Requirement R020

Requirement detail

Some industry bodies have produced national level assessments, for example the Marine Aggregate Regional Environmental Assessments (MAREA) in the case of the aggregate industry, which aims to provide a strategic view of future marine aggregate extraction activities and their potential cumulative and in-combination effects to ensure that individual dredging permissions are suitable informed. This is incorporated into licensing applications which allows efficiencies for both MMO and industry. Further work with other industries is required for improvements and savings to the marine licensing process.

Other industries could be:

• Subsea cabling
• Local councils
• Fishing industry
• Ports and harbours
• Renewables
• Flood defence

Development of methods to better describe social and economic outputs from fishing effort/landings for fishing vessels and allocate these to marine space. This is required to link fishing activity with the social and economic benefit that accrues from it.

Presently the MMO collects and publishes data in relation to commercial fisheries and landings. This data covers:

• species caught
• landed weight
• fishing gear type
• port of landing
• vessel nationality
• vessel length
• catch value
• catch location (ICES rectangle for over 10 metre vessels, ICES area for under 10 metre vessels)

As such, this dataset is detailed and covers all commercial fish landings. Though as noted we do not have complete spatial data on the catches of under 10 metre vessel catches.

Recreational fishing (sea angling) has some limited data collection, though this is not linked to spatial activity information, which is less available than for commercial fishing and is derived from surveys.

There is a requirement to look at methods of improving the linkage between the data available on fish catches and the data available on where fishing activity takes place. This requirement is for further work to improve this linkage, through developing and testing new methods, but also potentially by looking for new sources of data, or making suggestions to improve current ones.

The Environment Agency consults the public on certain applications for waste operations, mining waste operations, installations, water discharge and groundwater activities. The arrangements are explained in its Public Participation Statement

These notices explain:

• what the application is about
• how to view the application documents
• when you need to comment by

The Environment Agency will decide:

• whether to grant or refuse the application
• what conditions to include in the permit (if granted)

Requirement R020

Requirement detail

To better understand how activities including but not limited to fishing, transport, energy, and recreation influence the ongoing functioning of the marine environment by exerting physical or chemical pressures.

Evidence on how activities influence the ongoing functioning and capacity of the marine environment is limited. It is important that this knowledge is improved to support the development of policies for the English marine plans, and to better assess licencing applications to ensure they maximise the sustainability of the environment.

At present, marine licensing is undertaken on a first come, first served basis except where marine plan policies provide a steer. In order to deliver sustainable development, consideration of environmental carrying capacities is required to allow effective prioritisation of projects within the limited capacity.

This work would seek to establish a methodology to identify areas most likely to be at risk from exceeding environmental capacity.

This work should focus on a case study area and include:

• analysis of activities currently taking place including any likely increase or decrease in activity which will influence the pressure they put on the environment’s carrying capacity and any associated thresholds
• identify and test approaches that can be used to measure environmental sustainability and support the marine planning and marine licensing process

Sellafield Ltd has to monitor beaches close to the Sellafield site to check for radioactivity. This beach monitoring programme is a condition the Environment Agency imposed on Sellafield Ltd when it issued them with an environmental permit.