Please note: This video was one of a number of presentations from the webinar, and in order to allow each video to be watched individually, they all have the same 30 second introduction to provide the required context. If you have already seen this introduction in another video from the webinar, please skip to 0:31.
Read the video transcript:
The subject of the webinar today is animating the carbon cycle. It really explores the very important link between biodiversity and climate. And the goal of this webinar is to launch a new global initiative to launch nature and climate, and set the first global target for restoration and rewilding to address this accelerating climate breakdown.
Our next speaker is Henri Brocklebank. And Henri has been working in locally based nature conservation in Sussex in the UK, for 20 years. She’s the director of conservation policy and evidence at the Sussex Wildlife Trust. She is a collaborator. She’s the chair of the get this. Help our kelp partnership. What a great name is that, eh? And she’s really been working with them to revive the kelp forest off the coast. She’s going to present now on this very work.
And so, Henri, thank you very much. Okay. Thank you very much. And a fascinating event. Thank you for inviting me. So, I’m going to be talking about a very specific example about rewilding of Sussex seas. So, just for the benefit of the audience, Sussex is in the southeast of England, so you might have heard of Brighton and Hove. This is the area that I’m talking about. So it’s the coast of West Sussex, and I’m going to be talking about kelp. So I’m going to start off briefly with, what is kelp? So, kelp is a group of large brown seaweeds. They can form dense forests, and they are amongst the most productive and diverse ecosystems on the planet. I have no doubt that many of you would have seen fantastic films and footage of the giant kelp in California and Tasmania, South Africa. In.
In our Sussex context, it’s a different species of kelp, but it, as a family, there’s about 14 different species. They’re found in the temperate waters of the world, all across the world. Now, kelp is what’s known as an ecosystem, engineer it. By its very structure, it generates diverse ecosystems, so much like a forest or a woodland. You have canopy, you have understory, you have forest floor, and even the holdfasts themselves are ecosystems in their own right. All the different species that are finding shelter and protection in those niches that it provides. And in doing so, in providing all this shelter, it’s obviously a nursery ground for juvenile fish, which is so important. And in our kind of man-made perceptions, actually, nursery for juvenile fish is also nursery for commercially important species of fish, which, in Sussex, we have fisheries and also for shellfishes.
So kelp is also really important habitat for lobsters. Additionally to this and the ecosystem services provided by kelp. It can provide a natural coastal defence, which for our Sussex shoreline on the English Channel is really important to us. As you can see, our towns come right up to the sea, and, of course, it is a really important carbon conveyor belt. It’s different from blue carbon, from those rooted habitats like salt marsh or mangrove. It’s a different process because kelp grows up, it draws down carbon very fast, but then as it breaks down, it moves into the deep sea or it moves into the ecosystem.
Now, that giant kelp in California, for example, is close to deep sea trenches. It’s quite a different scenario in the English Channel, but globally, there’s an estimated 600 million a tonne, 600 million tonnes of carbon drawn down a year by macro algae globally. But there is more to this has been explained. So kelp is a catalyst for bio abundance and biomass and a catalyst for diversity, so that we can have those healthy trophic levels that have been referred to by other speakers and really importantly, that resilient food web. It is, for us, our ultimate nature-based solution. Now, within rewilding, there’s often talk of shifting baseline syndrome. So if I look at Sussex Marine life, you know, 200 years ago, our boats were so heavy with fish, they could hardly be landed on the beach. Now, I think we. Personally, I’m a bit desensitised by all the baseline where 200 years ago, it was all so good. But actually, this really disturbs me in the 1980s. So, just a couple of decades ago, the kelp forests off the Sussex coast was so dense that fishermen had to stop their engines and row across the kelp forest for ten to 15 minutes to get past the kelp before they could row their engines. So we know from divers records where that kelp was.
This is a map of where the kelp was all along the west Sussex coast. And this is a very generous map of where it was in 2019. And all this time, the sea has been looking beautiful. We stand on our beaches, we’re very proud of our Sussex seascape. We stand on our beaches and go, oh, this is gorgeous. But we’ve been putting in wind turbines, we’ve been paddle boarding, sitting on the beach, lobster potting, fishing, but most critically, we’ve been trawling and we’ve been trawling in this near shore habitat. And by dragging that heavy fishing gear across the seabed, we’ve been drawing out and preventing those ecosystems from restoring themselves naturally. So the way we refer to it is that that Sussex kelp forest has been out of sight and out of mind. And that is how we have lost 200 square kilometres of a critical ecosystem from our Sussex waters. So, in come the Sussex inshore Fisheries and Conservation Authority. They manage fisheries in the near shore, so that’s within six nautical miles of the Sussex coast. They are responsible for creating bylaws for fisheries, and they took, for the first time ever, a natural capital approach to developing a local near shore bylaw.
Now, the area in red here, I’ll just put my cursor over this area here, is the area that they proposed to exclude trawling from, so that the kelp would have a chance to regenerate. And there’s the area there, and it is no longer a proposed trawling bylaw eight weeks ago. It is now a trawling exclusion bylaw for those west Sussex near shore waters. So, Sussex IFCA is a statutory body and is obviously limited to what statutory bodies can do. So we, as Sussex Wildlife Trust and our colleagues in the help harsh kelp partnership, decided we were going to back this with everything that we had to make sure that this bylaw and the regeneration of the kelp is as successful as it could possibly be. So, with grateful, grateful thanks, David Attenborough got involved, narrated a fantastic film about the Sussex Kelp, about the bylaw. I don’t think there’s ever been a film made specifically about a bylaw. But as a result, two and a half thousand people responded to the IFCA process to say how much they wanted it. And many, many local organisations, national organisations, wrote to the secretary of state going, please, please make this bylaw happen as soon as possible.
So now, as a result, we have a bylaw, we’ve got active supporters, we have a science group of south coast universities, strategic stakeholder holders and enthusiastic public. So when you look at the key principles to rewilding, people are key. This is a massively populated coastline. Size matters. It’s 200 square kilometres plus. If you think about natural processes, we’re encouraging succession. And in doing so, what we’re doing is limiting the man-made disturbance on that environment. And rewilding. Britain described rewilding as a marathon with the sprint start, and we are most definitely in that sprint start at the moment. So we’re at the start of our journey at the moment. We’re benchmarking and putting together the research. That’s our absolute priority.
We’re telling the story every step of the way. So the Sussex kelp will no longer be out of sight and out of mind. And for us, we want to celebrate the un decade of ecosystem restoration with the restoration of Sussex Kelp. Thank you.
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