Annual General Meeting 2024

Seasearch is going from strength to strength, with our millionth species record due in 2025. This citizen science programme is of huge importance both to the Charity and external stakeholders, with its 35-year (and growing) dataset of marine habitats and species diversity contributing to marine management plans, policy and conservation work (including identifying MPAs, MPA boundaries, and fisheries management measures to ensure sites meet their objectives).

Looking forwards, we want to build on this legacy and our plans include growing the volunteer network, improving volunteer communication and engagement, streamlining volunteer accreditation for a better experience, and working with the Seasearch community to identify efficiencies in data entry without compromising data quality.

We offer a variety of citizen science activities which can be carried out anytime and anywhere that suits you! These can be viewed on our volunteering page.

We're keen to expand our offering, so are trialling new citizen science activities through locally-based projects, like assessing oyster habitats on the Firth of Forth. We'll then look at the role they might play nationally before extending them further.

For Beachwatch, our beach clean and survey activity, we've created online training videos which can be viewed at any time on the website as well as a series of virtual training sessions, where members of our team will walk you through how to organise your own beach clean. Or if you just want to help out, go to find a beach clean and join one near you.

For a different way to get involved, register with the Ocean Voice volunteer programme to help as a media spokesperson, community presenter or (coming soon!) events volunteer. These roles are a great way to share your passion and the work of the charity in your local area, no matter where you live.

And if you're not near the coast, you could organise a Source to Sea litter pick in your local community.

No matter where you live or how much time you have, we'd love you to take part in any way you can.

Our Beachwatch programme encourages volunteers to organise or join a beach clean in their area, collecting litter from beaches and recording what they find. This includes plastic litter pollution that has come from the sea or is about to end up in the sea.

Through our Source to Sea litter picks, volunteers can help prevent plastic waste from reaching the ocean in the first place.

Funding dependent, there is often equipment available to support local organisers with running their cleans and you can contact beachwatch@mcsuk.org for more information.

It's heartening to see bluefin tuna returning to our shores again after the population collapsed in the early 1900s.

Conservation efforts have now brought the resurgence of these charismatic creatures but we must be careful; overfishing led to the population's initial decline, and we must ensure that doesn't happen again.

We must be cautious of reopening commercial and recreational fishing without adequate monitoring of activities at sea and the Marine Conservation Society is continuing to meet with UK governments as well as fisheries to advocate for the adoption of management strategies that honour the fragile balance of our seas and respect this iconic species.

Bluefin tuna are a magnificent sight and hopefully one that is here to stay in the UK with our support.

We're working with our EU partners, Seas at Risk, and partners in the UK, like the RSPB, to try and get this ban introduced. This is from a nature point of view, rather than a fishing opportunity and business point of view. Like us, the EU has obligations to recover our seas – the challenge is around the trade and co-operation agreement, and ensuring it doesn't forget its own duties to nature.

We've been working for years to push for the improved monitoring of the sewer system in order to identify the problems in the network that need to be fixed and improved. While monitoring has improved for stormwater overflows in England and Wales, we need that extended to emergency overflows.

Scotland has many fewer stormwater overflows monitored but here, we have succeeded in helping push for commitments for that to be improved. The way the system is managed needs to be transformed and that's why we're working hard to ensure the new UK Government's commitments for improving water management in England and Wales are taken forward.

Through the Water Special Measures Bill, we're pushing for a system that ensures there is mandatory monitoring of all sewage overflows by 2030 (stormwater and emergency); for monitoring to include the volume of a discharge; for there to be a legal duty for spill reduction plans to be implemented; and for there to be no exemptions for reporting on emergency overflows.

In short, we're working to ensure the current law is fully enforced, and laws are improved so that new laws must have plans published and implemented.

The Marine Conservation Society now sits on the global action group, UN Decade for Ocean Science Ocean Acidification, looking at solutions to this issue. The work we already do to mitigate the impacts of climate change, from stopping effluent into our seas to restoring habitats and ending overfishing, are all part of the suite of solutions we're actioning to address ocean acidification.

In all likelihood, mining will have negative impacts on our seas as we've already seen on our coasts and ocean from other extractive activities. Disruptions in an already fragile ecosystem are unlikely to have positive effects.

