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| The Blackwater Estuary is one of the areas scheduled for protection under the Marine Bill
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The government this week launched its long-awaited Marine Bill which aims to protect Britain's seas and marine life by creating a single regulatory authority for all aspects of inshore waters.
This was a manifesto commitment at the 2005 general election, and the apparent delay in formulating legislation had been criticised by both business and environmental groups.
The White Paper shows that ministers plan to create protected areas, improve the regulation of inshore fisheries - and ease planning for offshore industry. This is expected to help not only those wanting to develop windfarms, but also the infant wave and tidal power generation industries.
Environment groups, who have been campaigning for a bill like this for more than five years, have generally welcomed the White Paper. The bill now goes out for consultation with the aim of legislation next year.
"Protecting our seas is one of the biggest environmental challenges after climate change, and the two are closely linked," said Environment Secretary David Miliband.
"The proposals in the Marine Bill White Paper are a first for the UK, and would raise planning for the management and protection of our seas to a world-leading level."
The bill would create up to eight new Special Areas of Conservation, preventing fishing in important spawning grounds for fish and dolphins, protecting cold coral reefs in north-west of Scotland, and locations in the North Sea where methane seeps from the sea floor, sustaining communities of worms and other organisms.
Protected areas can bring benefits to the fishing industry. The UK's only "no-take zone" around the Isle of Lundy has been a huge success: local shellfish populations have recovered from their overfished state even faster than environmentalists forecast.
If the White Paper proposals are accepted, companies wanting to exploit non-protected zones of the sea would find fewer obstacles to progress than at present.
"There is a lot in the Marine Bill White Paper that we are excited about," said WWF's campaign director Paul King. "It is a vital tool for restoring our seas to good health, and it is now crucial that the government introduces legislation in the 2007 Queen's Speech if it is to meet its national and international targets on biodiversity and climate change."
Those targets include the commitment, made by every government signed up to the UN biodiversity convention, to halt the global loss of biodiversity by 2010.
An estimated 44,000 plant and animal species live in the waters around Britain's coastline - about half the country's entire biodiversity. And many have been threatened by the dumping of sewage at sea, and other forms of marine pollution, as well as by dredging and over-fishing.
A healthy marine environment is also essentialto fighting climate change, because the sea absorbs large quantities of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.
Marine parks or conservation zones as envisaged by the bill will have varying degrees of protection, including total bans on human intrusion - except to sail through the areas.
Initially the protected zones will be within the 12-mile national limit, but ministers hope in future to extend them to a 200-mile limit, if and when agreement is reached within the European Union. At the moment, beyond the 12 nautical mile limit there are European laws that cover Britain's seas - for example, the Common Fisheries Policy - and it is not yet clear how the new Marine Bill will fit in with them.
Responsibility for coastal waters has grown up, piecemeal, over hundreds of years. The Crown Estate owns nearly all the seabed out to the 12 nautical mile territorial limit, including the rights to explore and utilise the natural resources of the UK Continental Shelf (excluding oil, gas and coal).
The Energy Act 2004 gave rights to the Crown Estate to licence the generation of renewable energy on the continental shelf within the Renewable Energy Zone out to 200 nautical miles - although the revenues no longer go to the Queen.
"If you want to apply to build an offshore wind farm, at present the system is hugely complicated," said Sharon Thompson from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which has a keen interest in the White Paper because of the birdlife that depends on the sea.
"Not only do you have to lease land from the Crown Estates, you also have to get a license from the DTI, and then Defra have to do an environmental impact assessment.
"What this White Paper is proposing looks pretty positive to us - to have one organisation responsible for planning, licensing, fisheries and enforcement."
"In the same way that the Climate Change Bill is the first legislation of its kind in the world, so the Marine Bill would give the UK the first co-ordinated marine law in the world." says the Environment Minister, Ben Bradshaw.
"All the historic regulatory authorities will be merged into one regulatory body, which will have powers of planning and protection.
It will provide a simplified and strategic approach to deciding what goes where in the sea. It will also simplify the process of getting offshore windfarms agreed."
The government is taking the opportunity of the Marine Bill to create eight new areas of special protection. These are locations that ministers are required to protect under the EU Habitats Directive, as they are of European importance.
But Melissa Moore, senior policy officer at the Marine Conservation Society, says the key part of the White Paper is the government's intention to introduce highly-protected designated areas of national importance as well, which sometimes do not get European protection.
There should also, she says, be a category of highly-protected marine reserves - areas of the sea where all damaging or potentially damaging activities are excluded.
But she is keen to see the government translating this policy White Paper into legislative action.
"We are pleased that we are one step closer to a Marine Bill for our oft-neglected seas," she said. "The Cabinet now needs to show that its environmental agenda extends to our seas and allocate a slot for the Marine Bill in the next parliamentary session."
