provisioning of fish for people to eat.
And the ocean is still extremely important in terms of food security, particularly in terms of protein and supply nutrients,
but also more complex processes such as nutrient cycling, for example, the carbon cycle and the production of oxygen.
So something like one out of every two breaths you take in this room has actually come from marine phytoplankton in the oceans,
and WWE has recently estimated that the goods and services provided by the ocean are worth somewhere in the region of 2.5 trillion dollars per annum,
which makes it the seventh biggest economy on the planet.
But of course, the planet simply couldn't, couldn't operate without many of these processes going on.
So in fact, the ocean really is infinitely valuable in terms of supporting processes of money supply in Liverpool for us.
So what does much of the sea floor up the high seas look like?
Well, much. It looks like this fairly flat sediment.
There's life throughout the entire depth range of the ocean, all the way down to nearly 11000 metres in the Mariana Trench.
That life is adapting to low pressure to very small amounts of food and also low temperatures.
And it's a very diverse fauna. One of the things we've learnt since 1960s is the diversity in the deep ocean is actually very high.
The abundance and biomass of animal life declines as you go deeper.
And this is because the supply of food decreases as you move away from the surface.
Sources generally declines unless you're a scavenger, in which case you actually get bigger as you go deeper.
But most of the diversity is actually in the small critters that live in the sediments or on the net around the moves like this.
So there things like pollock eat worms, crustaceans and bivalve moss.
And the worms, in fact, are the most diverse groups, certainly down to about half a millimetre in size.
And the diversity of these animals is very, very high in surprisingly high.
We are starting to get an idea of how this diversity is distributed horizontally if you like through the oceans on the sea floor.
And what is seems a pattern seems to be one of the highest diversity at mid-latitudes.
We think that's because that's where the highest supply of organic food is falling out from the ocean surface.
And this is in contrast with shallow water marine life, which is its highest diversity in the tropics in the equatorial regions.
The patterns of diversity with death were also very interesting,
we see a peak in diversity of mid slope that's somewhere between 2000 and 3000 metres.
So diversity, certainly in these segments,
seems to actually increase as you go down deeper into the ocean before it starts to decrease as a result of lack of food.
We're not absolutely certain about why this is, but it probably has something to do with interactions between species and the supply of food.
But the deep passion the high seas don't all look like that.
And in fact, there were some really remarkable habitats which occupy a smaller area of the seabed.
And this is one of them. These are deep sea hydrothermal vents.
These particular ones we filmed in the Southern Ocean back in 2010 at a depth of about two and a half thousand metres and a black cloud.
So through it, you can see they're coming out. These chimneys are at about three hundred eighty six degrees C.
And these are very, very interesting ecosystems because despite the depths and as you can see from this photograph here,
I have abundant life around them.
So what our hydrothermal vents and places where seawater penetrates ocean crust and comes into contact with extremely hot
rock around a magma chamber underneath the seabed is a very complex exchange of chemicals between the seawater and the rock,
and the seawater becomes really enriched in chemicals like hydrogen sulphide and various metals, so forth and so on.
And it's these reduce chemicals, which are the key to the abundance of life around these vents.
Because what's happening here is the bacteria are actually oxidising, some of these chemicals to release energy.
So this is an ecosystem which is based on chemists synthesis rather than light energy and photosynthesis.
And this was really a remarkable discovery back in 1977 when it was made.
But it was remarkable for another reason as well because it showed us that we could
get life in very different conditions to those which we previously considered.
And in fact, now we've got evidence of hydrothermal ism elsewhere in the Solar System.
This is a French problem and colitis,
and you can see jetting off the bottom half of the Moon that these geysers of water and they're actually coming from
the subsurface ocean on that plane and passing satellites have picked up the chemical signature of hydrothermal vents,
actually Enceladus. So now there is a possibility of a second genesis of life in the Solar System because
it's thought that vents one of the prime candidates for where life originated on Earth.
We don't quite have work on hydrothermal vent organisms over the past 10 years.
One of the things that was discovered after the 1970s was that the biota around these pens differs depending on where you are in the ocean.
So the eastern Pacific fauna is characterised by these giant tubeworms, these animals, which are up to two metres tall.
I don't have a gut. I don't have a mouth. They have symbiotic bacteria inside them.
So far, it's also so acid fish, various other worms of mussels and so on.
The Western Pacific is different and is characterised by having these snails with symbiotic bacteria, stalk barnacles and so on.
The Atlantic is really different.
It's characterised by these huge swarms of shrimps around the vents, and they carry their symbiotic bacteria on their appendages in their gills.
The Indian Ocean, though, is very interesting because it is a kind of mix of the biota of the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean.
