Two billion reasons Tassie needs its own Marine Protected Areas

2 BILLION REASONS TASSIE NEEDS ITS OWN MARINE PROTECTED AREAS
Fishing Won’t Boost Fish Stocks – More MPAs Will

The Tasmanian Greens welcomed today’s Centre for Policy Development report, Preserving Our Marine Wealth, which puts the economic value of the newly-expanded National Marine Parks’ ‘ecosystem services’ and the previously unrecognised benefits Australians receive from them at more than $2 billion.

Greens Environment spokesperson Cassy O’Connor MP said this independent report is yet more evidence that Marine Protected Areas (MPA) are a win for marine life and a win for the fishing industry.

“Tasmania’s fishing industry would better off if Tasmania had no-take Marine Protected Areas for the very reason that there would be more fish protected and more fish for the future. This should be recognised as an economic benefit for the State,” said Ms O’Connor.

“To quote the CPD directly, ‘Studies show that marine parks in particular provide long-term benefits to both commercial and recreational fishers. These fully-protected zones result in larger fish and more biodiversity – they act as restocking areas for the surrounding waters, and make fish stocks more resilient in the face of environmental shocks’ [1].”

“The idea that ‘not being able to fish everywhere is bad’ is simply short-term delusion which doesn’t serve anyone’s interests in the long term while Marine Protected Areas demonstrably do.”

“But instead of Tasmania being included in the world’s largest network of marine parks announced recently by Federal Environment Minister Tony Burke, our marine life and commercial and recreational fishing sectors have been left out and left vulnerable to a range of threats, including over-fishing.”

“Instead of leaving Tasmania’s marine life, as well as commercial and recreational fishing sectors, exposed and vulnerable, the Greens are calling on Minister Burke to include Tasmania in the marine parks network and to back our calls to turn back the supertrawler Margiris while he’s at it.”

“It’s bad enough that Tasmania was largely overlooked under the new expanded MPA network, compromising our priceless ‘clean, green’ brand, but it’s even worse that we could be the home base to the biggest, most voracious supertrawler in the country.”

“The Greens are saying ‘send back the supertrawler’ and calling for the establishment of no-take MPAs in Tasmania, because both are common-sense ways to protect our marine life and protect our local human-scale commercial and recreational fishing sectors at the same time,” said Ms O’Connor.

[1] Ref: CPD media release: ‘Analysis Finds Marine Parks Protect $2bn per year in Economic Value’, June 27 2012

Map: Newly-expanded MPA network: