9 May 2012
The NFFO and the Crown Estate recently jointly hosted a meeting for representatives of fishing organisations from France, Netherlands, Germany Belgium and Denmark – all countries where the fishing industry are affected by the rapid expansion of offshore renewable energy projects.
The purpose of the meeting was to acquaint the European fishing organisations with the groundbreaking collaborative mapping project that the NFFO and Crown Estate have been working on over the last twelve months, funded by the Crown Estate and the Department for Energy and Climate Change. During that time the project has collated a large body of plotter data from a range of fishing vessel skippers and from this body of material has mapped the main areas of fishing activity potentially affected by Round 3 offshore wind-farm developments. This data and the Crown Estate’s powerful Marine Assets Resources System (MaRs) will be invaluable in:
- Informing future rounds of offshore renewable planning to avoid the most important fishing areas
- Informing direct dialogue between individual offshore developers about how to minimise the displacement of fishing activities
- Potentially informing any future marine spatial planning in ways that ensure fishing is fully taken into account
- Potentially informing the process of establishing a network of marine in protected areas UK waters
Trust and Confidence
The collaborative mapping project emerged as a result of the experience of Rounds One and Two, where poor planning decisions based on inadequate information placed a wind-farms development on the best lobster ground in the country (off Bridlington) and the Bristol Channel, in which the use of VMS data misled the planners to ignore the presence of significant fishing by the under-15 metre fleet.
Skippers have voluntarily provided their valuable plotter data to ensure that this type of problem is less likely to arise in the future. They know that their data is protected by assurances given jointly by the Crown Estate and the NFFO that it will only be used for purposes that have been agreed and in ways that protect the anonymity of individual vessels. This trust and confidence lies at the heart of the project and is essential if further information is required in the future. The data has been secured by highly experienced and respected skippers who have discussed the project in detail with each skipper.
Validation
Despite the undoubtedly impressive qualities of the MaRs system, the identification of specific features and fishing patterns requires interpretation and validation of the information collected by experienced skippers with knowledge of specific fisheries. This is why each data set has been validated as it is entered onto the system and will be explained to individual developers using the information collected.
Defensive Mapping
It is widely agreed that as an industry, we should have undertaken this mapping exercise at least five years ago. That would have put us in a much stronger position to defend our most important fishing grounds with hard, solid data that illuminate fishing patterns in ways that no other data gathering exercise can approach. On the other hand it is appreciated that five years ago very few skippers would have been prepared to share their plotter data. It has taken that time to build up the recognition that the world has moved on and unless this kind of hard data is made available the fishing industry is going to lose more of its fishing areas than necessary.
The project is also supplementing plotter data with a pilot for under-15m vessels using a low-cost VMS system using mobile phone technology. This ensures that inshore areas are covered adequately.
Dialogue and Co-existence
An open and direct dialogue between the fishing industry and individual developers has to date been hampered by the use of “consultants” who pose as “experts” on the fishing industry and sell their “expertise” to the wind-farm developers. This is perhaps to be expected in a young and rapidly expanding industry unsure about how to interact with a sector as different and complex as fishing. And there are however, examples of best practice when the developer has engaged directly with the industry’s representatives from the outset, rather than relying on self-appointed experts. The mapping project is an example of what can be achieved through collaboration with the shared goal of co-existence and the minimisation and management of frictions. The information that it has collected, and the powerful way that it is presented in the form of GIS layers, allows the possibility of a mature, reasoned dialogue about how in concrete terms co-existence can best be achieved. Our hope is that it will be used at an early stage in the planning of turbine arrays and route planning for export cables.
International Fleets
It was recognised from the outset that outside the 6 mile limit the activities of the international fleets should be mapped. The possibility of a single large mapping project organised by the RACs was discussed in earnest. However, the desperate need for hard data and the long time it takes to secure funding at a European scale led the UK to push ahead with a national initiative; although it was always envisaged that this would be the first piece of the jigsaw, with other pieces being laid by other fleets later. In the event, extensive data has been included from non-UK fleets, freely given under the same assurances by non-UK vessel operators. It is recognised however that there are still a few important data gaps which it is important to fill. The meeting was useful in identifying where those data gaps might be and how they might be filled.
Offshore renewables will be with us for quite some time and the arrival of marine spatial planning and marine protected areas underlines the need to build on the good start that has been made. The meeting agreed that:
- The collaborative mapping project had produced an impressive amount of high quality, accurate data that, linked to the MaRs system, provided a powerful analytical tool
- Although quite a bit of data had been collected from non-UK vessels, the priority should be to identify data gaps and fill them
- A discussion about Phase II of the project should take place on how to build on the work that has been begun
- The data that had been collected would improve the quality of the dialogue between individual developers and fishing industry representatives
- We should ensure that the safeguards and assurances that have accompanied the provision of data should be extended to any new initiative
- The RACs would be a natural arena for discussion on how the project should or could be taken forward on a wider scale incorporating data from European fleets.
- The project had implications for the establishment of marine protected areas but care would have to be taken in how the data could be shared without betraying the assurances under which it was collected