Archives for June 2009

At the International Whaling Commission annual meeting in Madeira:

On Thursday night, while IWC delegates and officials were having a much-needed drink or seven in the bar after the meeting closed (some of them have been corralled here for four weeks), I had a sneak preview of the latest weapon in the war of emotions over whales and dolphins.

The makers of The Cove set out to lay bare the dolphin hunt of Taiji, a small town on Japan's south-east coast.

The hunt - in which boats drive dolphins into a bay, where they're penned in and many of them later killed - has long been a major issue for some animal welfare activists.

With this film this group wants - quite overtly - to end the hunt.

To circumvent the fences and barriers blocking access to the eponymous cove, the film-makers used techniques worthy of long-term anti-whaling campaigner Pierce Brosnan in his 007 guise - running over town in the dead of night in camouflage, hiding cameras in fake rocks, and gaining the assistance of champion free-divers who can hold their breath longer than most of us can imagine.

So we are led by the hand around into the concealed cove where the dolphins are killed - 23,000 per year, if the film-makers' statistics are correct - where we see hunters stabbing the animals to death with spears, half-dead dolphins swimming crazed across the bay with flesh trailing where flesh is not meant to be, and the waters running red with dolphin blood.

Revealingly, we also see that for the hunters, this is normal life. We hear them chatting on the beach before the killing begins; we even see one of them relaxing with cigarette in hand, leaning back against a dead dolphin on a boat's deck.

The Cove makes a health-based case against eating dolphin meat on the grounds that their flesh contains dangerous levels of mercury. It will also make difficult viewing for anyone who has gazed enraptured at the feats of captive dolphins in pleasure parks; according to the film-makers, the majority of those animals are extracted from their home environment right there in Taiji.

It also makes an emotive case against the IWC, with the film's central figure, former dolphin trainer Ric O'Barry, and Sea Shepherd chief Paul Watson denouncing the organisation as toothless and ineffective, and images from IWC meetings that would make you think they are all about insensitive Japanese delegates falling asleep, Caribbean leaders with bigger mouths than consciences, and hand-wringing do-gooders without the cojones to follow through on their public utterances.

If you have spent any time with the issue, you won't agree with everything in The Cove - just as anyone with a working knowledge of climate change will find things to dispute in An Inconvenient Truth.

But that isn't the point. In the West at least - and the movie has its US release next month, with the European debut to follow - whales and whaling and dolphin watching and dolphin killing are principally issues of emotion, not of reason.

Through visually linking the dolphin hunt of Taiji with the body that in principle regulates whale hunting, The Cove may well add to western public pressure on Japan over the issue.

Is that fair? Many in the environment field would dispute the film's interpretation of the IWC. One long-term delegate, who works on many other conservation issues as well, told me that in his experience the organisation has been more successful than any other international conservation forum.

But those environmentalists who disapprove of the current "peace talks" in the IWC and instead recommend the maintenance of all-out, full-frontal attack on whaling nations will find The Cove to their taste.

Whether its images do help their cause - and after all, there have been years of graphic whale-killing footage from Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd expeditions in the Southern Ocean - is another matter.

The reason some environmental groups endorse the peace process is precisely because they don't believe the full-frontal attack will ever work.

Some are even prepared to go as far as outgoing IWC chairman Dr William Hogarth, who - five minutes after closing the final meeting of his tenure - told me that in his view, the outlook for whales might well improve if the 1982 global moratorium on whale hunting were lifted, albeit under tight restrictions.

The Cove or the chairman? War-war or jaw-jaw? Emotional appeal or politics?

We shall see. In the meantime, whatever its place in the bigger picture, The Cove is certainly worth a watch - but probably not just before dinner.

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At the International Whaling Commission meeting in Madeira

As Bill Clinton might say: "it's the politics, stupid".

Or perhaps Tony Blair would adopt the form of his statement of priorities for the 1997 UK general election to read "politics, politics, politics".

The conference hall here at the International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting rings with statements about what's right and wrong, what ought to be done, how others are failing to abide by their moral obligations, and different visions of the world based on traditions and ethical stances.

