Science4Parliament – Episode eleven – Dr Mark Costello – Marine Protected Areas

Welcome to the Science4Parliament podcast,  the first podcast that aims to foster the relationship between science and decision-makers and show how research and innovation are vital to the equitable and sustainable functioning of our societies and economies. 
  
It is presented by Denis Naughten, a directly elected Member of Parliament in Ireland for nearly three decades. Denis has served as an Irish cabinet minister and on the Council of European Union Ministers and is currently chairperson of the Inter-Parliamentary Union Working Group on Science and Technology,  based in Geneva, which aims to inspire global parliamentary action through legislative work in the field of science and technology. 
  
The podcast aims to highlight the work of innovative people in the world of science and to get their perspective on what needs to be done to bring that world and the world of policy closer together. 
  
In this episode, Dr Mark Costello,  a marine ecology expert and currently Prof. of Marine Ecology at Nord University, Norway, joins Denis to talk about marine protected areas (MPAs) and why they are so important to marine biodiversity.  

Further information at the links below:
Dr Costello's  recent paper on the economic effect of MPAs :
https://doi.org/10.3989/scimar.05417.080
A village celebrating their marine reserve after a 10-year campaign by local schoolchildren.
One of those children (now a mother)  set up Experiencing Marine Reserves, which has taken over 100,000 people snorkelling inside and around MPAs to show how they work and the difference that they make,
A short video from a New Zealand recreational fisherman
Interviews of fishermen in the Canary Islands who demanded  more marine reserves when they saw their success
Interesting article on the Atlantic Ocean circulation and the effect that it is having. 

Contact  Denis Naughten:
Email:            dnaughten@gmail.com
LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/denis-naughten
X:              https://x.com/DenisNaughten
Blog:         https://substack.com/@denisnaughten
Web:         https://denisnaughten.ie/

More information on Dr. Mark Costello
Website:       https://www.nord.no/en/about/employees/mark-john-costello
X:                   https://twitter.com/costellomark
LinkedIn:      https://www.linkedin.com/in/costellomarkj/

Transcript

Science4Parliament Podcast – Dr Mark Costello – Episode 11 –Marine protected areas 

SPEAKERS

Dr. Mark Costello, Denis Naughten

Denis  00:00

Welcome to the Science4Parliament podcast, the first podcast that aims to foster the relationship between science and decision makers and to show how research and innovation are vital to the equitable and sustainable functioning of our societies and economies. My name is Denis Naughten, and I'm your host. Today I'm delighted to be with Dr. Mark Costello, a marine ecology expert, who is currently Professor of Marine Ecology at Nord University in Norway. Mark addressed the Parliament in Ireland last year on the subject of marine protected areas and why they are so important to marine biodiversity. And he's just recently published a paper on the evidence of the economic benefits from marine protected areas. So when we heard that he had published this paper, we decided we'd contact Mark and ask him to come and talk to us. So first of all, Mark, you're very welcome.  

Mark  00:57

Thank you.

Denis  00:58

And before we get to the science Mark, just add something different to the conversation, I asked each of my guests to pick two numbers, each of which is related to one of 10 random light-hearted questions, some of which will be asked during the interview. So can you pick two numbers for me between one and 10?  

Mark  01:16

One and 10? 

Denis  01:17

Number one, and number 10. That's great. So I suppose Mark, first of all, you might explain to us, what are marine protected areas, or MPAs? as they're known 

Mark  01:28

Ah well that's a never-ending question, because the big question is, what does protected mean? So when we talk about public health, how do we protect people, when we talk about the environment, what does protected mean? You can’t protect against everything; you can do your best against some things. And I think this is the biggest source of worry, that people are worried about, that it might limit them in some way. And then of course, we all think we know what protected means. So, some people might think this is a great idea. We're going to protect this area, and then somebody else will think oh, no, that'll will that ban me from doing something I've always been doing, you know. So, I find this the most confusing problem. And the International Union of Conservation of Nature came up with a classification a few decades ago, but there's seven different types of protection, seven different types of protected areas, which doesn't help at all. Just to add to the confusion. Yes. And then of course, you have European Commission, that any country can redefine them as it feels best. Where I am, in Norway, a few years ago, their definition was that an area is more protected. That was all, so

Denis  02:28

So it's more protected?  

