The global moratorium on commercial whaling reached its 40-year mark in January, during which time it’s been credited with helping Earth’s largest creatures recover from centuries of hunting pressure.
The moratorium went into effect in January 1986 following a 1982 vote by member countries of the International Whaling Commission. Though a few countries have continued to hunt whales using legal loopholes, the vast majority of the world’s nations have stopped.
“The ban has literally saved the great whales from extinction, and is one of the most important
global conservation measures ever implemented,” Clare Perry, a senior adviser with the Environmental Investigation Agency’s ocean campaign, told Mongabay in an email. She called the passage of the ban “the defining moment in the IWC’s history.”
The IWC was formed in 1946 and is celebrating its 80th anniversary this year. Perry said it started as a “whaler’s club” made up of the 14 biggest whaling nations at the time; today, it has 88 members. The commission sets whaling rules and coordinates conservation of the roughly 90 known species of whales and dolphins.
Commercial whaling was already declining by the 1970s as overexploitation depleted whale populations. Regulations and consumer preferences had also shifted. Some national fleets had halted operations even before the moratorium was enacted.
The 1982 vote got the three-quarters majority required to pass. Japan, Norway and Iceland opposed the moratorium and are the only countries to conduct commercial whaling since the late 1980s.
The IWC doesn’t have enforcement authority, so “if parties don’t follow it, there’s not much that can be done,” Erich Hoyt, co-chair of the marine mammal protected areas task force at the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, told Mongabay in an email. However, in 2014 Australia won a case against Japan’s Antarctic whaling program at the International Court of Justice. Perhaps partly due to the verdict and international pressure, Japan, which had joined the IWC in 1951, withdrew in 2019 and stopped its Antarctic program. Its fleet continues to hunt whales in Japanese waters.
Today, targeted exploitation is less of a concern than fisheries-related mortality and ship strikes.
“Fishing gear interactions of all kinds, leading to bycatch as well as entanglements, are the main threat against many species of whales and dolphins,” Hoyt said.
Kate Wilson, the IWC’s communications manager, told Mongabay in an email that, “Bycatch and entanglement are the biggest threat to cetaceans today and [are] estimated to kill more than 300,000 animals every year.”
Ship strikes are harder to quantify, given that some whales killed this way never resurface again. However, it’s well-known that slower, surface-feeding whales such as humpbacks (Megaptera novaeangliae) are the most often hit, Hoyt said.
The IWC, based in Cambridge, U.K., has taken a proactive role in whale conservation, establishing programs to reduce fishing-gear entanglements and the accidental catch of whales and dolphins.
Banner image: A humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) off Western Australia. Image courtesy of Dani Escayola/Ocean Image Bank.
This story first appeared on Mongabay
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