So we have found shrimp, but we also have things like mussels and some of the crabs you'd associate with
the Pacific and also some rather strange local animals like scaly foot now,
which you can see in the photograph here.
These animals are the only animals which secrete iron armour to protect them from the environment and from predators.
So we wanted to understand why we were seeing these geographic connexions between these very different corners.
And one of his answer was that there was dispersal through the Southern Ocean
as subduction connects all of these other nations and the southern hemisphere.
So we went down to look for these vents and we found them around places along a ridge called East Scotia Ridge,
which is just to the south southeast of of South Georgia.
As you can see from this map here and in places where that ridge was swollen up and it swells up because the magma chamber actually went to the ridge.
We found hydrothermal vents, and this was really remarkable because people actually told us that we never do this work.
And the reason was quite simple sublimation really is quite a ferocious place to go work.
This particular storm took photograph of of the South Sandwich Islands.
The swells were about 15 metres in height in management.
That's probably as tall as this building, pretty much.
But we were actually quite lucky. That was probably the only really ferocious storm we came across.
And this is what we actually discovered.
In fact, what we discovered was something totally unexpected and which poor little resemblance to any of the foreigners we'd seen elsewhere.
What you can see on this video what it called yeti crabs. They're called yeti crabs because you'll see they have kind of furry bellies.
You can just see the fuzz around the sides of these animals and actually grow sulphur bacteria on that fuzz and just kind of make off and eat it.
As you can see, they're rather successful at doing this around these vents, and they occur in absolutely vast numbers.
And these were a new species or is only one not yet known at the time.
We also found various other new species, so these snails, which are so big,
have symbiotic bacteria actually in England, thought they were a new species,
a new Jenness and a new species of stool barnacle, which was somewhat related to the Pacific animals, but certainly not identical to them.
And you'll also see the baby yeti crabs hiding out in these barnacles.
But what was really odd was the things that were missing. We found none of the giant tubeworms known mussels, no crabs, no shrimp.
And it seems that the very, very cold waters of the Antarctic basically keep our animals with certain types of life histories.
And that's probably because the extreme seasonality of that system really
counts against you if you've got a larva which actually feeds in the plankton.
This single four week expedition basically changed our ideas about the distribution of the fauna around hydrothermal vents globally.
So these different colours on this map represent different types of fauna that you that you actually find.
Around these. So moving from vents, which are a kind of biological hot spot in the high seas to another biological hotspot, and that is seamounts.
This is our own seamount, which is actually in the UK EEZ and just to the west of Scotland, the entendu and Seamount.
The summit of that is probably in the region of 200 to 400 metres depth.
We actually visited back in 2016 and sea mounts are very important because they kind of oases out in the high seas.
So they're very important for predators foraging things like tuna, sharks, whales, turtles,
seals and seabirds all home in the same places where they can forage for rich supplies of food.
There are actually a lot of sea mounts in the ocean. This is from such a gravity map.
We did for sea mounts and yashwant back in 2011, you'll see here over 3000 large events across the ocean, covering about five percent of the seafloor.
So this is actually a major ecosystem. And I mentioned the Indian Ocean before as being a place which challenger appointed.
Well, it seems that many other scientists avoided it as well, because we still have one of the most poorly explored parts of the oceans.
And back in the I think it was 2010 2011, again, we actually visited the seamounts down in the southern Indian Ocean.
And this is what we found again, very, very rich ecosystems.
You see, the summer of this seamount is covered in corals and all sorts of other sessile organisms.
There are also these large carnivorous fish swimming around somewhere.
This is a rockfish along with a shot you can see in the background those fish grow to well over a metre long.
They're really quite voracious predators. There's also clouds of more ones in the background there as well.
This is sort a depth of about 200 metres from the summit of the same name.
Deeper still, there were still large predators. This is about 1000 metres down, and you see here those six killed shot,
which were actually probably one of the biggest predators we get at these deaths around.
So they always come up and investigate our robots while they're down in places like this.
We also found some really spectacular other communities.
This is a deepwater coral reef at a depth of about thousand metres, and this has a very high diversity of other organisms associated with it.
And in fact, we found many, many new taxa on this expedition.
Here's a couple carnivorous sponge sea spider, both of which the tax on this generously named after me.
I don't know whether that was an honour or some sort of veiled insult, but I'll leave it up to you to think about.
But we really found this very high instance of undescribed species and bearing in
mind most of our work was just focussed on the larger animals around these segments.
So why should we really care about the high seas and about life in the high seas?
Well, simply put, the high seas are highly connected to coastal waters.
The ocean effectively functions as a single home.
And what you see here are the distributions of various large marine animals throughout the year in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
And you can see that these animals cross from the high seas into coastal waters and back out again.
And in fact, there was a study done earlier this year where we actually looked at the connectivity
between high seas areas and coastal waters in this case in the Indian Ocean.
