Barry Gardiner

It has been almost 19 years since I first met Professor Alex Rogers at a two-day conference at Somerville College, Oxford, convened by the Global Legislators Organisation for a Balanced Environment. The subject was international law on the high seas. The young postdoctoral fellow inspired us about the amazing biodiversity of our global ocean— I use the singular deliberately—but he also frustrated us by explaining that the international community lacked any legal framework to protect it. The ocean accounts for 99% of our planet by volume and nearly two thirds by surface area. Every second breath we take is supplied to us by the ocean. Some 90% of the excess heat in the climate system has been absorbed by the ocean. The ocean is our greatest nature-based solution to climate change, and it is only by restoring the health of our marine ecosystems that we can deliver on our promise to meet the 30 by 30 target in the Kunming-Montreal global biodiversity framework. The BBNJ treaty is the missing part of the jigsaw. That is why today’s debate is so important, and why the Bill is so important. The Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Bill is welcome and necessary, but we must recognise what the treaty is and what it is not. We must do so not in order to understate what the Bill does, but to understand clearly what action we must take following its passage. We will need secondary legislation to implement the treaty, and—dare I say this before the Budget statement?—it will require adequate funding. The treaty creates a framework for the establishment of protected areas on the high seas, but it does not, in and of itself, create those protected areas. It is therefore important that the Government start to develop proposals for high seas MPAs, especially in regions of the world where the UK is a party to the relevant regional fisheries management organisations. I commend DEFRA for the work that it has already done in its stocktake of area-based management tools in areas beyond national jurisdiction. This is a really important baseline. I ask the Minister to set out in her response to the debate what further work is planned to identify, support and deliver specific MPAs. I am particularly keen to hear how she might develop the supplementary report that has already been prepared on the Sargasso sea. Will she confirm that this internationally significant ecosystem is a priority for the development of an MPA? It has now been 13 years since the Sargasso sea was recognised as an ecologically or biologically significant area, having met all seven EBSA criteria. Our country’s history has left a legacy. That legacy is our exclusive economic zone, which is the fifth largest in the world, largely due to our remaining overseas territories, but that legacy brings responsibilities with it. I pay tribute to the work of the previous Conservative Administration, who expanded the blue belt programme to nominally protect more than 4 million sq km of ocean, from Anguilla in the Caribbean to Pitcairn in the Pacific ocean. In the last year, the programme took satellite imagery of more than 100 million sq km of UK overseas territory waters, providing crucial monitoring and surveillance to crack down on illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing activities. It is this very tangible knowledge and expertise that the UK should be at the forefront of delivering through the first BBNJ COP, which will take place within a year of the treaty taking force, from 17 January 2026. I welcome the announcement, following the spending review, that the blue belt programme will receive increased funding for 2025-26. However, given that £2 million of this £8.6 million comes from official development assistance, which itself is being cut, I hope it will not seem churlish if I ask that the programme be ringfenced for the future. For much of human history, we did not need the BBNJ treaty. The high seas were protected from the worst impacts of human activity by the simple reality that they were so far from land and too difficult to access. The dawn of the industrial age and motorised ocean-going vessels changed all that. Even species that lived their whole life hundreds or thousands of miles from land were no longer safe from human exploitation. Nothing epitomises that sad reality more than the slaughter of the great whales. Industrialised whaling caused the deaths of nearly 3 million whales. Even the blue whale, the largest animal that has ever lived, had its numbers reduced by more than 90%. Whales’ size and the fact of spending most of their lives in inhospitable and hard-to-reach parts of the open ocean had kept them safe for millennia, but the introduction of new and more powerful technologies meant that even they became the victims of massive over-exploitation. Today, there are fewer than 400 North Atlantic right whales left in our ocean. And why was it called the right whale? Ironically, it acquired its name because it was rich in blubber and baleen, it moved slowly and it floated after being killed, so it was easily towed in to be butchered—so it was deemed the “right” whale to hunt. The history of these great mammals shows just why we now need the BBNJ. Biodiversity is no longer protected by its remoteness from land. Human greed will destroy it wherever it is found on our planet, unless we act decisively to regulate our most destructive activities. Today, although the international whaling ban is still ignored by a few countries, whales are no longer threatened by hunters, on the whole, but they are killed by ship strikes and they are entangled in fishing gear. I emphasise the importance of the international ban not just because I believe that it is one of the most important conservation achievements of the 20th century, but because it was a great achievement of multilateralism —something that is not much in vogue at the moment. It shows how, by acting in concert with other nations, we can mobilise popular support around environmental objectives with both a clear ecological and a clear moral purpose, and we can achieve results. I regard it as an inspiration and a template for what we are now doing in the BBNJ. The huge factory ships that once slaughtered whales have largely gone, but in their