The Wildlife Trust’s Living Seas
The UK Wildlife Trusts’ ambition is to lead the way towards a healthy, productive and wildlife-rich future for UK coasts and seas. This work focuses through the Living Seas vision, which centres on four themes:
- Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) and wildlife
- Fishing and seafood
- Marine planning and sustainable development
- Legislation and policy
The Alderney Wildlife Trust’s Living Seas
The programme aims to follow the Living Seas vision, yet adapted to suit the island. This is due to Alderney’s unique island status, geographical location, local governmental designations (with the island owning its own territorial waters within 3 nautical miles) and regional governmental links (Channel Islands, France and the UK).
The programme first aims to support existing, future and potential strategies and projects with similar objectives associated to the conservation of the island’s marine environment and beyond. This comprises of projects undertaken by the AWT, other regional and national governmental bodies (such as The States of Alderney, Bailiwick of Guernsey, The States of Jersey, France and the UK) and organisations (i.e. Sea Watch Foundation).
In particular, this includes supporting:
- The Alderney Ramsar site management strategy.
- The Alderney ‘Living Islands’ Project (including the Puffin Cam initiative Living Islands: Live).
- Future and potential marine protected areas (MPA’s) planning and application.
- Potential local marine renewable energy development planning, research and assessment activities.
- Marine conservation awareness and education.
- Other local, regional and international based marine conservational activities. This includes: fisheries issues, climate change initiatives, policy and legislative designations (i.e. Convention of Biological Diversity).
- UK wide Living Seas projects (i.e. Petition Fish/ marine conservation zone (MCZ) campaigns).
The Alderney Wildlife Trust’s Living Seas Programme will secondly focus on the island’s marine species and habitats. This part of the programme will develop a range of marine ecological assessments, to advance current ecological knowledge and public awareness of Alderney’s marine species and habitats. Ecological assessments will be reviewed and updated annually, to incorporate new developments (i.e. coastal development plans), projects and research within Alderney’s waters and beyond.