And you can see here from the colours represented on this chart that the high seas and
coastal waters are connected over timescales of a couple of weeks to a few months.
So clearly, the high seas are important, but all day under threat, and simple answer to that is yes.
One of the prime targets for deep water fisheries are seamounts.
And the reason they go out and fish these seamounts is because there are aggregations of fish,
some of them very commercially valuable around the sea mounts.
This is an orange roughy. They live for about 150 years.
So these fish are very slow growing. They don't mature to let 30 or 40 years.
So they're very, very vulnerable to overfishing.
And in fact, if you look at many of the other species that are caught in these fisheries, they are also very long lived.
Things like the cardinal fish told about the orange roughy lived through about 70 years old.
So this is a major sustainability issue in itself.
Of course, with fishing comes losses of fishing gear, which, as you can imagine,
if you're trying to trawl across a mountain or sand, there is quite a high chance of losing it.
And this is a photograph of a horror film of a ghost on one of us emails in the southern Indian Ocean.
You can see that lobster there is completely tangled up in that in that line.
And basically, it's dying, so this neck will just carry on fishing.
A real surprise was this. These are lobster pots tangled up again on Melville Bank Seamount.
This is the same seamount you saw the Blackfish and so on on.
And this is a real surprise because this seamount was many hundreds, if not thousands, of miles from the nearest land.
The other problem with this type of fishing is that because the fish die for the seabed, you have to catch them using bottom trawling.
And of course, when you try to control through a fragile the world's coral reef, it completely obliterates the coral.
So here you can see photographs from a fish seamount south of Tasmania and a seamount that hasn't been fish for orange roughy in Oreo's.
And you'll see that the coral framework on the fish seamount is pretty much completely obliterated.
And in fact, what we've discovered more recently is some of these corals are very, very long lived.
Black corals, for example, can live to more than 4000 years old.
Some of the sponges can live even longer, and there's good evidence that the sponge from the South China Sea can live up to 11000 years.
And probably one of the longest lived organisms on Earth.
Of course, with fishing comes all sorts of other trash is just a couple of bits we photographed on the Southwest Indian Ridge.
But the really India story here came from the actual sediments you see here surrounding these objects.
What we actually found was that the sediments were completely full of microplastics.
Every single sample we took down to a depth of 1.5 kilometres was contaminated with plastic.
Even all the animals had plastic on them or actually inside.
And we actually looked at this in some detail, so we looked at the composition of the trash, if you like, and different parts of the deep ocean.
And what you find is around the southwest things you reach. Most of the trash comes from fishing.
Elsewhere, it comes from shipping and from the land and so on.
And this has become a real problem. Now, something like five to 15 million tonnes of plastic pollution going into the ocean every single year.
And along with that, a large quantity of microfibres as well.
And it's estimated that if things carry on as they are,
we would see an order of magnitude increase in this quantity of plastic going into the oceans by 2035.
There are also other pollutants still affecting the high seas, legacy contaminants like PCBs,
which is a type of flame retardant used in electronics and so on.
There's a whole range of emerging pollutants which have now been found to affect the ocean as well.
This is everything from chemicals in personal care products like shower gels to pharmaceuticals, plastics and so on.
On top of that, of course, we've also got the effects of climate change, so we're seeing rising temperatures.
The ocean has absorbed something like 93 percent of the excess heat produced as a
result of global warming and also ocean acidification and ocean deoxygenation as well.
And what are these things causing? Well, the heating of the ocean is causing a complete redistribution of the biota,
so organisms are moving further north or further south away from higher temperatures.
Animals are also getting smaller as well as a result from warming of the ocean.
So in terms of fisheries, this is potentially quite a catastrophic situation because the fish stocks are moving away from low latitudes,
basically from developing countries, and they're moving towards developed countries and they're becoming less productive as well.
So this is an issue in terms of food security. Ocean acidification is caused by absorption of CO2 into the ocean, which is converted carbonic acid.
And this reduces the amount of calcium carbonate in seawater.
And this, of course, affects the secretion of calcium carbonate skeletons or shells.
You can see an example here of a pelagic snail called a terrible to receive up fine.
And this is a picture of one of the shells of these snails that was sampled from an upwelling area in the Antarctic.
And you can see where the shell is actually corroding as a result of this acidification effect on top of a naturally low water.
And finally, the effect that almost everyone forgets about ocean hypoxia,
where the warming of the ocean is causing a lowering of mixing and that is causing a
reduction of oxygen in the ocean expansion of what we call the oxygen minimum zone.
And this effect is being estimated to have decreased habitat for the fish from
tuna in the tropical north east Atlantic by about 15 percent between 1916 2010.
