What does iwc do

Keep the whaling ban in place. What does the International Whaling Commission do? Stay up-to-date by email. Which countries are members of the IWC? The IWC: we've achieved a lot together Keeping the ban in place: Despite many attempts by the whalers to overturn the moratorium ban , WDC and other groups have helped ensure commercial whaling has not returned.

Latest Campaign News. What now for the whales of Japan? Misleading information from some member states At the IWC meeting, a moratorium on all whaling using factory ships with an exception for minke whales was agreed. From then on, successful non-lethal whale research took place in that area some of it funded by WWF. However, it was also revealed that the USSR had been falsifying reported numbers and species were being caught on a massive scale, with the meat being sold to Japan.

Conservation concerns expressed by scientists, WWF and other conservation organizations and conservation-minded governments grew deeper. The vote was comfortably won with a majority of 25 to 7, with 5 abstentions.

Iceland did not lodge an objection to the moratorium at the time it was established, but left the IWC in , re-adhering to the ICRW with a reservation to the commercial whaling moratorium in Because of the problems with the New Management Procedure, the IWC asked its Scientific Committee to produce a fail-safe management system that could ensure that any future commercial whaling would never again deplete whale stocks.

The RMP is designed as one part of a Revised Management Scheme RMS which would also include rules for conducting surveys of whale numbers and for the inspection and observation of commercial whaling.

Please note: This page has been archived and its content may no longer be up-to-date. This version of the page will remain live for reference purposes as we work to update the content across our website. Humpback and sperm whales were the next targets of commercial whaling, with oil for lighting and other uses as the most important product.

In the late nineteenth century the whaling industry was transformed by the development of steam powered ships, enabling the hunting of faster blue and fin whales , and of the explosive harpoon, enabling further reach and increased accuracy.

The new technology, coupled with the depletion of whales in the rest of the world, led to the spread of hunting to the Antarctic, where huge concentrations of feeding whales made large-scale whaling highly profitable. The First World War provided a large market for explosives using glycerine from baleen whale oil provided by British and Norwegian whaling in the Antarctic.

Meanwhile Japanese whaling had developed separately as a coastal industry, mainly for humpback, right and grey whales. Since whales migrate world-wide through both coastal waters and the open oceans, the need for international co-operation in their conservation became evident. By , the League of Nations recognised that whales were over-exploited and that there was a need to regulate whaling activities. In , the Bureau of International Whaling Statistics was set up in order to keep track of catches.