So on Wednesday morning, as I sit listening to statements from non-governmental organisations that represent - or claim to represent - various constituencies on the pro- and anti- sides, we hear, for example, contentions that Western nations are wrong to offer port services to the "pirates" of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, that regulating subsistence hunting by indigenous groups is "demeaning" and "neo-colonial", and the decades-long argument that anti-whaling countries always act in good faith and pro-whaling countries do not.

Judging by comments and e-mails coming into the BBC - not least those on my last blog post (for which many thanks) and on this week's Green Room article - statements aired here are a pretty good reflection of genuinely-held views in the big world outside this hall.

But what holds the key to sorting out the mess that the IWC has been in for years surely doesn't lie in expressions, however incisively phrased, of right and wrong.

Only politics - or perhaps more accurately, politics, politics, politics - can do that.

Time after time, for example, environmental organisations say that Iceland, Japan and Norway should just stop whaling.

It plays well in the speakers' own constituencies and often in their home countries; but having heard it 1,000 times, what realistically is the chance that the 1,001th utterance will see whaling captains suddenly stand up, bend an ear to the wind and say "you know what - they're right", before turning their harpoons into gardening forks and their boats into pleasure cruisers?

And how likely is it that on hearing yet another contention that science would support the limited resumption of commercial hunting, the countries and individuals who worked for years to ban the practice will suddenly agree and wish Japanese harpooners good speed as they head into the Southern Ocean?

I had a chat yesterday with someone equipped with a long and substantial understanding of the conservation movement and more wisdom than most of us can aspire to.

"I've said to youngsters in the field 'don't think you're going to change anything just because you're right'," she said.

"They look at me askance but that's the reality. It's a political issue and you have to play the politics."

If you feel passionately about whales and whaling - or about any other conservation issue - this can be a hard point to see.

To bring things into focus more clearly, think of something you would like to change in the world and ask yourself how, realistically, you would go about doing it - especially if it's going on in another country with an unfamiliar history and different traditions.

Will standing outside an embassy waving banners do it? Will writing a pamphlet do it? Will going to the place concerned and telling people to stop do it?

Hmm... probably not. So you have to be cuter about finding a point of entry to the issue, a foothold you can gain... and now you're playing politics.

The whaling issue has been around for so long that every bloc has people who have grown very cute, and the best observers read the opposing side's strategy like a book printed in the boldest type.

That means they're also cute enough to know that their opponents are often prepared to go much further in private than their public statements would indicate. Without that understanding, the current compromise talks would not even exist.

Strident demands are, properly used, part of the political game - any political game.

What they must not become - and there is a danger of this in the IWC arena, because not everybody involved, particularly on the anti-whaling side, appears to understand the importance of reading runes and giving clues and playing the long game - is a wall that blocks exploration of wiggle room.

At the appropriate time, in effective negotiations, the grandstanding stops and the private words begin - and that, often, is when the real progress is made.

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At the International Whaling Commission meeting in Madeira

My bet is that by the time we finish this week's IWC meeting, just about every delegation in the room will have extolled the virtues of making decisions based on "sound science".

Japan has long argued that questions of whether or not whale stocks are robust enough to allow some hunting should be based on "science, rather than emotion" - a stance endorsed by other hunting countries including Iceland, whose IWC commissioner once argued in a memorable quote that "we should not make decisions on the basis of the survival of the cutest".

Now, as discussions continue over whether or not Japan should be allowed to introduce what is effectively a new category of hunting - on a small scale, by coastal communities with a whaling history, and for local consumption [pdf link] - scientists affiliated to one of the organisations most implacably opposed to commercial whaling in any form, the International Fund for Animal Welfare (Ifaw), have also appealed for such decisions to be based on science.

By this they mean deciding on regime for managing this hunt, including catch quotas, using a complex process devised by scientists over many years and endorsed by IWC member nations called the Revised Management Procedure (RMP).

Looking at the situation, you might conclude that everything was sweetness and light, with Japan's Fisheries Agency and one of its fiercest critics snuggled up together, feeling the love (for science, of course) after decades of snarling strife.

Think again; the rocks in this bed are as cold and jagged as ever.

Securing agreement on coastal whaling is, for Japan, a necessary ingredient of a larger deal with anti-whaling countries - a deal that could reduce the overall number of whales being killed each year, and a deal that some powerful forces are very keen to achieve.

Ifaw's concern is that the process of allocating a coastal catch quota may be driven by politics more than science - that science may be short-circuited in the drive to make a deal, resulting in a quota that is unsustainable.

For Japan and the other whaling (or would-be) whaling nations, this appears a rich irony indeed.

The RMP was agreed in 1994, but has never been introduced - according to pro-hunting nations, because anti-whaling forces blocked it, realising that its implementation would effectively end the 1982 moratorium on commercial hunting.

Japan and its allies dispute the moratorium's scientific validity; and it's certainly the case that some experts argued against the need for a blanket ban at the time, and that others have argued since that some species could be hunted sustainably.

Then there is the years-old dispute about Japan's use of regulations permitting hunting for scientific research to take annual quotas numbering many hundreds.

Is it science, commerce or politics? All these motivations are cited by some.

So what should we make of the use of science - or of the word "science" - in this context? Can either side really claim to hold the torch of scientific purity, and justifiably accuse only the other of using it as a convenient political fig-leaf?

One way of looking at it, I think, is to consider that the same curtain that separates societies into those that won't countenance whaling and those that will also divides scientists along similar lines.

Many of the younger generation, especially, came into the issue with a passion for live cetaceans and a desire to protect them - to use research for conservation of live animals only.

By contrast, scientists who work in hunting nations learn their trade cutting up dead whales, as did researchers of decades gone by in Britain and the US.

The avowedly anti-whaling generation charges that this research produces virtually nothing of benefit. In an age where the major threats to cetaceans come through issues such as climate change, entanglement in fishing nets and being hit by ships, they argue, what use is catching hundreds of them and cutting them up?

One long-time observer of the issue told me here that the IWC's scientific committee - which is supposed to be apolitical - is now more polarised than ever.

That's hardly surprising when you consider that its membership includes researchers who spend their time in government-sponsored Tokyo laboratories dissecting bits of dead whale, and others whose working lives are funded through donations to avowedly anti-whaling organisations such as Ifaw.

From the perspective of scientific output, both approaches include projects that use scientific method; both generate data.

But a meeting of minds? I don't think so.

Purity might be a scientific ideal but in many fields - take climate prediction or alternative medicine - it can rarely be disentangled from the politics of the issue and the scientists' motivation - or, on occasion, their funding.

Whales and whaling perhaps provide the example par excellence.

We should be not surprised if science comes out of this less than squeaky clean; but it might help us to make more sense of the issue if on occasion, parties made clear that when they talk of "sound science" they usually mean "the science that suits us".

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The UK government's projections of climate impacts, released on Thursday, claim to paint a probabilistic picture of the country's future climate in unprecedented detail.

In principle, the project allows you to select any part of the country and obtain projections in 25 sq km blocks of how temperatures and rainfall may change at various points in the future, with probabilities assigned to various outcomes based on uncertainties in the modelling process, imperfections in how well we understand the mechanisms behind weather and climate, and guesswork about what the future holds in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.

Each of these three areas are sources of considerable uncertainty - and as my colleague Palllab Ghosh detailed, not all scientists are sure it's yet reasonable to try to make projections at this level of spatial detail.

The uncertainties are certainly big enough to open questions over how local authorities, businesses and ordinary citizens will use the projections.

In the south-east of England - already the hottest UK region - the projections are that summer temperatures may rise by between 2C and 6C if the world stays on a "medium emissions scenario". If greenhouse emissions rise faster than that trajectory, 12C is a possibility.

For health services, water boards, railway companies, fire services, farmers - even for you and me - there is a heck of a difference between planning for 2C and planning for 12C.

Despite these caveats, I would suggest UKCP09 is a useful exercise, in two ways.

The first is that some of the "clients", as the government calls them - "users" might be a better term - may find the projections useful; and if it does help them make better planning decisions, that should prove beneficial for communities and the economy.

The second is that by going down this route, the UK (and especially the Met Office that led the climate modelling) has taken a major step along a path that other developed countries are sure to follow in the next few years.