As if that wasn't bad enough, we're now seeing new industrial activity starting up in the deep ocean.
One of them is deep sea mining.
This is a piece of one of those hydrothermal vent chimneys from the Southern Ocean, and you can see that it's almost solid copper.
So these hydrothermal vent fields have rich mineral resources associated with them, but they're not the only mineral resources in the high seas.
There are also cobalt crusts on seamounts and manganese nodules.
These mineral aggregations on the seafloor in places like the Clarion Clipperton Fracture Zone in the tropical Pacific.
And this map, which Gwilym very generously put together for me,
shows where an organisation called the International Seabed Authority has licenced
countries in areas beyond national jurisdiction to explore for minerals in the deep ocean.
You see that big orange blob in the Pacific there. That's the clarion clipperton fracture zone, and the licence is for exploration.
There cover the same area as the 20 largest countries in Europe.
So all this is quite bad news, but there are things we can do about this.
And one of those things is actually protect areas of the ocean using marine protected areas.
This is very good for protection from extraction in terms of fishing.
It also eliminates the side effects of fishing things like seabed impacts.
You also preserve the population structure of species and also ecosystems really
preserve those structuring organisms in the ocean like coral reefs and so on,
which provide habitats for other organisms. Also, these MPAs actually may benefit in terms of.
Actually pushing back against some of the effects of climate change.
So there is a concept called blue carbon,
where some of the activities in the ocean actually sequester CO2 into the deep ocean and lock it up from the atmosphere.
So we recently put together a first concept of what network of marine protected areas might look like in the high seas,
and scientific studies have suggested that an optimal area of protection for the ocean is probably around 30 percent.
And that's because below that figure, you're basically not giving sufficient protection to various features in the ocean.
Above that figure, you're getting diminishing returns for that area of protection.
But having said that, even small MPAs can be quite effective.
So how do we actually do this? Well, we used what's called systematic conservation planning,
where essentially we used computer assisted method of identifying where these MPAs would would best be placed.
And what this does is we specify in areas the ocean we want to actually protect.
We specify what features of the ocean we want to protect.
So it might be seamounts, threatened species, oceanographic features and so on.
And we basically model where to put the protected areas to protect those features.
But taking into account the economic impact of where those employees are actually situated.
In this case, we calculated that economic impact through the estimated cost to fisheries placing those employees,
and we used to call Markson to actually tell you this. So what types of features that we actually plug into this software?
Well, was things like obviously fishing existing protected areas, but then oceanographic parameters like primary productivity impact,
food being produced in the ocean places where you had very high or very low interannual variation in temperature,
which were likely to be resilient to climate change, then by physical parameters like sea mounts,
biological parameters like distribution of threatened species and also something about the biogeography or at least by geography.
As we know, what you end up with here is very interesting because what we actually saw as a result of this
exercise is essentially a network of protected areas which surround areas of usage for humankind.
So instead of a land where you often have protected areas which are kind of isolated by large areas of human use,
this approach actually produced almost the opposite situation where you end up with network protection around islands of human usage in the ocean.
And it was very interesting that through the repeated runs of this software,
we had places which came up again and again and again in terms of needing protection in the ocean.
You see, one of these happens to be right over the clarion Clifton fracture zone.
But there are various other areas which came out was very important because of the
combination of conservation features that occurred in those parts of the ocean.
So to summarise, all the high seas are a very important part of the ocean and perform critical ecosystem services for humankind.
There was a very strong connectivity between the high seas and coastal waters.
The high seas comprise a very diverse range of ecosystems, some of which have a high diversity,
and there are threats which are degrading these ecosystems at present, and those are only going to get worse in the future unless something is done.
And the 13.30 report was the first systematic attempt to really try and plan for spatial conservation of this entire ices area.
And with that, I'd like to hand over to Gwilym to talk about how such areas could be enforced.
Great, thank you very much, Alex.
So, yeah, I'm going to sort of focus in on a perhaps a narrow question here of how we might monitor and enforce these these areas,
which Alex has described in particular.
I'm going to focus in on on sort of some of the technical aspects of different technologies which are being used to do this.
So here I'm looking at a figure from the Pew Charitable Trusts,
which show some of the technologies which are used to monitor the activities of vessels at sea.
And these range from a variety of satellite technologies to track vessels, as well as image vessels,
as well as sort of electronic monitoring CCTV if you like on board vessels, drones, as well as a sort of ship based drones, if you like as well.
Broadly, we can split these into two different types of data.
We have collaborative data and we have non collaborative data as a collaborative data.
Our tools are things essentially where you have to have some sort of hardware on board a vessel to have a sense of what that vessel is doing.
A non collaborative tools that are things such as your sort of satellite imaging or your drones where essentially
you can monitor aspects of of what vessels may be doing without having to engage directly with that vessel.