Mark  02:30

Yeah, yeah. But it could be almost completely unprotected as well. It was a very loose definition. And I think so I guess. But the extreme one extreme views, you'd like some places to be wild, where we don't have any deliberate impact anyway. You know, we've had maybe pollution, and some other things leak in. And sometimes these are called no take areas where we don't take anything, we are not extracting, we don't go mining or fishing or seaweed harvesting. But then often people will allow some of these things in some areas, or they will have zones where they will have a part of it that's fully protected where there's no allowed take. But then in some of the classifications with the IUCN, they actually say people shouldn't be allowed into some of these areas. I don't really agree with that, particularly in the marine situation, because the IUCN, that's the International Union for Conservation of Nature. It's an international body, largely funded by governments, but it's not a government run organisation. And they have staff based in Switzerland and various offices that several 1000 members around the world, it's a very big, long established think tank of nature, conservation minded people. 

Denis  03:32

I remember a few years ago, in Ireland, we had protected area in the Burren in Co. Clare, which is a limestone cast area. And one of the conditions there at the time was that they took all of the cattle off the land there to bring it back to its pristine habitat. But they soon found that actually they needed the cattle on the land to actually maintain the flora that had been there historically. So, when we talk about marine protected areas, and this idea of protecting the pristine nature of them, is there the risk that if human intervention is removed completely from these areas, that it could potentially have a detrimental impact as well as a beneficial impact. 

 Mark  04:17

Well, that kind of depends what we want at the end of the day. So you could say that traditional farmland protects a lot of biodiversity, which is true, and it has many years, but it's still not natural. And you could say that some areas that are fished in a very benign sort of traditional way for many years, and no species have disappeared from the area that they're also quite acceptable. And I think probably the majority of us would, would regard that we do have a footprint. We can't avoid it, and that in most of the world, we've had a footprint and we will still we will always have one, but the big difference between land and sea is that in the Burren example,  of course, before we had cattle, we had giant elk and all sorts of other big wild herbivores which are performing the same function as the cattle and grazing and keeping and stop it turning to forest. I do find it a bit amusing, sometimes when the land turns to forest, people complain about it. And then other times they're complaining they want more forest. So, you can’t please everyone. 

Denis  05:08

Can’t please everyone, absolutely 

Mark  05:11

But the big difference in the sea, is that what we take out are the top predators. So pretty much all the fish crustaceans that we eat are carnivores, whereas on land, we hunt herbivores. So, we can take out quite a lot of deer and rabbits and hares and other herbivorous animals, without altering the food web in a big way. But if we take out the top predators, which are largely gone now, since the wolves are gone, we want to get into that conversation about what wolves are wandering around Dublin. But, you know, we've  lost those carnivores on land already. So, we have a different baseline as to what is natural, but in the ocean, we still have them. But if we take out those big fish and big lobsters, immediately, the whole food web will start changing because what they used to eat will become more abundant. And then we will fish out the next panels. So, people have called this fishing down the food chain, right? Where we as people keep taking out the biggest animals. And then we ended up just eating the little fish because we've taken all the big ones. So that's kind of the big difference between land and sea. And I think a lot of people think, well, taking a few fish is not going to have any effect. But it depends which fish are taken through. And usually, we take the biggest ones first, and there's fewer of them. So the food web is very easily altered.  

And we discovered this, first discovered, I think, maybe in New Zealand and North America where they had fully protected areas. And they suddenly saw the kelp forest recover. And they said, Oh, the seaweed forest all suddenly come back again, after 20 years of protection, it must be climate or some other thing. And then they realise it's because the grazing sea urchins which are these little spiny shellfish, they love seaweed. And if nothing is predating them, like the big lobsters and big fish, which eat the small sea urchins, then the sea urchins just graze on the forest, the seaweed forest completely bare down to the rock. And this has been happened all over the world. So, then we realised Ah, okay, so by our fishing, even though it wasn't classified, really as overfishing and we were still able to fish, we had changed the ecosystem. And so, we've learned a lot from having a few small, protected areas. So, whether that's a good or a bad thing. Well, that's for people to decide. Because even though we've changed the system, you know, it's still another human altered ecosystem. And some people would, would argue that we should have some of these fully protected places. So, we know what's fully natural, I would argue that, but then we also have to accept that we'll have places that are semi natural, and then we might have some cases where it's been pretty hit pretty hard. And this kind of needs radical intervention. But in the ocean, we've had only I think less than twenty species have ever gone extinct versus about a thousand on land, so we haven't damaged the oceans as much as land and the oceans can still recover very quickly, without any real significant intervention on our part, we just stop having to do bad things to it.

