Marine reserves offer best chance of healthy and productive seas

Frank Pope, Ocean Correspondent

In the long term, conservationists and the fishing industry want the same thing: healthy, productive seas. The question is, are marine reserves the best way of rediscovering them?
All around the world fish stocks are in bad shape and Europe is one of the worst. Records show us just how good the fishing could be, if only we could back off long enough to let populations grow.
Fishing is not like farming, where a closed system can be pumped with fertilisers for big yields. The fish that trawlers chase are wild and rely on the integrity of their ecosystem to survive.
The traditional methods of controlling fishing using quotas, temporary closures of spawning grounds and restrictions on net sizes can help to control how much fish is taken from the sea, but they don’t bring back the vital complexity of life on the seabed.

Evidence from highly protected marine reserves recently implemented in other countries is starting to come in and show impressive results. A third of the waters off St Lucia in South Africa were protected in 1995, and in just three years the biomass of fish within the reserve tripled.
Critics argue that science does not know enough about our seas to position the reserves — and they’re right. But with an ocean facing pollution, coastal development, warming waters and overfishing, waiting for complete knowledge would result in there being little left to protect.