Placing people at the heart of environmental decisions

Academic Spotlight: Dr Siân Rees

“I work on environmental issues – but people are at the heart of everything I do. Every one of my projects involves research on the connection between human wellbeing and nature. As far as I’m concerned, if we do not explore the multiple ways in which nature provides value to people and build that into environmental decision making then we will not bring about lasting change.”

Dr Siân Rees ' perspective on the best ways to engage people with the environment around them has not been developed overnight. For more than two decades, she has been working as a social scientist involved in environmental projects. From the fishers of Lyme Bay to the surfers of North Devon, the inhabitants of St Helena and the residents of inner-city Plymouth, she has developed research to surface the many ways in which nature supports lives and livelihoods and build these perspectives into environmental decision making.

Her CV is testament to the success of such an approach. Major projects at home and abroad compete for space with ongoing work that is influencing local, national and international policies. And the tried and tested skills she, and colleagues at the University of Plymouth, have developed over many years are in increasing demand.

Taking a step back, however, Siân’s love of the great outdoors has been evident since early childhood. Growing up in landlocked Wiltshire, many holidays were spent on the coast of North Wales with her parents and grandparents. While other children dangled buckets off harbours in the hope of landing a crab, Siân added another dimension – she would mark a caught crab’s shell with her mum’s nail polish before releasing it, to test whether she was catching the same animals day after day.

A similar process was followed on local beaches.

“I can remember painting pebbles at low tide, and making a note of their location on the beach,” Siân says. “I would then come back the following day and see whether the tides had moved them. Looking back on it now, I guess you could say the power of nature had already captured my interest.”

As a keen dinghy sailor, Siân swapped the North Wales coastline for the inland flooded quarries of Gloucestershire to teach outdoor education.

“Many of these children had experienced significant hardship in their lives. Teaching sailing skills enabled me to experience first-hand how – when people connect with nature – it can not only provide new skills for recreation but also fosters a deeper human resilience which supports wellbeing.”

Such interests led to Siân enrolling to study Marine Geography in Cardiff and, completing that, she came to the University of Plymouth in 2002 to do a Masters in Coastal and Ocean Policy. The two programmes opened her eyes to the importance of people, and policies, in protecting the marine environment. However, her first foray into the world of conservation management arguably gave her the perfect grounding in some of the challenges that she might need to overcome.

Employed after university by the Devon Wildlife Trust, her first role was working with local communities on the beautiful River Dart.

“Those were memorable days,” Siân recalls, “and it was such a privilege to connect with fishing and farming communities who were so invested in protecting the wildlife across the whole river catchment – from its source on Dartmoor and out to sea.”

Her second role at the Trust was, however, significantly more challenging. As part of a marine planning project for Lyme Bay, she was also tasked with working with its fishing community to develop the evidence base to conserve the reefs and other sensitive species, notably the pink sea fan.

“There was such tension with some fishers vociferously challenging the need to close the reef to fishers using trawls and dredges which damaged the reef ecosystem. I would come away from every meeting thinking it was impossible,” she says. “There were opposing views held, but at the heart of the matter I could see that we had all lost sight of any commonality – particularly the value of nature – and how the reefs support lives and livelihoods in multiple ways”

A short while later, the Lyme Bay Marine Protected Area (MPA) came into force, the first of its kind, protecting around 200 sq km of the English Channel seabed from bottom towed fishing gear. The decision to implement the MPA rested not only on the ecological importance of the reef and its associated species, but also evidence of the social and economic opportunities associated with the protection of the reef.

Siân, now back at the University and working towards a PhD on the value of marine conservation, was part of the team monitoring the legislation’s effectiveness. Ever since the MPA had come into effect, the recovery of the reef ecosystem had been monitored. It is a process that continues to this day, and sees researchers from the University working directly with the area’s small-scale fishing communities. Siân’s research on the social and economic impacts of the designation ensures that Lyme Bay is now held as an exemplar of MPA management.

Such successes led Siân to further develop her research on the social and economic dimensions of MPA management in other parts of the world. Her research in the UK Overseas territory of St Helena, supported through the Darwin Plus programme, has enabled the management plan for a new large Marine Protected Area in the south Atlantic. In 2017, she became part of the South West Partnership for Environment and Economic Prosperity (SWEEP), a £5million programme funded by the Natural Environment Research Council. Her role in the programme involved pioneering work into how best to measure – and make use of – a concept called natural capital.

