Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)

I will speak to Amendment 3 in this group on the UK’s capacity to comply with Article 5 of the BBNJ, which is about capacity building—building the international capacity to understand the problems and issues and to develop solutions. The UK is particularly well placed to do that because we have the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton and Liverpool, which is a centre of excellence, providing all sorts of leadership and national capabilities in ocean research. We have the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, which is leading in its field of marine science research and is recognised as a centre of international excellence in marine ecosystems. In Scotland, we have the Scottish Association for Marine Science and the excellent Sea Mammal Research Unit at the University of St Andrews, which is the UK’s main centre for marine mammal science. I have not included an absolutely full list of all the centres, so it might be a bit invidious, because there are other places that do a lot of work in this area and are excellent—those are just three examples. We have a special responsibility to share our capacity with the geographical locations that will be making an effort to comply with the BBNJ treaty but do not have anything like the history and knowledge base that we have. One example I could give would be the Sargasso Sea, which is 4 million square kilometres in area—when I read that, I thought it unlikely to be so large, but I double-checked and it is—with Bermuda at its heart. It would be hard to overstate the importance of the Sargasso Sea in biodiversity terms. It is globally significant and is threatened in lots of ways, particularly by overfishing, obviously, but also by mining. Bermuda, for which the sea is critical, has worked hard to achieve, for example, the Sargasso Sea Commission in 2014. As the treaty implementation gets under way, the UK has not only to help capacity-build the science there to start solving some of the Sargasso Sea’s issues but to set the agenda internationally, because although the treaty affects Bermuda so crucially, as an overseas territory it has no direct voice at the UN. We need to use our voice and scientific capability to help not just Bermuda but all those overseas territories that are so critical, given the fact that the ocean and its currents are global.