Hi all,

My name is Seán Lynch. I am the only person in Ireland to graduate with one MSc in Coastal & Marine Environments and another MSc in GIS & Remote Sensing. This is my first post on Steemit and I look forward to sharing more knowledge and information with this community soon :-)

The reason for this post is because a company in Ireland has been issued a licence to mechanically extract 1,860 acres of native kelp (seaweed) forest in Bantry Bay, west Co. Cork recently with no public or stakeholder consultation and no Environmental Impact Assessment. I wanted to publicise some knowledge about why we should encourage and engage in proactive research before decisions are made and licences are issued to harvest our natural and important ecological resources. As a researcher, I feel this decision is a slap in the face to the years of hard work put into proactive environmental research which is being entirely overlooked and many people in the community are visibly fearful for their generational livelihoods. I look forward to feedback and criticism. If you would like to support the local people, I have linked a website and petition at the end of the article. Please sign and share it :-)

" MSP / ICZM / EIA - Out the Window in Bantry Bay"

The case for proactive research before Coastal & Marine Decision-Making (in West Cork, Ireland)

Seán Lynch
MSc Coastal & Marine Environments
MSc GIS & Remote Sensing
BA Geography & Economics
Developer, Diver

The oceans of our only habitable planet are essential ecosystems for the survival of life that provide a diverse suite of ecosystem services to humans including adding value to economic growth that represented a contribution of an estimated €1.4 billion to Irish GDP including employing 18,500 Full-time equivalents in 2014 (Marine Institute, 2015) and about €500 billion to the annual EU economy (European Commission, 2017). Ecosystem Services are the services that nature provides to humans for free, eg. fresh air, clean water, food, carbon sequestration, the list goes on.

“Blue growth” i.e. the sustained and inclusive development of coastal and marine territory is expected to undergo significant economic development in this generations lifetime and provide additional value to economic recovery, general well-being and livelihood. In order for this growth to be sustained for current and future generations, proactive research is needed to ensure that this is done in a responsible, sustainable, fair and balanced manner that is inclusive of the competing needs of multiple different stakeholders. Failing to address or engage with scientific investigation has resulted in dramatic and irreversible economic and ecosystem collapse. For example, in 1992, the collapse of the Canadian Cod fisheries (Fig. 1), once renowned as the world’s most productive fishing grounds, was devastated by incompetent mismanagement of overly-efficient and largely untested new technology that almost immediately put an estimated 40,000 people out of work resulting in a multi-billion dollar emergency relief package for coastal communities and a 2-year moratorium on fisheries that is still in place today, over 20 years later. This “ecoside” could possibly have been avoided, if management had engaged with and took the advice of academics and respected the natural stocks ability to respond to industrial harvesting and better understood the potential for “tropic cascade” (Fig. 2) caused by removing an integral and/or indirect component(s) of an ecosystem(s) Fig 1. “Canadian Fisheries Cod Collapse” – 40,000 people out of work in 1992.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/Surexploitation_morue_surp%C3%AAcheEn.jpg

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MSP / ICZM / EIA - Out the Window in Bantry Bay