International Whaling Commission

The International Whaling Commission meeting 2016 has just come to a close. Delegates from 64 countries spent a week discussing and debating whales, in Potoroz, Slovenia.
Greenpeace’s international team was there, and here’s a quick roundup of what happened.

Big news for a little porpoise.

Something big just happened for the tiny vaquita porpoise at the International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting. The diminutive porpoise was the subject of a resolution, passed by all the countries present, urging concerted international cooperation to save the species from extinction.

Bad news from the 2016 International Whaling Commission meeting – as the first significant vote was another disappointment for whales and supporters of conservation. Despite getting a majority of votes in favour, the proposal to create a South Atlantic Whale Sanctuary did not pass, because it was short of the three-quarters majority needed.

Killing whales for food has been happening for millennia. But it was commercial whaling – turning whales into barrels of oil for profit – that led to the wholesale destruction of most of the world’s populations of big whales.

Commercial whaling devastated the world’s biggest whale species, pushing some of them to the very brink of extinction in the early to mid 20^th Century. Whaling for meat, oil, or whalebone was not a new idea, but new explosive harpoons and industrialised factory ships plundering the seas for whales had an even more catastrophic impact than what had come in centuries before.

It was the realisation that catches were declining that led to the creation, by whaling nations, of an organisation that would become the ‘International Whaling Commission’ (IWC).

Delegations from global governments, and representatives from NGOs are currently on their way to Slovenia for the biennial meeting of the International Whaling Commission meeting – so here’s a quick synopsis of what to expect from the meeting:

Being a porpoise looks rubbish.

Dolphins look like they have fun. They even look like they seek out fun. Okay, the fixed grins make them seem perpetually happy but let’s be honest - when was the last time you saw a porpoise jumping out of the water or heard a friend gushing about an *amazing* experience seeing porpoises?

There’s good reason that porpoises don’t have the wow factor of dolphins: and it’s not just that they have bad PR people.

The contentious thing at this year’s International Whaling Committee (IWC) annual meeting wasn’t whaling, but bizarrely it was the issue of ‘consensus’.