If we talk about these sort of remote areas of the ocean, such as the ones that Alex highlighted,
it's quite hard to imagine how you would monitor these without some sort of satellite technology.
And I'm going to show you some examples from the UK Blue Belt programme, in particular from the Ascension Islands,
where we've we've done quite a lot of work and how you might monitor activities in relation to protected area such as this.
So the UK Blue Belt Programme for those that don't know is is a is a an intense on the
part of the UK government to to designate four million square kilometres as NPA by 2020.
And a lot of this is being focussed in the UK overseas territories where you find the bulk of the biodiversity.
So focussing in on Ascension Island. So this is an overseas territory in the southern Atlantic.
It's very small islands less than 100 square kilometres in area, and that's a very small population, less than a thousand people living there.
And for anybody that sort of wants to delve down into the details of what I'm saying is that the reference,
the paper there, which is freely accessible online, you can get into that.
But in terms of where this essentially island is in relation to the fishery of the Atlantic,
you'll see that it sits at the southwest sort of southeast corner of the sort of bulk of longline activity in the Atlantic.
So it's a prime candidate for protection. And we were able to look at how you might monitor this area for for designating an MPA.
And this was moving, as I said, towards the UK government sort of blew out commitments to ascension.
On the left hand figure. There you'll see the sort of charted out the history of fishing in relation to Ascension.
So in blue, we've got periods where the Ascension Island is either exclusive economic zone around Ascension was was a licenced
fishery or we had a lot of fishing activity in and around the red area periods at times when the easy was closed.
And then we had a period where we were looking for the study,
where we had a sort of mix management approach, where half of the exclusive economic zone was was closed.
The fishery an MPA, no take MPA, if you will, and half of it was was open.
We had these two periods in 2016 and 2017 where we brought a lot of different satellite
technologies to bear to understand the activities of vessels in and around ascension,
as well as sort of looking at the economics of the fishery.
And this is just to show that for one of those periods where the fishery was open inside that that sort of red circle,
you can see that the colours in there so that the hot spots of fishing activity
in particular up in the north northwestern quadrant of the Ascension Island,
easy. Now I'm going to draw for this next part on some dates called automatic identification system data.
So this is it's one of those collaborative tools where essentially you have transponders on ships
and you can use this to track the activities of fishing vessels as they go about their business,
essentially. But this was developed actually as a safety of life at sea to using VHF radio
to communicate between ships and shore to give a sense of the sort of course,
direction speed of different vessels. But these these radio signals don't just go horizontally, they also go vertically.
So an interesting study which put sensors up on the International Space Station discovered that you can detect these things in space,
and there are now constellations of satellites roving around the world which detect these air
signals from which you can get sort of footprints breadcrumb trails if you like a vessel activity.
Putting all of that together for Ascension Islands. So that's what these sort of heat maps that you see for 2016 and 2017 below that show.
So we have green low activity up to red high activity.
And what you'll see around the Ascension Islands is which is sort of the inner circle, if you like.
There's very little activity detected on this for this period.
So this is a period where we have this managed fishery. And also this closed MPA.
It's not just fishing vessels, actually, that we can detect using this.
We can also look at other aspects of the sort of fishing industry so we can
look at carrier vessels where fishing vessels might be offloading their catch.
We can look at bunker vessels, which are vessels used to refuel these fishing vessels to keep them active and fishing sort of 24-7 365 days a year.
And then we can also look at interestingly, if fishing buoys, so markets that are used to mop gear, long lines and so forth.
One of the chief problems with this data is is that it's it's not obligatory for fishing vessels in particular to carry it.
So a lot of vessels will be what we would call dark vessels in that case.
And this is a big problem. Potentially, you've got a large fleet operating in and around the area that you might want to protect,
which you just don't know what their activities are. So in this case, we look at another type of satellite data.
This is something called synthetic aperture radar,
and this is just basically like a radar that you might have on a ship which scans the horizon and detects that a big metal objects,
you get a big return back. But in this case, operating from space from satellites,
and you can see that little image thumbnail there where you see the presence of a vessel against the backdrop of the ocean.
So if we look at detections and compare those now to our tracks, we can see where these dark vessels are operating.
And in the case of Ascension Island, actually again, in response to these closures,
they've moved outside of the easy and they're operating out in the high seas.
So sort of putting that that picture together, what we see is that we have dark vessels operating in place of affiliation with the trackable fleet.
And this does give us sort of a reasonable confidence that an MPI in Ascension Islands could
be successful if it's not not just us carrying out the study that that a confident about that.
So the UK government is now taking the bold step to to basically put its money where its mouth is and back an MP in Ascension.
The other interesting thing is the licence uptake for that licence fishery really was very low.
