Members of the 88 IWC member governments are gathering in Lima, Peru for the organisation's biennial meeting.

Approximately 400 delegates are expected to participate in the week-long meeting which will tackle a busy agenda, with progress to report on programmes ranging from scientific fieldwork and population assessments to management advice, threat mitigation and capacity building.

An important agenda item at this year's meeting is Aboriginal Subsistence Whaling. This type of whaling is not conducted for profit but to meet nutritional and cultural need of communities, often in remote, Arctic regions. In 2018, new measures were introduced to improve and support the Commission's handling of aboriginal whaling quotas. These new measures will be used for the first time at this year's meeting. 

The central principle of the new process is that quotas will extend in automatic, six year blocks if three conditions are met:

• quotas do not change 
• the Scientific Committee advises that these quotas will not harm the whale stock
• the Commission determines that the ASW governments have complied with the agreed timeline and the information provided represents a status quo continuation of the hunt.

The Commission will also receive progress reports and future work plans from each of its six sub-committees. New areas of work have also been proposed with five Resolutions tabled on topics ranging from commercial whaling to alignment with other international or biodiversity-related organisations. A proposal for a whale sanctuary in the South Atlantic Ocean will also be discussed.

In addition. the Commission will tackle complex governance issues related to quorum and the relationship between financial contributions and voting rights. A new, best-practice approach to financial management was endorsed at the last Commission meeting in 2022 and means that any proposal for new work must be fully costed.  In the current financial climate, budgetary discussions will inevitably be challenging but the Commission is committed to achieving a balanced budget and the long-term stability necessary to continue the IWC's broad and ever-evolving programme of science, management and conservation.

Transparency and accessibility are important to the IWC. The plenary sessions are 23-27 September and you can watch them on the IWC YouTube channel or read a daily meeting report on this website.