Denis  07:49

So, the oceans themselves are quite resilient. Now, just before we delve into that a bit more going to take a step back from the science for a second and come to those two numbers that you picked. So question number one that you picked was, if a child stopped you on the street and asked you what science is? What would you tell them? 

Mark  08:10

Ah, gosh, that's a good question. I would say it's fact-based thinking about problems where we try to use evidence to figure out what's right and wrong, just like a good businessman would do it, look at the numbers and say, Okay, we think this is happening, but actually, the sales are not going so well there. And why is why is that we have less customers. Okay, now we have the numbers to prove the problem. 

Denis  08:33

Oh, it's a good way to look at it. Coming back to you were saying that the marine environment is far more resilient. And I suppose we've seen particularly in the North Atlantic last summer, and indications are this summer as well, that we have had significant warming of the waters. Is this going to have a big impact on the resilience of our oceans to recover, even if we do put in these marine protected areas? And is this type of overheating happening in other parts of our planet? 

Mark  09:05

Yes, in fact, where I'm living here in Norway, we have the greatest proportional effect of heating. So with nearly four degrees warming of the sea in the Arctic sea near us. But in fact, we must remember it's very cold here. Yeah. So one or two degrees in the tropics around the equator can be very harmful because it's exceeded the threshold of many of the species that can live there. So we have seen a moving of species away from the equator into middle latitudes. And we've seen, one of my students published a paper last year showing that twice as many fish species are now living in the Barren Sea, which is just north of Norway, than were in the 1980s. But is that a bad thing? Nobody's complaining about it. We have more fish. So, and that's because of the warming effect. It's clearly correlated with it. So it depends very much on where you are geographically as whether you regard this as a good or a bad thing. And the thing is, marine species can move quite freely, compared to species on land, because the ocean is all connected so they can move they've always been moving. We even have fossil evidence from the last Ice Age, which shows that some of the plankton had most species at the equator 20,000 years ago when there was cold. And since then, they've been decreasing at the equator. So since the equator is already at the warm limits for many species, which we haven't really appreciated. We taught the equator some like, some like, Goldilocks, beautiful, perfect temperature, because we like going to warm climates, when in fact, it's a little bit too hot for a lot of things already. So that increased heating is decreasing things there. And all the evidence shows and not just the models, but the observations that fisheries in the equatorial countries are going to suffer a lot from a loss of fish stocks.  

But fisheries in the northern hemisphere, where we are, might actually benefit, a bit, On the downside, fish gets smaller when they're warmer; they grow faster, and they mature in a smaller state. So we won’t get such big fish, maybe within a population as we did before.  I'm not that worried about climate change, to be honest, in the ocean.  I was also on the International Panel on Climate Change and it was a bit of an eye opener to me there that the direct human impact of climate change is far worse on our infrastructure on our own health, then it is going to be on nature in the wild, even though there will be impact on nature. And at a local scale, some people will lose out from the biodiversity because maybe the species they've been harvesting for generations has suddenly declined, but and maybe a new species will come in. So where we're living here, there's been mackerel being coming here now for years, and many of my friends are quite happy about that. They don't complain. We've also got the big brown edible crab well known to Irish people, that's also become common here in the last 10 years. But there's no fishery for it here because people never thought, never fished for it before. And I have another friend who says it's amazing, that when he was young, he could never catch lobsters. And now he can go out and within a few hours, he'll catch a lobster for dinner just walking in off the coast. So sometimes so we will have to adapt, I guess is the answer. If the climate change is already set and trained, to some extent, we'll have to adapt to that. And we just we just want to make sure it doesn't go completely out of control. 

