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.
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