Representatives of the U.K. fishing, aquaculture, and offshore wind industries came together at the 2024 Responsible Seafood Summit to offer a shared message: The government needs to be a partner in their efforts to collaborate and coexist.
Elspeth Macdonald, CEO of the Scottish Fishermen's Federation, said that fishing and offshore wind are already working well together to share space in the ocean and that both industries are eager for the government to play its role in helping them collaborate effectively.
“A frustration we feel in our sector is that the government has a lot of plans and a lot of strategies, but they don’t join up very well,” she said. “There is a national marine plan for Scotland which has been around since about 2015, and it reads well, and it sounds nice, but it’s almost impossible to deliver because it promises the world to everybody.”
Meeting the simultaneous space needs of the wind, aquaculture, and fishing sectors is not always possible since some uses cannot physically occupy the same spaces, she said.
According to the panelists, the industries need the government's help to agree definitively on who is allowed what space.
“We are getting into some quite difficult decision-making territory at the moment between energy and food production. Government can’t just feel that it doesn’t have a role in actually resolving some of these tensions and helping us work our way through them,” Macdonald said. “Neither of our industries wants to be to the detriment of the other. The government has to step into this space.”
SSE Renewables Commercial Fisheries Manager Fingal McKiernan agreed, pointing out that offshore wind developers don’t choose where the government will grant lease areas and that his company tries to strategically bid on sites that are not disruptive to key fisheries. But, he said, government intervention is the missing piece in the equation.
“It does sort of feel that the notion of coexistence that everyone keeps talking about with fisheries and offshore wind is very linear – that it’s up to fisheries and offshore wind,” he said. “I think it should be a triangle approach. We should change the optics, and that third party needs to be the government. We need a holistic approach to development.”
The problem is not lack of industry engagement in the issue, he said.
“There’s a huge number of working groups and workshops going on to try and create a solution to the strategy, but they’re not necessarily coordinated; we need to streamline that,” McKiernan said.
Ultimately, it is the government, McKiernan said, that should be driving these inquiries and collaborations, not the industry members who don’t have decision-making power.
“Key decision-makers [from the government] need to be involved in those groups because they're going to be the ones that make the policy change,” he said.
Salmon Scotland CEO Tavish Scott said the aquaculture industry in Scotland is lamenting the fact that while the industries have copious amounts of data that could be useful to government planning, they often don’t have a way to share that data.
Scott said the industry does intensive water testing on Scottish salmon farms that can offer a lot of insight, but the government isn't using that data.
“A lot of very bright young marine biologists are employed by the industry … [and] can tell instantly and in real time what's happening in the water column in lots of different parts of Scotland,” he said. “Now, that's information that governments simply don't have.”
If that science could be used to monitor water around turbines, he said, that would be useful to the aquaculture industry, as well as to the government when it decided on space considerations.
“We have information about what is happening at sea all the time. I think that’s a tremendous resource. It’s obviously commercially really important for us in terms of how we look after our fish,” Scott said. “But it’s also, I would have thought, of great interest to the government because it’s a source of data and knowledge and what’s happening.”
Scott said that the topic has left him to wonder whether “government [is] investing enough in science and the right kind of science to help government make great policy decisions for all of us.”
Despite the competition for space between industries that use the water, Macdonald, McKiernan, and Scott were hopeful that information sharing could allow sensible decisions to be made that would keep each industry growing. This information sharing will be especially important as conditions at sea rapidly evolve.
“We obviously want to be doing this spatial planning on the basis of evidence about what we know now and also thinking about how things are going to change in the future,” Macdonald said.
She said that one of the greatest concerns for her organization was highly migratory species like mackerel and herring, which “are really important stocks for our fleet.” Fishers don’t have property rights to their fishing areas, and they need to be able to move as stocks and their locations evolve, she said.
“The distribution [of these species] will change as our climate changes and as our seas warm,” she said.
Planning for the dynamism of the future will require a variety of experts and stakeholders to come together, according to the panelists, and the industry can’t do it alone.
“We really have to try and think about how you do marine spatial planning that is flexible for the future and not just going to work for today because the conditions that we will see in 30, 40, or 50 years time will probably be very different from those today,” she said. “I appreciate that that is a big ask. It’s very difficult. But, I think there is a danger of just doing what is the right thing now, and we do need good investment in science and evidence.”