So the economics of that sort of mix management approach in Ascension just just didn't really work.
So they are supporting a full no take NPA in and around Ascension Islands, moving to the sort of high seas context.
So here you've got a different sort of data that I'm looking at.
So this is something called vessel monitoring system. So this is a closed system.
Essentially, you know, it's you need to be within the system to get access to this data,
but you can do interesting things with with VMS data so you can have two way communication between vessels and shore.
And you can now set up things such as what we call geo fences or virtual fences.
So potentially you can.
Although if you go out on the ocean and drive around in your boat, you will not know when you drive across that easy boundary or an MPX boundary.
You could set up these virtual fences where as a as a boat driving around you would you would be alerted to the presence of an MPA,
and you can also send targeted information for different gear types and so on.
And a recent study by the Australian government using this approach reckoned that that just in the trial,
they saved potentially four million Aussie dollars just in potential litigation costs through improved compliance.
The other thing that we see that is sort of heartening, I guess,
for the potential to have viable MPAs out in the high seas, is this this concept of flip the switch?
So this is something coming out of the Western and Central Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organisation.
And this allows coastal states to access the VMS of their waters and for the adjacent high
seas of of other other flag states operating there that a signatory to this agreement.
So you can imagine a similar thing operating in a high seas context where essentially states
give permission for their vessels to be monitored in relation to these high seas closed areas.
So just to sort of summarise really my broad feeling really is that where there is a will?
There certainly are technical solutions to these problems of of this challenge of high seas
marine protection and certainly is easier with within these coastal state jurisdictions.
But really just the key points really to resolve around international cooperation and the institutions that will operate these.
So the questions of who's responsible for the decisions on designation and how and by whom these MPAs will be monitored and enforced,
those are the sort of critical questions in my mind to answer, and we've got an exciting study,
just the plug being funded currently by the Prince Albert of Monaco Foundation.
Looking at some of these questions through the Oxford Martin School programme.
So that and I'm going to plug Alex's book, since he has added that Altovise slides available in all good bookshops and lots of.
Witty titles, I guess. Thank you very much.
OK, so we've got time for questions, I just want to warn you this is being filmed in live webcast, so if you're not comfortable with that,
save your questions until afterwards and then come grab one of these two and that can I have a show of hands if any questions have this front, please?
So there's a lot of work at the moment that's going into looking at alternatives for plastic that could be made out of aquatic plants like seaweed.
Do you anticipate this having ecological consequences that could rival those caused by plastic waste?
Actually, the really critical thing when you're looking at these alternative materials
is that there's a full lifecycle assessment done on whatever material it is.
And that means you look at, for example, the CO2 footprint of the material.
You look at the consequences. If it's a biological material,
you look at what may be necessary in terms of cultivating the plant material for that particular substance, whatever it is.
And you look at the almost food miles, if you like, in terms of transport, of the raw material to where it has to be processed and sold as well.
And in fact,
some fire materials that may be suitable to replace plastics have turned out to not really come out that well from those lifecycle assessments.
So you do have to really look at the whole lifecycle of those materials to understand what the impacts of those are going to be compared to,
say, plastics like peat or whatever else it happens to be.
And both of you have mentioned the the impact on the marine environment of lost fishing trawler nets with modern transponder technologies.
Why don't we make it mandatory for all fishing nets to have transponders, so when they're lost, you can find them and recover them?
That would be a sensible thing to do. Unfortunately, a lot of this problem comes from illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing.
So probably by far the worst problem is gillnets, for example,
and it is possible to buy container loads of cheap monofilament gillnet and literally use it as a disposable asset in the ocean.
So there's a major problem with without what we call IUU you fishing a lost fishing gear and you can't get those guys to basically obey the rules.
But there are certainly other measures now being used, so fishing gear is now being essentially labelled with the name of the vessel is come from.
There's mandatory reporting of hair loss in some fisheries that's been trialled off Norway and has been found to be quite successful.
So people are waking up to the fact now that not only does this cause horrible suffering to the animals involved,
but actually it causes significant economic loss to the fisheries as well,
because those fish that these coconuts catching could be the fish that the fishing boats themselves catch.
And so certainly in the better managed fisheries globally that they're trying to solve the problem.
He's questioning. Thank you very much, both of you, because it's really interesting.
It's like having your own special Horizon programme just presented for you and you're presented intelligently instead of with the gloss of the BBC.
And they're nice. But thanks anyway. I'm intrigued and I was frightened all those some months ago.
Was it when the stories were stories, the reporting of finding microplastics in almost everywhere you look?
You think, oh, I suppose that's yeah, it would, it would be, wouldn't it?
But I'm intrigued to know what we can say about how that's damaging the environment and how small microplastic become and not actually damaging.
