Recent efforts to resolve an impasse at the International Whaling Commission (IWC) have come up very short. The proposed compromise released recently by the IWC fails to respect both the 1994 declaration of the Southern Whale Sanctuary as well as their 28-year old moratorium on commercial whaling.
The Southern Ocean, the environmentally sensitive waters around Antarctica, must be respected as off-limits to any whaling today as well as 10 years from now. It is extremely disappointing that this proposed compromise validates Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean.
Many thousands of whales are no longer killed each year because of the moratorium, one of the major victories of the environmental movement and conservation-minded governments. However commercial whaling continues by Japan, Iceland and Norway under the guise of science or in disregard for the moratorium, and will continue with the proposed compromise.
There are numerous threats to whales today, ranging from pollution, ship strikes, bycatch in fishing gear, underwater noise, to industrial fishing and climate change and these are greater than they have ever been in the past. For two years the member countries of the IWC have been negotiating to find a way forward, to solve the whaling problem and address the many threats to whales across the world’s oceans. The result of these negotiations released recently do not go anywhere near far enough to achieve those goals.