Posts Tagged ‘Climate Change’
Whales, trees and butterflies – how we’re giving a voice to the ocean at COP26
I’m in Glasgow representing WDC, Whale and Dolphin Conservation at COP26, the UN’s 26th climate conference. This is the first time WDC has attended one of these and it’s because we have something important to say – we desperately need the world to wake up and listen to the ocean, for without protecting it, we…
Read MoreSave the whale, save the world – because our lives depend on it
Carl Sagan famously called our planet a ’pale blue dot’ when he saw the first images of it taken by the Voyager 1 space probe from 4 billion miles away. It appears blue because almost three quarters of it is covered in water. The ocean is our greatest natural asset and our biggest carbon sink,…
Read MoreOne world ocean – why we need to think globally and act locally
On World Ocean(s) Day let’s remember that there is only one ocean on our world. All the water flows through one connected system and this was illustrated to me when I was on an expedition in Greenland. Oceanographers were finding chemical fallout from nuclear tests carried out in Russia in the early 1960s. It had…
Read MoreSave the whales, save the world – convincing governments that whales will help us fight the climate crisis
Whales and dolphins are awesome. They are intelligent, self-aware, socially complex and they need and deserve our protection. But, did you know they are also our allies in fighting the climate crisis? As we begin a new year with hope and optimism, we’re thinking big like a whale and setting our ambitions high. Help save…
Read MoreWhaling: an inconvenient truth – the hunters are not only killing whales, they are killing us too.
As we hope for an end to the coronavirus crisis, we should reflect on another existential threat – the climate change – a threat which is advancing even as we isolate ourselves at home to protect one another. One has to hope that the selfish approach of some governments to the pandemic will come to…
Read MoreEU Commission asked to do more to tackle climate change
EU Heads of State have taken the unprecedented step of asking the European Commission to propose policy options to tackle the impacts of climate change on the ocean. The move represents a significant step forward for the protection of the marine environment, and in making the ocean more resilient to face the inevitable changes it…
Read MoreFinancial worth of whales revealed
Policymakers and economists at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have placed a substantial value on the benefits of having healthy whales in the ocean. The report looks at the economic benefits whales provide to industries such as ecotourism, and also the environmental benefits (such as how much carbon they remove from the atmosphere by absorbing…
Read MoreInternational scientific congress talks whale poo
Whale poo and its contribution to marine productivity and climate change mitigation will be part of the agenda of the 28th International Congress for Conservation Biology, which opened July 23 in Cartagena, Colombia. Scientists will consider how a range of eco-friendly services provided by whales could underpin conservation decisions made by large organisastions that determine…
Read MoreWhales could help save Arctic Seed Vault
Recently, Norway announced that the entrance to the Global Seed Vault in the Arctic was flooded after very high temperatures caused the permafrost to melt. The vault, a storage facility deep inside a mountain on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, is designed to preserve the world’s crops from future disasters. The store holds seeds from c.5,000 crop…
Read MoreManaging or Recovering Leviathan
Is it time to reframe the conversation? A recent article published in Oceanography by Dr. Phillip Clapham is entitled Managing Leviathan: Conservation challenges for the great whales in a post-whaling world. In the article, Dr. Clapham reviews the history of modern whaling (i.e. industrial, commercial whaling) and its removal of nearly 3,000,000 whales in the 20th Century alone, reducing some…
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