And how do we measure that? I'm not saying there isn't no damage. I just don't understand how you would assess it at those tiny little particles.
Yeah. Well, that is kind of the million dollar question of at the moment that scientists struggling with what is the actual ecological
consequences and the consequences ultimately for human health of all this material that's got into the food chain.
Simple answer is at the moment, we don't know. What we do know is that certainly microplastics and nanoplastics are even smaller.
Bits of plastic are able to leave from the digestive tract of fish into the tissues and even cross the blood brain barrier.
So there is certainly plastic getting into the food chain, and not only is it getting into the food chain,
it's getting throughout the bodies of the organisms that we do know that there
is evidence in some organisms of inflammation associated with microplastics
in the body and certainly some of the chemical markers a stress as a result of those materials in the body and that is suggestive of a problem.
Most of the problem actually comes at a kind of more superficial biological level
in that if your say a loved one on the beach or a out more or less feeding,
you're taking up these microplastic particles and they're reducing the amount of
actual food you're getting and potentially having to reject them from the body.
And that has impacts on growth and reproduction, probably at the population level on those organisms,
but that the more difficult question is about toxicity and that we don't understand.
And that's going to need a much more robust and sophisticated approach to try and address that problem.
I mean, one thing I will say is there's no doubt we're eating microplastics in my mind when we're eating seafood.
But the inputs of microplastics to us via seafood is probably only a fraction of what we're taking in from other sources.
So what we're breathing in, what we're taking in through water, so is being microplastics found in drinking water in all sorts places?
What we're taking in through other forms of food as well? And then it's a question of, okay, well, this stuff's getting into the body.
Is it crossing into the tissues and then is it dissolving in terms of the chemicals?
It either contains what it's manufactured or it's absorbed because obviously
plastics being a non-payroll material soak up a lot of organic pollutants as well.
So it's one of those chemicals actually dissolve into the body after they've been taken up.
But as I said, I think sea freight is probably a relatively minor source.
For humans, anyway. Thanks very much, Alex.
I'm wondering if you can tell us a bit more about the governance of the high seas,
and so who's now looking at this 30 by 30 proposal for empires and how many nations around the table considering it?
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's no coincidence we did 30 by 30 report.
At the moment, there is currently, well, the ocean,
the high seas kind of governed through something called the United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea.
And there is currently negotiations between all the signatory governments, and I can't remember how many that is.
But it's a law, certainly all the big ones about developing a new implementing agreement for unconventional law of the Seas,
specifically to protect biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction.
And that's really important because at the moment, there is no legal framework to place marine protected areas in areas beyond national jurisdiction.
Some of the fisheries management bodies have put protected areas out there specifically to protect from the effects of fishing.
But it's quite easy for another state to just ignore those rules and go and do whatever they want to do in those protected areas.
So these are really, really important negotiations are going on at the moment at the UN in New York.
We're all hoping for a strong agreement. Obviously, there are certain states with different point of view who want a kind of weak agreement,
which is likely to result in pretty much the status quo in terms of the way things are run at that level.
I was also wondering with the 30 by 30 employees, he said one of the parameters one of the main ones is biodiversity.
And for a lot of these regions, as you said at the beginning, they're incredibly difficult to measure that.
Yeah. So how do you account for that in the planning? Because it's a crucial parameter.
But yeah, well, in this case, what we picked on was specifically threatened species.
I mean, we do have biodiversity information.
So the data I showed you early in the talk showing where our species records are distributed in the ocean,
that one comes from a system called the ocean by geographic information system.
The problem is that the sampling is massively uneven across the ocean,
so you have to kind of pick on some form of, you know, pseudo marker, I guess, for biodiversity in that case.
That was certainly threatened species and I think also commercial species as well.
So that's the kind of way we.
Questioned her own safety because it was the best that we could take you given the information that's available, but we do,
we are getting a better understanding of how biodiversity is distributed in the oceans, certainly in coastal seas anyway.
OK. Oh, there is one more question that you had very briefly actually addressed the point of microplastics,
which was already the subject of some questions, and it seemed that this was in very remote places.
Can you comment on exactly in what places you made these observations and what is your opinion?
What is the major source of these plastics was probably not fishing gear.
No, 80 percent of plastics in the ocean are from land based sources, so only 20 percent are coming from shipping, fishing and other activities at sea.
A good deal of that is coming down rivers. Top five countries, in terms of sources are all in Southeast Asia.
So it's China, Thailand, Indonesia.
Basically, countries within that region probably account for about 50 percent of the plastics going into the into the ocean.
Once that material is in the ocean, of course, it moves away from the coastline.
