BRITAIN is planning to set up a string of marine conservation areas where commercial fishing will be banned up to 200 miles from the coastline.

The proposals for what could become marine national parks will appear in a white paper to be published this week by Ben Bradshaw, the fisheries minister.

He will announce that Britain will extend the areas covered by conservation legislation from 12 to 200 nautical miles from the shore.

Once the proposals have become law, a powerful new Marine Management Organisation (MMO) will designate the zones in which all fishing and other “extractive” activity, including oil wells, will be banned.

The organisation would oversee fisheries, planning, conservation and other marine policies, enforcing conservation measures through a network of satellites, aircraft and fisheries protection vessels.

The aim is to create areas where creatures ranging from tiny corals and shellfish to the largest basking sharks can flourish, recreating the complex food chains that have been destroyed by industrial fishing.

“This is the biggest change to marine law in a century,” Bradshaw said. “It will at last enable us to manage our seas properly, including protecting marine life, while allowing development where appropriate.”

His move will be greeted with enthusiasm by conservation groups. A study by the Marine Conservation Society warned that industrial fishing had turned swathes of the seabed around Britain into a lifeless desert.

A spokesman for the society said Britain was “way behind” countries such as Australia, which has turned 200,0000 square miles of the Great Barrier Reef into a “no take” zone where fishing is banned. New Zealand has 28 such protected zones, while the United States has established dozens along both its Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

As an interim measure, Bradshaw will announce eight new “special areas of conservation” (SACs) within the 200-mile zone; but he will not have the power to ban fishing in these until the bill has been passed.

There are already 63 SACs but all are close inshore. The new ones will be larger and further out to sea, including areas such as the Dogger Bank in the North Sea, the North Norfolk Sandbanks and the Darwin Mounds coral reef off northwest Scotland, where trawling is already banned by the EU.

Fishermen are dismayed. Jim Linstead, chief executive of the Eastern England Fish Producers Organisation, predicted that the new agencies proposed by Bradshaw meant there would soon be more civil servants than fishermen. “Marine reserves will be a disaster for the fishing industry,” he said. “Eventually we will be unable to enter the reserves, banned from the windfarms and left unable to make a living.”

To head off the European fishing lobby, Bradshaw argues that his power to extend conservation areas derives from the European birds and habitats directive, which was issued in 1989 and has so far only partly been enacted into British law.

Many of his proposals will be controversial, especially a plan to give sea anglers a stronger role on the sea fisheries committees that manage local fisheries. These have been dominated by commercial fishermen but Bradshaw has decided to change this in recognition of the fact that leisure angling has become a more important source of revenue for many coastal communities.

He is also proposing a “light touch” licensing system for marine development, aimed at making it far easier to obtain planning permission for wind turbines.

“We want to see far more offshore wind farm developments,” he said. “Britain needs new sources of renewable energy and offshore wind is going to be very important.”

Wind farm developers are already drawing up plans that could see thousands of turbines stretching up the North Sea from the Thames estuary to northern Scotland.

Cloned wild cats give new hope for endangered species

Scientists have cloned two litters of two of the world’s rarest wild cats, heralding a new era in conservation. Skin cells from an African wild cat and from a sand cat were cloned using eggs from a domestic cat at the Audubon centre for research of endangered species in New Orleans. The embryos were grown to maturity using another domestic cat as a surrogate mother.

Researchers there have decided that cloning and other reproductive technologies could be the only hope of survival for many endangered species.

“We are collecting skin cells from as many endangered species as we can,” said Betsy Dresser, professor of conservation biology at the centre.

“We are freezing them in liquid nitrogen so that if they die out in the wild we will always have a sample of their DNA that can be used to recreate them. The samples should be viable for hundreds or even thousands of years.”

Dresser’s frozen zoo will feature in a BBC Horizon programme, The Elephant’s Guide to Sex, to be shown next week.

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