We're working on commitments, like those in Scotland, to move towards a more circular economy. This reduces the need for new mining activities by recycling old products to get the rare earth minerals for new technology instead. This is cheaper, and if done correctly, less damaging to the environment.

Alongside this, making decisions on what activities should be permitted at sea, including but not limited to mining, requires effective spatial planning. We must therefore ensure effective spatial planning allows for responsible decision-making that protects and restores our ocean, especially in the current biodiversity and climate crisis.

Our seas are facing climate and biodiversity crises, partly fuelled by the single-use plastic problem. We've got to switch to using more sustainable products, and UK governments need to do more to bring in legislation that bans single-use plastic being produced.

We would encourage everyone to avoid any single use plastic when possible - reusable and refillable options will help us move towards a more circular economy where nothing is wasted or leaked into our precious ocean.

We're delighted to share that this year two big milestones have been reached in projects in which we are partners for reintroducing European flat oysters in Scotland.

Over 100,000 have now been reintroduced to the Dornoch Firth in the northeast of Scotland north of Inverness through the DEEP project, led by Glenmorangie Whisky Company and Heriot-Watt University.

The WWF-led Restoration Forth project has reintroduced over 30,000 oysters to the Firth of Forth, with a survival rate above 85%! Every single oyster was hand cleaned by students, project staff, and volunteers to whom we'd like to say a huge thank you. This project won the RSPB Scotland/NatureScot Nature of Scotland Awards Coasts and Waters Award this year, which is a great achievement.

In other areas, seagrass density in Cawsand Bay, Plymouth increased by 212% after we replaced damaged traditional moorings with Advanced Systems, and will be recovering more seagrass with Advanced Mooring Systems in Wales through the Natur am Byth! project. We've already put 20,000 oysters back into Milford Haven through this project too, with many more to follow.

Met Office data shows offshore surface temperature: (although note that many offshore buoys are being redeployed).

Scotland's Environment Web, and National Marine Plan Interactive, also have many data layers.

We have worked with the community of the Hebrides and Scottish Wildlife Trust on a designation there for basking sharks. This is because the numbers of basking shark sightings off the Hebrides has dropped to an all time low, although there are still around 20,000.

In short, they're not doing brilliantly. We need to do more.

In Scotland, there's a whole range of new sites being consulted on which expand the network of Marine Protected Areas across the UK, so there is some progress there.

We know Wales is delaying its Marine Conservation Zones, but is looking to the active management of its existing sites.

England doesn't seem to be designating any new ones, but is being pushed very strongly by us to protect and manage its sites better.

There is appetite from the government to increase our renewable energy, which, of course, we need to do to tackle climate change.

But we must ensure this avoids the most sensitive habitats and species. This is why we're working with the government to try to achieve a nature positive marine planning system where we meet net zero targets, without putting the risk onto our already declining wildlife.

We have a healthy level of membership at the moment and numbers can fluctuate on a daily basis. Like many charities, we haven't seen growth in membership over the last five years, however we have increased our recruitment and reached a steady retention rate of 87% over the past year.

We're prioritising members as a key audience – membership donations provide a large portion of our income and our members play a key role in advocating for our charity by adding weight and influence to our campaigns and appeals, and volunteering for us.

So, we're continually looking for ways to grow and nurture our members so they feel truly valued, including by improving our communication with them and launching the new and improved digital members' magazine.

We offer a range of opportunities for growth and development through our volunteering roles including community presenters, media spokespeople and events volunteer roles (coming soon!), for which you can receive training.

No, we don't.

Diversity and inclusion is something which is absolutely central and integral to everything that we do. Our recruitment process of trustees, and of staff and volunteers, seeks to ensure a good representation of society. This is done at each step, from identifying the skillsets we need to achieve our strategic ambition, through to the advertisements and interview process.

We have a board champion in this area as well, and we're also very proud to have two young trustees and an ambition to include very young supporters within our trustee work as well.

It is very difficult. We do have a section on our forms where volunteers can report if they're seeing anything that is very clearly from a different country but most of the time it's quite hard to determine this.

Litter is a global issue, which is why we work with countries all over the world to tackle it. Whatever we put in the ocean ends up in someone else's country as well – that's why we try and share our data far and wide.