Some of it gets washed up. But some of it moves out into the ocean and it's broken up and fractured into these microplastic particles,
and they end up being concentrated in the ocean gyres. So these are the large areas of circular circulation out in the middle of the ocean,
the most famous of which is the called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,
which is a rather dramatic name for an area where there's just the high density of this material than other areas around it.
But then the material kind of goes missing,
and we think that those missing fractions are either being essentially dissolved through biological or mechanical and chemical action,
or it's sinking into the deep ocean. So that's plastics with a size fraction of below a millimetre.
We know that these plastics get colonised by their own unique microbial field.
That microbial fill may actually be active in terms of breaking material up.
It's also active in terms of moving some very nasty pathogens around the ocean as well things like embryos.
So we've got a good general idea of where this stuff is going up to a point.
But there are many, many questions still to be answered about whether plastic is actually going.
You know, is it just ending up as smaller and smaller pieces of plastics?
We have really got effective way of even measuring nanoplastics in the environment at the moment.
OK, we have one more question. I'm going to just ask a question, if I may, as the microphone goes across.
This is organised as part of the City Council's Green Week, which is designed to inspire action amongst people in Oxford.
I just wondered if there were a couple of things that you've talked about fishing into plastics that we could do in our daily lives.
Is there anything and what would you recommend? Yeah, there's a lot. I mean, we can certainly reduce CO2 footprint.
A very good way of doing that is to eat less meat.
So apologies to any butchers in the room or other people that so maybe it's a simple fact of the matter.
If you eat less particularly red meat, you are reducing your CO2 footprint.
I count on you because of losing your car, something I try and do.
And what if, in fact, we both live out to the west of the city?
Think about food miles as well, where your feeds actually coming from,
and all the usual things about switching off the lights, getting your power from renewable energy supplier on fish.
There's some fantastic websites which can help you if you decide you're going to eat fish, it can help you to actually pick sustainable fish away.
So the Marine Conservation Society of the UK do a very good guide to sustainable fish.
WWF Guide So I think for several countries around the world, and if you're in the states,
the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute also do a very good guide for.
And of course, try not to use single use plastics because that is turning into a real.
Well, it's actually turning into a planetary boundary problem.
And so I mean, there's also because you've got the Marine Stewardship Council who you certify a lot of fisheries.
So a lot of supermarkets, you'll see those little blue labels on fisheries products,
which give a certain expectation of standards of the operations of that fishery.
And the thing sort of thing.
Just this week within the Oxford Waitrose store, I think it was with they sort of pushing the sort of zero packaging around food.
So I mean, potentially encouraging supermarkets to move that way.
So there's just less plastic in the supply chain.
I think is is a big step forward. OK, thank you so much.
Thank you both. Was really, really interesting. I was particularly surprised about the formula to the same MBA students at MBAs and the open ocean.
You mentioned that it takes into account just the economic impact it will have.
And I noticed one of the areas highlighted was the novel area North-East Atlantic,
which has which is a major fishing ground specifically for trolling.
And could you elaborate a little bit how they're going to be?
Impact is taking into account how this way? Yeah, I mean, the impact is literally based on the amount of fish being caught in those regions.
So it's the economic impact of fish catches in each polygon more or less.
And the nafaa area is one which has been massively heavily overfished, as you know.
I mean, it was the area where there was the great called collapse of Canada and all sorts of shenanigans going on in terms of how you view fishing,
what we call high grading as well,
where fishing boats were catching fish, keeping big ones and throwing back the small ones so they could get all their quota in terms of large fish.
So there was a lot of activity there, which really wasn't very helpful in terms of those fisheries.
The other thing about that location is there are a lot of what we call vulnerable marine ecosystems there.
So sponge grounds, cold water, coral grounds. So a lot of fragile habitat.
And also it's quite a rich area in terms of cetaceans and so on as well.
So that's why it was popping up in terms of an area of conservation importance.
It's also an area where you've got a boundary between cold and warm water.
Those tend to be very productive areas and again, those were favoured in terms of our particular approach to this study.
So it'll it'll that algorithm, if I understand it, is that applied.
It tries to minimise the cost.
But at some points, the biological benefit will be perceived as outweighing costs, so you could still be supplanting an economically viable fishery.
Yeah. For perceived sort of good biodiversity gain, essentially.
OK. Georgia, close that, and I do want just before we finish to draw your attention to an event next week,
which may be of interest same time five o'clock on Tuesday in this room.
We have Barbara Fenimore, who is the senior strategic director for Asia of the Natural Resources Defence Council.
She'll be speaking about whether China will save the planet under the title from pollution dissolution.
So 5:00 o'clock next Tuesday and do keep an eye on our website for other upcoming talks.
There is a drinks reception out to which you are all warmly invited so as you leave, if you want to drink right, if you want to leave, go left.
And perhaps we could just close by thanking our speakers one more time.