Belinda Bramley

I think what I see working in the UK is community-led efforts, particularly from individuals that have an investment in that marine space, be they fishermen, be they recreational fishers, tour operators, local businesses that depend on the ocean.

Perhaps, but our communities are tired, I think, as they are across Europe of inaction by government.

So we've designated these areas, but really they're just lines on the map.

We haven't put them into operation with resourcing and we never consulted our communities about where those protected areas should be in practice.

So, yeah.

Because they don't have the resources.

So an MPA, in my mind, is a living being thing.

It's about people doing jobs, performing ranger activities, educating the public about why this area is special, why we need to look after it, helping local stakeholders understand the rules of the MPA.

And then you're setting...

You're basically trying to protect something from something.

So we've already heard about compounding pressures on the marine environment.

We've lost a lot of nature because we've over harvested.

We have pollution.

We have climate change.

We have multiple pressures.

The job of an MPA is to remove us and our pressures from an area so that nature can get back to what it would have been done like without those pressures.

we would like marine protected areas to be seen by fishermen as friends of them and their activities because scientific evidence has shown time and again that if you take pressures away from marine life and you stop fishing in an area,

then the species grow larger, the populations can recover, the big old fat female fish produce disproportionately more larvae and eggs, and you get a richness comeback and a spillover.

And so even though the area that the fishers can now fish in has shrunk, there's more fish in the sea.

That's a fair problem.