Allocate more investment to research and actions to protect blue carbon and decarbonise the fishing industry
Additional funding could come from the Nature Recovery Fund, which needs a minimum of £100 million over the next parliamentary term to keep pace with inflation, though significantly more is needed to reverse nature loss.
There is now sufficient information to support effective practical actions to protect key Scottish blue carbon habitats and minimise the impact of the fishing industry. This funding should support action to:
- Restore habitats like seagrass beds and saltmarshes.
- Research and monitoring of blue carbon dynamics.
- Add seagrass and saltmarsh to the Greenhouse Gas Registry for tracking and monitoring emissions.
- Undertake full cycle assessments for each fleet segment.
- Protect of upper sealoch sediments by introducing targeted spatial management restrictions on damaging mobile seabed-impacting fishing gears.
The most important of these habitats are at the heads of our fjordic sea lochs which sequester large amounts of organic terrestrial carbon, washed out by rivers. The paper ‘Carbon burial in the mid-latitude fjords of Scotland‘ sets out the scale of the carbon sequestration and storage in our sea lochs, stating, “it is estimated that Scottish fjords bury 84,000 tonnes of [organic carbon] annually, which is equivalent to the whole North Sea sedimentary system, despite the area of the latter being approximately 190 times larger”. Additionally, Scotland’s forgotten carbon lists the most critical fourteen sea lochs from this perspective and notes that “Scottish fjords are a more effective store of [carbon] than the terrestrial environment”, and that “fjord sediments are potentially the most effective store of [carbon] globally”. Crucially, securing these most important seabed areas does not require the closure of the whole of those fourteen sea lochs to trawling. As Sources, Sinks, and Subsidies: Terrestrial Carbon Storage in Mid-latitude Fjords indicates, the relevant areas for closure can be established within each sea loch.
Despite clear policy commitments in Scotland’s Blue Economy Vision, as well as the obligation under the UK Fisheries Act 2020 to meet the climate change objective that ‘the adverse effect of fish and aquaculture activities on climate change is minimised’, progress towards decarbonising the fishing industry has been negligible. A vital precursor to any progress on this issue is to understand the current extent of fisheries emissions and to establish detailed baseline data. However, apart from the pelagic sector for which a Life Cycle Assessment of 11 vessels in the Scottish pelagic fleet was undertaken, there are limited detailed analyses of greenhouse gas emissions at vessel level.
For more information:
- Action for Blue Carbon: Protecting the marine environment to support action on climate change, Stop Climate Chaos Scotland, 2025