Document ID: chunk:federal_register_of_legislation:F2024L00930:reg:2:p44
Version: federal_register_of_legislation:F2024L00930
Segment Type: reg
Provision Reference: reg 2 (pt 44/48)
Character Range: 185434–188557

and BIAs for southern right whales must be used to inform planning, assessment, and decision-making of actions in the marine environment. This must address that female southern right whales have strong site fidelity to certain areas along the Australian coast for reproduction (mating, calving, nursing), generally returning to the same location to give birth and nurse offspring. Furthermore, as the population size increases there will be re-occupation of historical habitat and establishment in new areas that need consideration for protection to enable the species to recover. Historic high use areas need consideration in site-selection of marine projects due to their importance historically in supporting large numbers of breeding females, and presently to support re-occupation of these areas as the population recovers. The importance of historic high use areas is supported by two of the four historic high use areas (in southeast South Australia and southwest Victoria) demonstrating consistent current use.
The impact mitigation hierarchy is the framework to avoid, mitigate and offset environmental impacts on Matters of National Environmental Significance (MNES), which identifies that avoidance and mitigation measures are the primary strategies for managing the potential significant impact of a proposed action. Given southern right whales demonstrate high site fidelity to calving areas, offsets cannot compensate for habitat loss in southern right whale reproductive BIAs. The first approach to reduce the risk of impacts from key threats to southern right whales is to avoid southern right whale BIAs, and particularly HCTS, wherever practicable at any time whales are present, predominantly between April to November. For example, in the case of threats from anthropogenic underwater noise resulting from development of marine infrastructure (i.e., pile driving in the pre-operational phase of offshore development), construction activities should be planned at a time when southern right whales are not present. This requires the implementation of temporal (i.e., seasonal) avoidance measures in or adjacent to HCTS during the critically important calving season.
Where it is not possible to avoid HCTS when southern right whales are present in those areas, reasonably practicable minimisation controls supported by appropriate whale detection and adaptive management measures must be adopted that clearly demonstrate risk minimisation to achieve the actions set out in this Recovery Plan. Verification of the effectiveness of mitigation measures should be undertaken and reported, which may include underwater noise verification studies of noise modelling used to predict impacts and effectiveness of whale detection methods. Impacts that cannot be sufficiently avoided or mitigated should not be approved.

      3.12.3          Southern right whale monitoring programs
It is incumbent on the proponent to identify the species that may occur in the proposed area of interest and obtain current information about their presence, distribution, and abundance to inform risk assessments. Desktop reviews