At the 2012 IWC Annual Meeting in Panama the Scientific Committee and Conservation Committee agreed to hold a joint intersessional specialist workshop on marine debris and cetaceans in 2012/13 in order to better understand impacts, to provide a forum for compiling relevant data and ultimately to generate a series of applied, science-based management actions.
Subsequent discussions between the Scientific Committee workshop convenor and the Chair of the Conservation Committee have revealed that the scope of work is such that it would be difficult to achieve in a single workshop. Instead a two stage process is planned, with an initial scientific preparatory workshop tasked with developing recommendations to feed into a second workshop, to be held in 2014, which will develop management actions.
The primary aim of this first preparatory workshop is to develop tools that will allow us to determine quantitatively whether or how marine debris is affecting cetacean populations and how best to monitor and mitigate for these effects.
Documents
Documents for this workshop can be found here
