Report of the Workshop on Small Cetaceans and Climate Change

1.1 Welcome and Introduction Andrea Nouak (IWC Commissioner for Austria) welcomed participants to Austria and Mark Simmonds (Workshop Convenor) thanked Dr Nouak and the Government of Austria for the invitation to meet in Vienna and for hosting the meeting. He also thanked the Governments of the US, Australia and Germany as well as WWF and WDCS for sponsoring the workshop and making it possible. He expressed gratitude to the participants for attending, especially those that had come long distances, and the IWC staff especially Julie, Sandra, Greg and Simon for their support for this initiative. He noted that the background to the work of the IWC on environmental threats was detailed in the report of the second IWC workshop on climate change which had been held in Siena in 2009 (IWC 2010). Simmonds commented that whilst attention had largely been focused on the effects of climate change on land, the ocean and the atmosphere were inexorably linked and it was the interactions between the two that regulated the Earth’s climate. Human-induced changes to the atmosphere were now leading to changes in the oceans and these same oceans are in fact the Earth’s most significant global heat buffer and also distribute heat around the planet, pumping warm water and air toward the poles and cold water and air back to the tropics. Major changes in ocean currents could lead to major shifts in weather patterns and regional climate, with impacts on all life forms. The oceans also absorb significant quantities of carbon dioxide and, bearing all these things in mind, future discussions concerning our need to mitigate and adapt to continuing global climate change should, therefore, include the consideration of ocean ecosystems (Herr and Galland 2009). Cetaceans were potentially important sentinel species for climate change (Moore 2008) and have been the focus of some recent increasing international interest and assessments (e.g. Whitehead and Worm, 2008; Alter et al., 2010; Simmonds and Elliot, 2010). The first IWC workshop on climate change was held in Hawaii in March 1996. It was felt at that time that health problems associated with thermal change were unlikely for cetaceans and, instead, that workshop focused on the potential impacts of climate change on prey and the interplay between global climatic change, chemical pollution and pathogens. Broad areas of concern were identified, including the potential that some recent marine mammal epizootics had been exacerbated by climate change. However, in its conclusions, the first IWC workshop ‘recognised that given the uncertainties in modelling climate change at a suitable scale and thus modelling effects on biological processes at present it is not possible to model in a predictive manner the effects of climate change on cetacean populations’. A summary of the second IWC climate change workshop (the 2009 Siena workshop) is given below under item 3.1. After the Siena workshop reported back, the IWC passed a resolution on climate change by consensus at its 2009 annual meeting. Apart from calling for climate change to be addressed and endorsing the findings of the Scientific Committee and the workshop, this resolution also requested ‘Contracting Governments to incorporate climate change considerations into existing conservation and management plans’. This ‘Vienna Workshop’ thus follows on from the 2009 Siena workshop. Its focus, scope and a list of proposed invited participants had been identified by a steering committee and endorsed and elaborated at the 2010 IWC scientific committee meeting, which concluded that the workshop would include some 10-12 participants; meet for 3 days; its report would be provided to the IWC Scientific Committee, Conservation Committee and Commission meeting; and all species of small cetaceans would be considered by the workshop (i.e. including river dolphins and small whales). Simmonds also reported that at the 2010 Scientific Committee meeting, the progress of work derived from the second climate change workshop had been noted, including planning discussions for a comparison of physical indicators of climate change and available data on population dynamics and behavioural ecology of the Bering-Chukchi-Beaufort and Hudson Bay-Davis Strait populations of bowhead whales. A list of available physical and biological data sets was being assembled for both populations, after which a formal outline and