Partial Business and Regulatory Impact Assessment - Amendment of the West of Scotland Nature Conservation Marine Protected Area (NCMPA) site boundary

Rationale for Government intervention

Scotland’s marine environment provides a wide range of social, environmental and economic benefits to people. Some of these benefits are direct and tangible, for example fish for human consumption or tourism and recreational opportunities. There are also other less tangible benefits such as the important role that different species and habitats play in nutrient cycling and climate regulation.

Protecting our natural capital supports the services provided by healthy, productive and biodiverse marine ecosystems, including building resilience into marine industries and strengthening food security. The Dasgupta review on the Economics of Biodiversity highlights that our economies, livelihoods and well-being are all dependent on nature, including the marine environment^[1].

By protecting defined areas of Scotland’s marine environment, MPAs provide a significant number of supporting services. These services are the foundation for all other ecosystem services. Perhaps most significantly is the support that these services provide for provisioning services, such as the protection of features, which in turn provide habitats for larval and juvenile life stages of marine species^[2]. The potential management measures for the proposed MPAs could increase the level of several provisioning services. Gubbay (2006) noted positive species community effects such as greater complexity of food webs and increase primary and secondary productivity in MPAs as a consequence of protection.

The capacity of the marine environment to continue providing these benefits to people in Scotland is at risk due to market failures:

Public goods - Many of the benefits associated with the marine environment have ‘public good’ characteristics, which means they are non-excludable (no one can be excluded from enjoying the benefits) and non-rivalrous (enjoyment of the benefits provided to one person does not diminish the benefits available to others). These characteristics mean that private individuals do not have the incentive to ensure the continued flow of these benefits, which can lead to their under-provision in the absence of any government intervention.

Externalities - Externalities occur when the actions of an individual leads to benefits or costs to others that are not accounted for in market prices. The environmental damage from marine users’ activities is often unaccounted for in the price of the goods they sell (e.g. wild fish). This means that these marine users do not have the incentive to internalise the full social costs of their actions.

The Scottish Government has a long-term commitment to ensure the sustainable management of the marine environment. Looking after the seas require a range of different management approaches to ensure that society can continue to derive the many natural benefits that our seas provide. MPAs have an important role to plan in supporting this commitment. They enable the focused protection of habitats and species which are essential to the marine ecosystem. Beyond the benefits provided for nature conservation, these areas facilitate an increase in ecosystem resilience and recovery^[3].

The marine space is subject to a variety of regulation aimed at managing these goods appropriately. The original West of Scotland MPA designation aimed to address these market failures, however, the current site overlap where the UK Economic Exclusion Zone (EEZ) extends beyond the UK continental shelf limits and onto the Special Area and Faroese continental shelf means that Scottish Ministers do not have exclusive management competence within this overlap. This creates rationale for government intervention to amend an error in the original site designation and to ensure appropriate management measures be implemented to further the conservation objectives of the site.