Denis  12:08

Just to pick you up on that comment in terms of the point that you make, that you're not as concerned about the warming of the oceans. Because if you were to look at the media reports over the last number of months, there nearly seems to be absolute panic out there in terms of warming of the ocean, particularly the North Atlantic, and they're saying that this could have a huge impact in terms of currents. And as a result of that could have a huge impact on shore in terms of weather, you're not quite as concerned. Why is that? 

 Mark  12:41

Well, I'm not an expert on the physical oceanography. But I've talked to a few people and there are papers. So in theory, you could have these cold water currents that come down from the Arctic. And in fact, there's a place just off the south of Greenland, which is getting colder due to climate change, because you've got the Arctic current is trapped in against Greenland by these warmer currents coming up from the Caribbean, the so-called Atlantic drift. So that's getting colder. But there's many, many things influencing these currents. And it's not just that northward Atlantic drift. So the experts I've talked to say, oh, yeah, this is great papers, it makes a lot of media attention. But there there's a lot of unanswered questions there still. And we can look back, you know, at least to the last Ice Age, there's quite a bit of fossil evidence. And we see that species have moved up and down the Atlantic as temperatures have changed. For blue mussels, which are also well known and farmed in Ireland, they're now growing again in Svalbard.  Atlantic cod are now common in Svalbard. And people regard them as a nuisance because they eat the polar cod, which they are happier to have. I was in Iceland recently. And they also complained that what was it? That mackerel are invading their country. 

Denis  13:49

So, you know, I suppose everything is relative. And I want to come to the economics of it. Because the main reason I wanted to talk to you was this interface between economics and science. But I'm going to before we do that, we're going to take a step back again, and I'm going to go to your question number 10 that you selected for me. So have you ever successfully flipped a pancake?  

Mark  14:13

Oh, (laugh) not in a long time but now that you mention it maybe I should have another go. We’ll see. 

Denis  14:20

Maybe, maybe. So listen, Mark, the main reason that I wanted to talk to you was, we as politicians and policymakers, were always very conscious of the economics of a lot of things. And in terms of these marine protected areas, probably the one big concern that we've heard is from fishermen and fisherwomen that, this, you know, is going to have an impact in terms of their ability to fish. Now in order to do have, you've worked in New Zealand, and you've spoken about when marine protected areas were put in there, in fact, the number of fish that were caught in the periphery of these marine protected areas went up significantly, it didn't have the detrimental impact that people were projecting. But you have been doing some work on the whole economics of marine protected areas. So maybe could you tell us a bit about what work you've been doing recently, your recent publication, and why you're so confident about the economics of protecting parts of our oceans? 

Mark  15:25

Yeah, I started taking notes from I've been teaching about a course from in particular in New Zealand for 15 years. And I used to take notes every year, and we'd have discussions about recent papers. And one of the things that comes up and seems quite natural is that they say, well, the fisheries is going to be pushed out of an area or displaced. And this will reduce the fishery catch. But in practice, I could never find evidence for this. So, then I started reading the literature and emailing people, there's an email list of can you believe 12,000 people interested in marine protected areas, I couldn't believe how many. And I couldn't get back any evidence that this had ever cost any fishery had ever lost out, I find this really surprising, because then you would expect it would. And then I realised the reasons for this, maybe that the protected area is so small that the fishery is much bigger, it's only a very small area within a larger fishery, so you can't detect an effect. Yeah, then after it's created, you got an increased abundance of species within the protected area, which everybody knows about, and all the fishermen line up outside, because they know they're hoping that some lobsters or fish will swim out and they can catch them. They call it the spillover effect.  

And then sometimes fishery management has a much bigger effect, of course, on fishing and marine protected areas, because fishery management often closes complete fisheries is restrict skiers, to sticks, fishing times all sorts of things. And we often don't have that information around the marine protected area. But when you do, often the protected area was put in, because there was a major fishery stock was depleted, and something different had to happen, that business as usual, wasn't allowing the stock to recover. So, one thing they could do was put in a fully protected area. And the fishermen got that. They have in many parts of Ireland; fishermen have voluntarily tried to not fish in certain areas. But that needs to be followed up, by enforcement and government regulation, right, you don't want somebody coming in and taking advantage of it. So I think there's many reasons why it didn't happen. It's probably also because people don't put in protected areas without any thought. And you know, there's, you have a fishing community, and others realise we need to be brought on board. So, with within the reserves in New Zealand, the people who most support them are often current and former fishermen because they see the benefit. And also they don't want anybody else cheating. Yeah, nobody likes to cheat. And that once they see the benefits over a few years, and they realise, well, actually, it's probably a benefit to them. And there's some online videos, which are very good from fishermen talking about, oh, I didn't know what this was all about. And I was like all against it. And then they put it in anyway. And oh, actually now I'm very happy about it, because I'm benefiting from it.

Denis  17:55

So if you share some of those video links with us, we'll put them up with the podcast itself, because I think it might be interesting to get the perspective of the fishermen themselves. And are there other potential economic benefits from designating marine protected areas, not just in terms of the fisheries.

Mark  18:17

So the second Marine Protected Area they put in in New Zealand, was at the Poor Knights’ Islands, which Jacques Cousteau boasted as one of his top 10 favourite dive sites in the world, as protected areas, But then they allowed sport fishing, because they thought sport fishing won't do any harm. But because you created a protected area with no commercial fishing, it attracted sports fishermen from all over the world, they've done exactly the same here in Norway, just up the coast from me. And the place is completely littered with hooks and lines and lead weights, and it's a complete mess underwater. And everyone regards it as a terrible problem. The local people and scuba divers are all up in arms about it. But it's because they again allowed it, they actually have a commercial fishing camp right in the middle of the protected area. So, there's more fishing inside it that there is outside. And it's because the protected area then becomes a magnet for those few fishermen who see it as an advantage for themselves. So, I think that type of tourism was it was a really bad idea. 

 And so in New Zealand, the local tourist operators then campaigned to have no fishing in the area and that was approved within a year or two. And that's been the situation with all the marine reserves in New Zealand. Think they've got 48 of them now, which are fully protected areas, no fishing areas, and most of them were created not because of scientific knowledge, but because people wanted them people saw one or two here. They said, this is pretty good. Why can't we have one two, and they will go home to their towns and have a little discussion about it and make a campaign but generally it takes about 10 years to create get one created so they don't happen overnight either. And I think the other tourism benefits in the paper I published we did find many examples of tourism benefits like the Great Barrier Reef and some of the Philippine Indonesian protected areas, which have massive tourism benefits, but infrastructure needs to go along with that which hasn't happened here in Norway. where we are, so a lot of the locals are complaining about sewage pollution and littering and not enough toilets for camper vans, and all the all the usual camps. And that happened in New Zealand, the first one as well. And the biggest cost actually of a protected area, was putting in the public toilets. As a government politician, you probably know the cost of infrastructure is unbelievable. So, I think if you are, if we are going to look at tourism benefits, then the infrastructure has to come in behind that, to minimise its impact. And the other solution in New Zealand was to have more marine reserves, so that you could tell the tourists go to these other places to reduce the pressure on one place. 

 Denis  20:35

But if you take the likes of New Zealand, Indonesia, maybe to a lesser extent, and Ireland, they already have a very large tourism footfall international tourists coming in. And this is something additional to add to the offering. And I think it is interesting that you should be looking at the onshore infrastructure to complement the designation offshore. But what about some of these countries where there isn't that infrastructure in place at the moment, and the tourism opportunities there for them. And coming back to the conversation we've just had in relation to climate change, you know, if along the equator and the oceans close to the equator, that we're seeing less fishing, a lot of these are countries that are very reliant on fish exports. The indigenous industry is very reliant on fish for processing. So they're losing that potential income, they're losing a livelihood as a result of that, is there an opportunity, then looking at some of those areas to introduce marine protected areas there and develop that that tourism offering?