(By comparing the level of detail in UKCP09 with the report just issued by the US administration on US impacts, you can see just how far the Met Office is trying to push ahead of the game.)

Projecting local and regional climate impacts is a nascent science but it is exactly the logical thing to do if you want to a) forecast climate impacts on your own society and b) develop plans to protect against those impacts.

There are of course concerns about the whole issue of projecting the climate through computer models - concerns that flood into my inbox every time I write about the issue - but I would just raise three simple arguments against those criticisms:

•With time machines in short supply, how else is humankind to gain insights into what the future holds?

•Modellers always these days attach uncertainties and limitations to their projections

•Current models may have their flaws, but I know of no way to make a perfect model other than to build imperfect ones, look for the problem areas and use that information to build progressively better ones

As other countries and other groups of climate modellers attempt local projections, they will be taking positives and negatives from the Met Office approach and trying to improve on it - which should, in time, lead to more refined and more accurate projections.

One irony of the project, though, is that the UK is one of the countries where the exercise is probably needed least.

A report last month from the Global Humanitarian Forum - the body chaired by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan - named the UK as one of the 12 countries least at risk from climate change.

The places where something like UKCP09 is most needed are just those parts of the world where weather and climate data is most lacking, notably Africa - although Mr Annan took some cheer this week from being able to launch a novel, low-tech project that will mount automatic weather stations on mobile phone masts across the continent.

Perhaps the greater irony lay in the yawning gulf between London and and Mito, Japan.

As UK environment secretary Hilary Benn was introducing the impact projections in terms that are by now very familiar - "Climate change is the greatest challenge that we face as a world", "we have got to respond, we've got to act", "this is the future we don't want to happen" - Mito was hosting a meeting that went a long way to slowing the progress of the one technology that might solve the world's energy problems (and therefore significantly mitigate its climate problems) in a single hit.

As my colleague Matt McGrath reported earlier this week, escalating costs and questions over the technology are now plaguing the ITER project, the international attempt to prove that nuclear fusion could work on a commercial basis.

The Mito meeting of ITER's council endorsed a "phased approach" that will push back the date for starting fusion in plasmas involving the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium - needed for anything approaching commercial operation - until 2026.

Building ITER is expensive, no doubt - calculated at $6bn originally, now perhaps as high as $16bn - and some experts charge that the international behemoth has pushed research on other designs to the sidelines.

But if Hilary Benn is right - and his words reflect those of just about every other developed country politician these days - why would a few billion dollars hold you back from researching such a prize?

From the US government to straitened banks, $700bn; from the European Central Bank, $500bn; to rescue insurance giant AIG, $85bn... I could go on.

Yet ITER governments feel squeezed by cost overruns amounting to just a few paltry billions on a technology with such potential?

They are happy to see the deadline slip back to 2026 - just about the date by which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recommends global greenhouse gas emissions should have peaked and begun to decline?

Nuclear fusion was never going to be a short-term solution to climate change but it could have an absolutely huge role to play in the longer term.

As with local climate modelling, you won't know how well it works unless you invest the money and try.

"We've got to respond, we've got to act"? Hmmm...

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About nine months ago, I spent a fascinating (and very agreeable) week on a research boat in the Canary Islands, attempting to study the elusive family of beaked whales.

Lucky for me it happened last year; because the boat in question, Song of the Whale, is now being taken off such operations, for at least a couple of years, for financial reasons.

The group that runs Song of the Whale, the International Fund for Animal Welfare (Ifaw), appears to have been hit particularly hard by the world's financial troubles. Mothballing the boat's research is one of several cuts it's had to make, including staff cutbacks.

Ifaw is certainly not alone. According to the head of one major UK conservation charity, most organisations in the field are feeling the pinch.

Over the past year, I'm told, UK green groups have seen their income fall by an average of 10-20% - some by more.

You might assume this was down to people withdrawing their membership or being less generous with their gift donations.

These trends are real; but they are regarded as minor compared with declining legacy income and adverse foreign currency movements.

The main component of a legacy donation is often the sale of a house; and often the legacy is worded along the lines of "person X gets so much and person Y so much, with the remainder going to charity Z" - in which case a fairly small dip in house prices can have a large proportional impact on the amount going to the charity.

It shouldn't come as any surprise to find the global financial situation impacting conservation groups - why should they be exempt from the general mayhem? - but it's worth having a quick think about what it might mean.

True, there's a strong propaganda element to much that environmental groups do, and you might either bemoan or applaud a decline in its intensity, depending on your political stance.

But projects such as Song of the Whale generate data that could prove important in understanding - and thus protecting - little-known species.

In developing countries, wildlife protection regimes often struggle for money and resources, certainly when compared to the poachers of valuable species and the industrialists who would expand the human footprint without restraint.

I came across a particularly stark example this week from India - wardens in tiger reserves working without simple equipment such as torches, without proper shoes, with meagre salaries often paid in arrears.

It's a common tale. And sometimes, Western-based groups fill this kind of funding gap, paying the human costs without which there can be no effective conservation.

The links between the world's ecological crisis and its economic woes are manifold and complex; and you can certainly argue that any slowing in the breakneck pace of human economic development is good news if it retards the rise in greenhouse gas emissions, the expansion of human habitat into areas occupied by other species, and the depletion of shared resources such as water.

But conservation projects such as Song of the Whale will be casualties; and in a world where we are often struggling to understand what is already on the verge of being destroyed, they are losses we can ill afford.

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Japan's new target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions has been widely criticised as too weak - and not just by environmentalists, but by the EU environment commissioner, Stavros Dimas, and implicitly by the UN's top climate official, Yvo de Boer.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, Japan pledged to cut emissions by 6% by - well, by around now, in fact.

In fact its emissions have risen in recent years - it's not the only Kyoto country in that situation - so its pledge to cut emissions by 15% from 2005 levels by 2020, when untangled, takes it only 2% beyond the Kyoto 6% pledge in a further 11 years.

Confused? If so, I'm think that may be part of the point.

Until a few years back, everything in the UN climate treaty framework was calculated with regard to 1990 - a clear and simple baseline against which every commitment could be measured and compared.

Japan has never liked the 1990 baseline, and there are some good reasons for that. With few indigenous energy sources, and caught out by the 1970s oil crisis, it made huge gains in energy efficiency before 1990.

In contrast, the bulk of European emission cuts came immediately after 1990 when Soviet bloc economies collapsed, Germany re-unified and the UK put its recently-developed North Sea gas resources to use.

Hence Japan's current choice of a later year - 2005 - against which to measure its latest 15% pledge. Australia has chosen 2000 as a baseline; and President Obama's pre-election promises, which have not yet gained the status of a national target, referred to 2007.

Does this profusion of base years matter? Absolutely.

One reason is that the change of baseline year allowed Japan's Prime Minister Taro Aso to claim that his commitment matches the EU's 20% from 1990 levels by 2020 commitment. It does, approximately, if you start from here - but not if you start from 1990, since when EU emissions have fallen and Japan's risen.

More profoundly, it creates an environment in which politicians can eternally start anew, forgetting what their predecessors promised in 1992 or 1997 - promises that are supposed to be internationally binding commitments.

Jenson Button, who currently leads the Formula One motor-racing championship, has to win races over the full distance. The rules don't allow for him to say "well I was fastest over the last 20 laps, so I win the race" - and that is basically what Mr Aso, Mr Rudd and (potentially) Mr Obama are trying to do.

It may make governments look better against a domestic landscape of economic turmoil and business desperation; but it surely plays very differently on the international stage, where the support of the poorest countries is a precondition for securing a climate pact at December's Copenhagen meeting.

By accident or design, Mr Aso chose to announce his 2020 goal during the second week of an important UN climate meeting in Bonn, a staging post on the road to Copenhagen.

It came a day after green groups lambasted EU finance ministers for not stumping up what Greenpeace calculated as "one bus fare per day for each EU citizen" to fund climate programmes in developing countries.

In terms of its climate rhetoric, the industrialised world is as healthy as it has ever been.

