15:30 Chris Grayling (Epsom and Ewell) (Con)

My next point is about the seabed itself, which is crucial. We hear a lot about the need to plant trees and reforest degraded areas. As hon. Members know, I am passionate about my view that deforestation is a blight internationally and needs to be reversed. However, the loss of seabed habitats—kelp and seagrass—also has a big ecological impact, and we must deal with that as well. We have seen huge loss of seagrass beds around the world and around this country. Restoring and expanding the seagrass and kelp beds on our shores and under our waters is important because it helps local marine ecosystems and is a rather quicker way of absorbing carbon than planting a tree. The Government and all those who work in this field should be eagerly pursuing the opportunity for this country to contribute to our 2050 net zero goal by restoring the traditional kelp and seagrass beds around our shores.

I very much hope that the Minister will follow up on all three of those requests, but I also want to touch on an area outside the United Kingdom: the future of the marine areas we do not control around the world. I pay tribute to the UK team that played an active part in the recent negotiations to secure the international agreement on the future of our oceans. As they did at the COP summit, the Government have continued to play a leading role internationally in seeking better protection for and the recovery of nature. That is clearly a very good thing, and Ministers and officials should take credit for it.

We clearly have to be sensitive to the issues in developing countries, but they do not benefit from a damaged environment. I see this proposal as beneficial to everyone on the planet. I do not see any downside to living on a cleaner, greener planet. It will bring different kinds of job opportunities. There are many opportunities across the developing world—renewable energy is an opportunity in parts of the world that are hotter and windier than the UK—so it is not an either/or. There are benefits to pursuing an environmental strategy and an economic strategy.

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15:52 Kerry McCarthy (Labour)

We think that 98% of carbon stored in the UK’s seafloor is in areas with no trawling restrictions, and the right hon. Member focused on bottom trawling. I come back to the value of protecting our marine environment, in terms of carbon sequestration and the importance of nature-based solutions to climate change, and creating nature markets.

Damaging that habitat comes at a huge environmental cost. According to the Climate Change Committee, the organic carbon stored in the soils of marine ecosystems is equivalent to around 17% of the UK’s total emissions. That was calculated in 2020. Damaging those ecosystems risks releasing all that carbon into the atmosphere. We need to protect our seagrass meadows and our seabeds, and we need to enhance them.

In the short term, seagrass meadows are about nature and biodiversity. In the longer term, the carbon sequestration benefits could also be huge, but there is a difficulty in evaluation at the moment. The Climate Change Committee has said that there are currently no estimates of carbon accumulation rates in UK seagrass ecosystems, and that UK-specific data is urgently needed. We also need a seagrass code, so that it can be properly accounted for.

Last year, the Climate Change Committee recommended that saltmarsh and seagrass be included in the greenhouse gas inventory, and called for a roadmap to identify the additional data required to enable that to happen. In response, the Government accepted that there were

The Government said that such information must be collected before a decision on inclusion in the greenhouse gas inventory can be made.

As I understand it, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has established a cross-Administration UK blue carbon evidence partnership to make progress on the evidence base for blue carbon, and I hope that the Minister can give us an update on how that is going. I also remind her that she promised me a meeting when, at DEFRA questions, I asked how the Department was working with the newly created Department for Energy Security and Net Zero on nature-based solutions. I would like to gently chase her up on that, because it would be really useful to see how we can make progress.

I have talked about the positive side—the potential—and now I want to flag up something that is very worrying. This was contained in the briefing sent to MPs today by Uplift, an organisation that provides the secretariat for the all-party group for climate change. Some 900 locations in the UK’s oceans have been offered as sites of development for oil and gas extraction in the latest offshore oil and gas licensing round, and more than a third of them clash with marine protected areas. I do not expect the Minister to comment on the Government’s dash for more fossil fuel extraction—I know that is a matter for another Department—but she should be very concerned about the overlap with marine protected areas.

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16:04 Ruth Jones (Labour)

Marine protected areas play a vital role in combating climate change. We know that healthy seas enable the sequestration and storage of atmospheric carbon dioxide, as I touched on and as my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) expanded on eloquently—I do not propose to go over what she already said. When blue carbon habitats, such as seaweed and seagrass ecosystems, are degraded and the seabed is disturbed, stored carbon is released back into the water column and could re-enter the atmosphere. By protecting and rewilding our marine environments, we can keep carbon locked in the ocean through increased numbers and biomass of marine species and healthier marine habitats.

Marine ecosystems will play a key role if the UK is to meet its ambitions for net zero by 2050, particularly as the UK has one of the world’s largest exclusive economic zones and governs substantially more marine territory than terrestrial. The area of UK MPAs is 27% greater than that of the entirety of the UK land area. As such, by making MPAs rich with life, we will materially help carbon storage on a massive scale.

Climate change is already having severe impacts on the world’s oceans, but oil and gas developments can have direct impacts, including: pollution from oil spills; the release of toxic chemicals through exploration, drilling and infrastructure decommissioning; the release of microplastic waste; and noise from seismic blasting. Will the Minister outline what safeguards will be put in place to mitigate any negative impact?

Globally, saltmarsh and seagrass beds alone can store up to 450 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. That is almost half the emissions of the entire global transport industry. Imagine what more we can do to preserve our planet and protect our environment by doing just a little bit more and going a little bit further, faster. Restoring and protecting key marine ecosystems can lock up billions of tonnes of carbon each year—as much as 5% of the savings needed globally. A sustained programme of ocean renewal must be part of any plan to tackle the climate emergency. It is time the Minister started to implement this plan, and fast.

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16:11 The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Trudy Harrison)

Earlier the hon. Member mentioned a potential oil and gas project. This is one example of how we will ensure that environmental concerns are fundamental to any approval. Clearly, that will be the responsibility of the Scottish Government, but the assessment is being done by OPRED, the Offshore Petroleum Regulator for Environment and Decommissioning, which is part of the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. In response to the hon. Member’s specific question about the regulation and perhaps any penalties that will be enforced, I would appreciate it if she would allow me or my noble Friend in the other place to write to her. We use a mix of strategies. The MMO ensures compliance by desk-based reviews of fishing vessel trackers and also site-based inspection, but I recognise that the hon. Member really wants to understand the regulatory and penalty process.

We need to do all we can in a way that helps to deliver a thriving and sustainable fishing industry alongside a healthy marine environment, as set out in our joint fisheries statement. We recognise that there are growing spatial tensions between industries such as fishing, the renewable energy sector, dredging, and the oil and gas industry, alongside the need to conserve and enhance our marine environment.

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