 Mark  21:51

Yeah, and in fact, I would say those countries are ahead of us, in many cases. The Philippines and Indonesia, where we had many students working in those areas, they have, they have hundreds and hundreds of marine protected areas. And many of these are because the local people want to take ownership, the coastal community wants to take ownership of what's in the sea around them. So they want fully protected areas and partly protected areas. They don't want big trawlers coming in from China and Korea and other countries and dredging into the areas which had been happening and still happens on occasions illegally. So it is partly protecting their own resources. And people there know what's going on, you know, they live, they've lived with fisheries in nature, they're really a very marine people, perhaps even more than most people in Northern Europe, so they really understand what's going on in the ocean. And they often had indigenous, traditional practices of no fishing areas, for different reasons, cultural sometimes, or there was a death of somebody in the area, so they wouldn't have fishing there.  

I was in Indonesia a couple of times. And one of the ways they've developed it there is that if a hotel wants to put in an infrastructure, it has to be completely self-sufficient just of its own freshwater sewage treatment to levy to the local village. So, when I was a tourist and I would visit there, I would put money, I would have to pay a small kind of a local community tax that went to the local village and the village chief would take that. And he would give it out to their local committee to the local people on a kind of a social benefits sort of arrangement, as I understood anyway. So, I was quite impressed at how they were doing that very sustainably, and no little piece by little piece. But of course, you still have the problems, as you know, complaints about big foreign owned hotels coming in and things like that. I think Indonesia has been a little bit smarter, because they've been coming a little bit later to the game. They don't haven't suffered some of the problems like in the Mediterranean and places. But both countries mean they really get the idea of protected areas. And a friend of mine has been going there for decades. He's one of these people that's crazy about fish. He has described many of them in beautiful photographs, and things, but he says within 20 minutes, you go to a local village, you say, you know, we're an environmental organisation, we're here to support nature conservation, we can support us establishing fully protected areas. And he says within minutes people say, oh, yeah, we like that. But how do we go about it? How do we get it enforced? How do we get to the tools to deliver on it?  And then we go to other places. They'll say no. Go away? We don't want to talk?

 Denis  24:15

Yeah, look, I think it's the same in every part of the world. Thanks Mark, thanks very much for giving us an insight into these marine protected areas. I have one final question for you moving away from the specifics to a more broader question. And that is what we're trying to do here is trying to pitch this to policymakers and decision makers in different parts of the world to give them an insight into, you know, science of what's happening out there and how it can help to develop policy. But are there any tips that you would give a politician or a civil servant that wants to engage with science or wants to benefit from scientists? How would you advise them to go about reaching out to start that engagement, any tips that you'd give them?

Mark  25:03

Yeah, I envy their job because they're under pressure from so many sources in the universe, lots of immediate human issues as well as we all do. But I would say no, keep asking the good questions. So, what's the evidence for that? Because even within science, I come across scientists who believe things, and I say, well, like, where's the evidence that like, all this talk about ocean acidification as the ocean really going acid? No, it will never go acid, never has, but the pH is dropping. But it's not dropping in any way that's going to affect marine life, except in a laboratory setting. So, there's all sorts of little things that creep into the popular narrative. And that you sort of say, “hold on a minute. Where's the evidence for that one?” And if you ask for evidence of ocean warming, there's lots of it, you asked for the evidence. That's why I published his paper on marine protected areas to list all those 40 or 50 papers that showed benefits from being protected areas. And I thought that was quite powerful. Because at the start, I thought I might have a dozen or so, and maybe another dozen showing the contrary, but I couldn’t find any to the contrary. So, I think you just keep looking for the evidence, like it's one of the things I find interesting in the popular media as we get such just fascinating details about sports statistics and financial things, which I'm completely can't understand, you know, certainly my pension funds and things. We don't we don't do the same thing with a lot of the scientific information. Well, why isn't the science reporting and why? Why do the popular media think people can't understand science? Of course, it can make them learning sciences primary school now. So, I think the media underestimate the public's ability to understand science, including medicine, and the same with politicians. We should, we should just ask for that evidence and then figure it out the best you can. 

Denis  26:45

I think that's a good piece of advice to ask for the evidence. And I guess the justification for it. Can I say thanks to you, Dr. Mark Costello, for your time on the Science4Parliament podcast today and giving us your perspective on the marine protected areas. And as always, if listeners have any questions or queries, they can email me at Denis.Naughten@oireachtas.ie. And you can listen to all the episodes of the podcast on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So until the next time, thanks for listening