“Everything in society has a value, but it doesn’t always have to be expressed as a monetary one,” Siân says. “So as our marine ecosystems have become degraded, the value they provide has not been accounted for. The approach we developed is a way to represent that value in decision making. It can reflect the economic value of an area, or a habitat, but value can also represent the intangible benefits people gain from the environment around them, whether that’s clean air or enhanced biodiversity and wellbeing.”

Through the SWEEP project, Siân – working alongside academics and communities – was able to develop and refine the first method of measuring the status of natural capital in a marine area and using it to influence decision making. The findings have since been applied effectively in North Devon, where it was integral to the region securing World Surfing Reserve status in 2023, and influenced a byelaw to prevent harmful trawling activity on seabed habitats in both Sussex and the Isles of Scilly. The marine natural capital approach is currently being applied as part of the £7million Stronger Shores project designed to reduce the impact of flooding and coastal erosion using nature-based solutions in the North East.

All of these projects involve staff and students from the Marine Social Science Research Unit, which Siân leads, and which sits within the University’s world-leading Marine Conservation Research Group. This Unit is transforming how the value of the marine environment is embedded in national and international policy, in particular setting ambitions for UK marine conservation, developing new decision-making tools and making the high-level connection between the conservation of deep sea ecosystems and human rights.

Such a focus has seen Siân contribute to briefings from the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST), work to shape parliamentary understanding of Blue Carbon, and co-author a major biodiversity report by the British Ecological Society. The Lyme Bay project was mentioned extensively within the 2020 Benyon Review, written by former Defra Fisheries Minister Richard Benyon, which explored how Highly Protected Marine Areas (HPMAs) could be introduced, and was also cited within the UK Government’s 25-year Environment Plan. Additionally, her research formed the scientific basis behind the Ocean Recovery Declaration – otherwise known as the Motion for the Ocean - which has been adopted by more than 30 councils in England, and encourages them to take the ocean into account in planning and decision-making at a local level.

This research and impact has led to Siân becoming the Marine Champion for Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Local Nature Partnership and an adviser to Defra’s marine Natural Capital and Ecosystem Assessment programme, the European Commission, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) on the United Nations and NERC as a member of the Advisory Committee and the UKRI Environmental Data Service Oversight Group.

In November 2024, she was also nominated to serve as a lead author with the Secretariat of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and its emerging Multi-Year Assessment on Monitoring Biodiversity & Nature’s Contributions to People.

Working alongside 100 other experts across the world, she will be tasked with identifying the most effective means of monitoring global biodiversity. As well as taking into account ecological, financial and other considerations, the assessment aims to incorporate diverse knowledge systems, including Indigenous and other knowledge, to ensure local and cultural aspects are taken into account. It is something Siân has been passionate about all her life.

“When I was very young, my dad was posted all over the world for his work,” she says. “We lived in the Middle East and travelled to amazing places including the USA, Seychelles and Kenya. I spent a lot of time meeting local kids on the beach and playing. It’s given me a lasting appreciation of the fact that people make use of and enjoy the ocean in so many different ways.”

“As an adult, I still play on the beach and in the ocean and am fortunate through my work to travel and meet so many diverse coastal communities. I now have a deeper understanding of the ocean as an essential resource providing the air we breathe and the food we eat. I also acutely understand its vulnerability to human driven pressures. I hope my research underscores the value of marine ecosystems as something we simply can’t live without.”

Marine Social Science Research Unit

Our inter- and transdisciplinary team provides expertise in applying social science research methodologies to directly inform marine environment governance at international, regional, national and local scales.

We are changemakers and impact-focussed, co creating and delivering robust social science research in partnership with statutory nature conservation agencies, sea users, NGOs, government departments and international organisations to support the sustainable and fair use of marine ecosystems.

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Sustainable Aquaculture and Fisheries

At Plymouth, a broad perspective on aquaculture and fisheries management is enabled by our transdisciplinary, systems-thinking approach embraces.

From the health and nutrition of farmed fish, crustaceans and bivalves, to marine conservation, fish tracking, habitats and natural capital, our research explores how all of these diverse elements help contribute towards responsible marine and freshwater food production, and, in doing so, how they support coastal economies and contribute to the national food security agenda.

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