place, equally large factory ships now plunder the ocean as if it were a bottomless pit of profit. There are longliners setting fishing lines tens of kilometres long, each with up to 15,000 hooks, and huge purse seiners using nets that are 2 km long and 200 metres deep. Imagine a net that is twice as deep as Big Ben—the Elizabeth Tower—is tall, and which stretches out so far from this House of Commons that it takes in the whole of Buckingham Palace and most of its gardens. These fishing enterprises devastate the very populations that they are targeting. That is why we need this Bill. Earlier this year, the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science—the Government’s own marine experts—found that more than half of the UK’s key fishing quotas were set above the levels recommended by scientists. Overfishing has led to a 98% collapse in Celtic sea cod populations since 2012, with an 84% collapse in haddock, an 85% collapse in whiting and an 80% collapse in herring. Just two weeks ago, the scientific assessment of mackerel showed that the species has declined by 78% in the past 10 years. Despite continued advice from scientists to reduce catch quotas, that reduction has not happened. While the UK has been a world leader with the blue belt programme, at home we continue to practise the opposite of what we preach, most notably through disastrous sustainable catch limits and quotas. Worse, we have driven out small fishing fleets, leaving our seas vulnerable to the monstrous mega-ships whose bottom-trawling scrapes away the existence of all life in their path. The inequitable quota allocation that was formalised in 1999 has resulted in more than 90% of the quota for mackerel, herring and blue whiting being held by just 20 companies, most of them not even British. Half of the English quota is held by Dutch, Icelandic and Spanish interests, more than half of Northern Ireland’s quota is held by just one trawler company, and 85% of Wales’s quota is held by Spanish companies. The system has been rigged against the UK’s inshore fleet and its independent fishers. All of this was done by UK companies selling their quota abroad, but it is the awful consequence of the privatisation of a public good—our fisheries—and the UK taxpayer has received not a penny in benefit as a result. If the UK is truly to be a leader in the implementation of the BBNJ and to demand of other nations that they curb their rapacious plundering of the high seas, we must at the very least begin to stop the over-exploitation of our stocks at home. Our ability to make our voice heard internationally will sound hollow if we continue to ignore the science and set politically led quota allocations at home. High seas fisheries often have unimaginably high levels of bycatch. This is particularly true of tuna fisheries, because tuna often school with other pelagic species, such as dolphins, manta rays and billfish. Indeed, many tuna species inhabit the same surface mixed layer of the ocean that is inhabited by vulnerable species such as silky sharks or turtles. It is estimated that 100 million sharks are caught every year—most as bycatch in high seas fisheries—so it is no wonder that the number of large open ocean sharks has declined by at least 70% in the past 50 years, almost entirely due to high seas fishing, where they are either targeted or caught as bycatch beyond the reach of national jurisdictions. The leatherback turtle, the largest turtle in the world, is threatened with extinction because it is so often caught as bycatch by purse seine fleets of fishing vessels on the high seas. In the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list of endangered species, published just last week, only one of the 22 species of albatross is not threatened with extinction through being caught as bycatch on hooks on longline fishing fleets in the open ocean. Distance from land once provided protection for many species in the pre-industrial era, and the same can be said of the deep seas. Until recently, the deep ocean was out of reach for human activity. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. Industrialised fishing fleets are now able to fish deeper and deeper, but many deep sea species are slow-growing. An orange roughy reaches sexual maturity only between the age of 20 and 30—much older than shallower water fish. These factors make deep sea species uniquely vulnerable to overfishing, and as many of the deepest waters are on the high seas, we need to ensure that the BBNJ agreement protects them and their habitat better. Deep sea fishing, especially on seamounts, poses an existential risk to many deep-sea ecosystems, and bottom trawling, which is devastating in coastal and shallow seas, is arguably even more so on the high seas. Bottom trawlers tend to focus on seamounts, as these underwater mountains act as biodiversity hotspots in the open ocean. I seek the Minister’s assurance that, in considering the next steps after ratification, establishing protections around seamounts on the high seas will be one of the Government’s priorities. I ask for the same assurance in relation to the issue of deep seabed mining—I trust that the Government will continue to oppose any developments of this on the high seas. The Bill before us is excellent. It will delight the now Professor Alex Rogers, who I suspect is not at his desk either in Oxford or at the National Oceanography Centre, where he is now the science director. Most probably, he is out somewhere in the Antarctic ocean in a submersible exploring the deep ocean, as he has been doing for more than 30 years. If he were to take a break from his mission to discover 100,000 new marine species in the deep ocean in this decade and send us a message, I suspect that it would emphasise the importance of getting this Bill enacted quickly. If we do not ratify the treaty at least 40 days before the first COP, the UK will not have a seat at the table; we will merely be a spectator as others set the ambition, or the lack of it, as they roll out the implementation of the treaty. I congratulate the Minister on bringing the Bill to the House for its Second Reading, and trust that we are able to see the whole ratification process completed in time for the UK to make strong proposals at COP1 next year.