§ Sue DoughtyTo ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs what action the Government are taking to monitor the damage caused to sea beds by beam trawlers; and if she will make a statement. [27162]
§ Mr. MorleyThe Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (CEFAS) has studied the impacts of beam trawling on different sea bed habitats in the North and Irish seas since 1993 and compared these impacts with other sources of disturbance in the marine environment.
Beam trawling effort is patchily distributed. Most beam trawling takes place in relatively shallow areas with relatively high levels of natural disturbance, and where the sea bed is, to a certain extent, resilient to the effects of the gear. For example, the sandy sea beds of the southern North sea are continually disturbed by tides and wave action, and most of the animals living there are already adapted to cope with disturbance. In these areas the effects of beam trawling on the sea bed are hard to detect, and recovery of areas that are trawled will usually occur in less than one year.
In deeper water, where there is usually less wave and tidal action, beam trawling could have a proportionally greater effect, and recovery of the sea bed will take much longer. However, beam trawls are not widely used in these areas.