World Oceans Day 2021

Virginia Crosbie Excerpts

Tuesday 8th June 2021 Westminster Hall

[Virginia Crosbie (Ynys Môn) (Con)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship Mr Hosie. It is a pleasure to speak in this important Westminster Hall debate on World Oceans Day. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby) on securing this important debate and on her excellent speech. As we are an island constituency, we on Ynys Môn understand more than most the importance of our healthy oceans. Healthy sea waters are critical to fishing and agriculture businesses such as Holyhead Shellfish, and vital to our tourist trade, with operators such as Seacoast Safaris taking visitors to see the dolphin, porpoise and seal populations that flourish locally. Our island waters are clean enough to support breeding seahorses at Anglesey sea zoo.



When we are considering how our oceans can help us achieve our net zero targets, there is a focus on renewable marine energy production, such as that being developed by businesses like Minesto and Morlais based on Anglesey, but in this year of COP26, we should also be focusing on the contribution that blue carbon can make to achieving those targets.

Blue carbon is the carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere by our ocean ecosystems. Anglesey is rich in a range of marine environments, including salt marshes, sand dunes, mudflats and areas of seagrass. All are significant sequesters of carbon. Large stretches of coastline in areas such as Cymyran, Newborough and Aberffraw are prime examples of these diverse landscapes. We host two marine protected areas in the Menai strait and the Anglesey coast salt marsh. Groups such as the Friends of the Isle of Anglesey Coastal Path actively clean, monitor and protect our coastline and it is extensively used by the School of Ocean Sciences at Bangor University for study and research. Using their knowledge and experience, we can preserve and rebuild these critical resources so that they can contribute to our 2050 targets.

At least 113 million tonnes of carbon are already stored in the top 10 cm of the Welsh marine environment, which equates to almost 10 years’ worth of Welsh carbon emissions. It represents more than 170% of the carbon held in Welsh forests. It is even estimated that the amount of carbon sequestered by the Welsh marine environment every year is equivalent to the average annual fuel consumption of 64,000 cars. That carbon is held in a number of different ways, but it has been shown that salt marshes have the highest carbon burial rate per unit area compared with other blue carbon habitats. Studies also show that intertidal mudflats and seagrass foliage account for much higher rates of carbon sequestering than previously thought. For example, seagrass covers only 0.1% to 0.2% of the global ocean floor, but is responsible for between 10% and 18% of the total carbon storage in the ocean.

However, the Blue Carbon Initiative, which includes representation from Bangor University, estimates that, worldwide, between 340,000 and 980,000 hectares of coastal blue carbon ecosystems are being destroyed annually. It is vital that that trend is reversed. Natural Resources Wales has recently carried out extensive restoration of sand dunes in Newborough and it actively monitors areas such as the Cefni salt marshes. Such projects, which restore intertidal and shallow subtidal habitats and protect the features that allow them to flourish, would yield the greatest per unit area benefit in terms of increased carbon sequestration.

I urge the UK and Welsh Governments to take account of the contribution that can be made by our marine environment towards neutralising our carbon emissions, and encourage them to invest in extending, enhancing and improving these critical but fragile environments.