As we come closer to the key Copenhagen summit, fewer and fewer of the politicians' fine words are being matched by their deeds - and that must make prospects of a real deal in Copenhagen progressively slimmer and slimmer.

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This is my first entry for a few weeks, and I'm wondering if it's appropriate to make some awful pun about being "back on the blog"... ok, too late, done it already. Sorry.

The blog stayed blank during the earthquake project I was on in Japan, which was fascinating but slightly away from the core environmental agenda.

Watching the Earth it certainly was; but perhaps not appropriate for Earth Watch.

It's impossible for me to go to Japan without thoughts turning to whaling - and with the annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) just a couple of weeks away, it's a good time of year for those thoughts to surface.

One of the reasons why I find the issue so interesting is that it throws up so many "what if?" questions.

Many of them surround the whaling moratorium - called for in 1972, voted through in 1982 and implemented in 1986.

One of the key arguments mustered for the moratorium was that whale numbers did not appear to be recovering, even on species and in regions where protection measures had been put in place.

By the 1960s, hunting for blue whales and humpbacks, for example, was banned in large expanses of the oceans.

But time after time in records of IWC meetings from that period you come across phrases such as "it seemed that there was some rebuilding of humpback stocks in the North-west Atlantic but there was nothing to suggest any substantial increase elsewhere in the North Atlantic", followed by a recommendation to extend the existing protection for a further three or five years and see what happened.

The sense of heads being scratched is almost palpable.

After the demise of the Soviet Union, the reason why these protection measures weren't working became startlingly clear. The Soviet fleets, which included the biggest factory ships ever built, had been working to a radically different plan - to kill just about every whale they encountered, irrespective of size, species or rarity, and lie about it.

Since Alexey Yablokov first spilled the beans in 1993, the story has been told and re-told, the real catch records (kept secret and not submitted to the IWC, ironically chaired by a Soviet, MN Sukhoruchenko, during some of the years when the apparent ineffectiveness of protection regimes was being discussed) have been dissected and analysed.

But rarely has it been told as well as it has this week, in an article [pdf link] by Phil Clapham and Yulia Ivashchenko in Marine Fisheries Review, the US journal. If you're not familiar with the story, reading their article will be 15 minutes of your time well spent; if you are familiar with it, well, it's worth a read anyway.

Clapham and Ivashchenko are among the scientists whose work has documented the true scale of the Soviet abuses. Between 1947, when whaling re-started after World War II, and 1973, their fleets killed more than 100,000 whales secretly and - by the terms of their IWC membership - illegally.

Some scientists had suspicions about Soviet abuses at the time. But Dr Sukhoruchenko and his colleagues repeatedly batted away calls to place genuinely independent inspectors on ships, so no-one saw it happening.

(This, by the way, makes it almost inevitable that if anti-whaling countries are ever minded to approve the commercial or quasi-commercial coastal whaling quotas now being sought by Japan, they will insist on having independent and adequately empowered observers on the catcher boats.)

The biggest "what if?" question thrown up by the illegal whaling is what would have happened if the Soviets had not treated the oceans as a birthdaying kid treats open evening in a sweet shop.

Their hauls depleted the waters usually exploited by whaling stations in Australia and New Zealand, forcing them to close. Without those closures, would those two nations have moved so swiftly and so vociferously into the anti-whaling camp?

On a larger canvas, if the IWC's protection measures had worked as planned and re-built species such as blues and humpbacks, how would IWC members and the larger global community have reacted?

Would the moratorium call have been made - and if so, would it have been heeded? Would environmental groups have gained the traction they did if whale numbers had demonstrably been recovering?

Would whaling countries have sought to expand their quotas to the limit, or been content to remain at levels that would guarantee a continuing recovery, in a market that by now was largely driven by whalemeat rather than by oil or - from an earlier era - baleen?

These are, of course, imponderables; and doubtless veterans of the era will give varying answers depending on their recollections and their positions.

But it is entirely possible to argue that the illegal Soviet catches created a false impression of the ecological impact of legal whaling, and in doing so made the moratorium calls irresistible. Now, with proper protection in place, blue whales and humpbacks are recovering well - as they should have done 40 years ago.

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