Many wildlife sites round the British coast enjoy little or no protection from overfishing, pollution and damaging development, a report says.
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) lists 58 important seabird habitats, from the far north of the Shetland Islands to the Isles of Scilly, which lack proper conservation and management.
Announcing the society's Marine Life campaign, Barbara Young, head of the RSPB, said: "Successive governments have been unable or unwilling to confront the problems facing the marine environment, despite a clear international legal duty to do so. The seas have suffered decades of neglect and mismanagement."
In "Seas: the Opportunity", the RSPB estimates that about seven million seabirds, including gannets, shags, great skuas, Manx shearwaters, guillemots and puffins, depend on the waters round Britain for their survival. Important populations of dolphins, porpoises and basking sharks also live there.
More than 90 per cent of the global population of Manx shearwaters breed in Britain and Ireland, chiefly on Rum, off western Scotland, and on Skomer and Skokholm, two islands off southwest Wales. The British Isles are home to 61 per cent of the world's gannets, 58 per cent of its great skuas and 20 per cent of razorbills, according to the RSPB.
Patricia Bradley, a marine biologist who is head of the RSPB's aquatic unit, said: "The sea and the coastal environment have had a raw deal from the point of view of conservation. There is no marine equivalent of the many designations that now exist to protect land sites."
The 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act provides for the creation of Marine Nature Reserves, but so far only two have been designated, around Skomer and Lundy Island, off north Devon.
Among the sites the RPSB wants protected are Flamborough Head, Liverpool Bay, Morecambe Bay, the Solent, Poole Bay, the Moray Firth, the Minches (the channels between Skye and the Scottish mainland and the Outer Hebrides) and Cardigan Bay.
The RSPB says the Government should propose these sites for protection under the European Community's habitats and species directive and seek agreement on the routing of oil tankers away from such sensitive areas.
