14:30 Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)

The critics of Malthus were absolutely right, but the fact is that, although humans are creative, clever and innovative, they are also greedy, careless and exploitative. That is the truth. I said to one of my staff yesterday, “It’s not the sort of thing you run round your constituency saying to your constituents”. I do not pick on the British people particularly, but humans are clever, careless and exploitative, and they are in danger—one species—of destroying this planet through climate change and global warming and what we are doing to the oceans of the world, let alone what we have done to the poor species that we have shot, eaten, killed and driven into extinction.

I want to cover four things: plastics, overfishing, oil and petrol, and then come back to the big picture of climate change. We are sometimes too polite, aren’t we? If we look back over 400 years, we in Britain, as the earliest industrialised nation, with the greatest sea power, have not been good at keeping the global environment clean. I think we chopped down most of our trees to build warships. The biggest problem today is that as China is the most polluted country, followed by India, and then the United States, if we do not work with those large countries, everything we do in the United Kingdom will be of much less value. We need international co-operation, but not in a colonial way, pitching up in any country—even in Russia, which is a great polluter—and saying, “You should do what we do”. They would point to us and say, “Well you don’t have a very good record. You’re a late convert”. We are late converts, but we know a great deal now about how to change the environment in which we live and make it more sustainable.

Let us quickly look at one of the inspirations of recent years: the United Nations sustainable development goals. Goal 14 is about conserving oceans and protecting them from the adverse impacts of climate change, overfishing, acidification, pollution and eutrophication. At United Nations level, it is very important that every country sign up to the goals and make them happen.

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15:00 Kerry McCarthy (Labour)

We have heard how the health of our oceans is under threat, and degenerating faster than anyone had predicted because of the cumulative effect of a number of individual stresses: climate change; sea water acidification; widespread chemical pollution; plastic pollution; the effect of drilling for oil; and gross overfishing. The world’s oceans are facing an unprecedented loss of species, from large fish to tiny coral, comparable to the great mass extinctions of prehistory. If we are serious about helping oceans to recover and rebuild, helping fish stocks to replenish, and giving marine ecosystems and coastal communities some breathing space, we need to get serious about creating marine protected areas.

The ocean around Antarctica is also the lungs of the deep, with its waters among the most oxygen-rich on our planet. Much of the life-giving oxygen in deep waters across the world begins its journey there in Antarctica, but the pristine marine environment is threatened by climate change and expanding commercial fishing interests. Marine life there, for example, is totally dependent on krill, but Russia, Norway and China are all said to have krill-fishing interests in the region. That is not something that the people of Russia, Norway and China need, but it is something that the marine ecosystem in that area absolutely needs for its survival. Greenpeace and others are currently pressing for an Antarctic ocean sanctuary. The UK Government can play a vital role in creating this, as part of the Antarctic ocean commission, but as I understand it, the UK has yet to throw its full weight behind negotiations. I hope the Minister can reassure us today that the UK will put real diplomatic effort into that.

The “Keep it in the ground” campaign asserts that 80% of the fossil fuels that we currently know of ought to be kept in the ground if we are to meet our climate change commitments. That means that we should not be drilling for oil in the tar sands, or in the Arctic. We should not look down, at deep-sea mining and the hydrothermal vents. I want to pay tribute to what my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield said. I am entirely with him on this: the world is not ours to exploit; it is ours to protect.

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15:28 John Mc Nally (Falkirk) (SNP)

The principal threats are climate change, marine pollution, unsustainable resource extraction, and the physical degradation of marine and coastal habitats and landscapes. Such transnational problems can be solved only by international co-operation. Globally, humans are exerting multiple pressures on 41% of the marine area, and we harvest 40% of the ocean’s productivity. Some 30% of global fish stocks are recognised as being overfished, and the quantity of predatory fish has halved in 40 years. The world’s seas have already absorbed about a third of the carbon dioxide emissions for which humans have been responsible. Although that has been a valuable carbon sink, it has reduced the pH of the oceans from 8.2 to 8.1, with the possibility of a decline to 7.8 by 2100. That reduces the concentration of calcium and other minerals in sea water, threatening shellfish and coral species. Such acidification hinders the ability of marine ecosystems to absorb carbon, and it is thought to be one of the reasons why the marine absorption of carbon has slowed since the year 2000.

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15:35 Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)

As my hon. Friend pointed out, there is nothing particularly new about some of these issues, but there is real urgency about where we are today. This debate is timely because latest figures from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs suggest that the amount of litter in our seas has increased, and research this week indicates that carbon dioxide emissions are set to increase by 2% by the end of this year. In addition, many of us will have seen recent images of the sea covered in plastic waste. With that in mind, it is thoroughly welcome that there is renewed public awareness of the issue, largely as a result of David Attenborough’s “Blue Planet II”, which is watched by more than 10 million people. I am sure that hon. Members, and anyone who has seen the programme, will agree that it is a visually stunning showcase of all that is important in our marine environment. It gives us a sense of why that environment is so precious and how important it is to protect it.

Our seas and oceans face a changing climate, and a long-term, strategic approach will be essential. Research this week suggests that, disappointingly, global carbon dioxide emissions appear to be increasing once again, after a three-year stable period. Our oceans are becoming more acidic as they absorb excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, with knock-on effects such as inadequate shell growth in marine animals, and a variety of risks to coral reef ecosystems. Temperature rises are already having an impact on marine life around the UK. For example, reports suggest that squid, anchovies and bluefin tuna are being drawn into our waters by the warmer temperatures, while other species are being driven north or deeper as the seas warm.

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15:44 The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Dr Thérèse Coffey)

Thinking further afield, we are providing £10 million to support key marine initiatives abroad. We have allocated £4.8 million to drive forward the creation of the blue belt across the overseas territories, and £5.2 million to marine projects in the two most recent rounds of the Darwin Initiative and Darwin Plus grant schemes, which help to protect coral reefs and increase coastal communities’ resilience to climate change. However, as I said earlier, there is more we can do, which is why the UK Government are committed to the UK agreement on protecting more parts of the world’s oceans.

The oceans are key to generating oxygen and are directly responsible for every other breath we take. Climate change is having a direct impact through ocean acidification, which threatens the very basis of the marine foodweb itself. As has been pointed out, corals vital to biodiversity, fisheries and tourism are threatened by the twin threats of acidification of the seas and the continuing rise in water temperature. That is why this Saturday, in Bonn at COP23 on the United Nations framework convention on climate change, I signed the “Because the Ocean” declaration on behalf of the UK, which links us directly to the Paris agreement. In the UK, we brought scientists, Governments, their agencies and NGOs into the Marine Climate Change Impacts Partnership, which has just published a study entitled “Marine Climate Change Impacts: 10 years’ experience of science to policy reporting”.

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