TUESDAY 28 OCTOBER 2003

MR GREG DONOVAN, DR NICOLA GRANDY, CLARE PERRY AND PROFESSOR LARS WALLØE

  92. Good afternoon, may I welcome everybody here today. I should like to welcome our four witnesses and the few members of the general public who are here today as well. This is an on the record meeting and there will be transcriptions of everything that is said today. It would be quite useful if each of the four of you were to introduce yourself. I must also apologise that we are a little depleted. We have a few illnesses and other meetings so we are not at our usual full strength, but I am sure we can give as good as we get.

  (Ms Perry) My Lord Chairman, my name is Clare Perry. I work for the Environmental Investigation Agency as Cetaceans Campaigns Manager. I have a background in biology and undertook an MSc in coastal zone management. I have worked for local marine nature reserves and environmental consultancies before starting at EIA in 1998. I have been attending the International Whaling Commission meetings and the Scientific Committee meetings since 1999.
  (Dr Grandy) My name is Nicky Grandy. I am Secretary to the International Whaling Commission. I have been working at IWC for just over three years. Prior to IWC, I worked for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris, where I was involved in chemicals management issues.
  (Mr Donovan) My name is Greg Donovan. I am the Head of Science at the IWC. I have been a whale biologist for 25 years, most of that time spent with the IWC doing both theoretical work and practical work.
  (Professor Wall'e) I am Professor of Physiology at the University of Oslo in Norway. I have been involved in whaling on the scientific side and whaling issues since 1986 and have been Head of the Norwegian Delegation to the Scientific Committee of the International Whaling Commission since 1989. Most of this time I have also chaired the sub-committee of the Scientific Committee responsible for giving advice to the Commission on catch limits for the so-called aboriginal subsistence whaling, that is grey whales and Bowhead whales caught by Inuits and other aboriginal people in North America and in Siberia. During this time I was also a member of the Norwegian Delegation to the Commission. I have quite a lot of experience on the scientific side on other international issues and conventions, both in Norway preparing for the Montreal Protocol, the North Sea Agreement on Pollutants and from 1976 on the acid rain problem, with Richard Southwood, John Mason and Lord Marshall from this country.

  93. Thank you very much for that. I am going to start with the first question. What role does the secretariat of the IWC play in carrying out relevant science or collating scientific evidence? If you do collate evidence, what methods do you employ? What counts as "scientific evidence" for the IWC?
  (Mr Donovan) It was a long question, so if I miss anything out, just tell me I have missed something out. It is quite likely. We sent you a document, but I will not assume you have read it as I am sure you have hundreds of documents to read. Before I go into the role of the secretariat, the way the IWC gets its scientific advice is through a body called its Scientific Committee. We meet for two weeks each year and often longer. We have special workshops on special topics. The Scientific Committee is made up of getting on for 150 to160 scientists, a big group. Many of them are national delegates appointed by their governments, but we also have a large number of what we call invited participants. Where we feel there is expertise which will help us address particular questions that we do not have in the national delegations, then we will invite experts to come and join the committee. There is also a role for invited participants who volunteer. They know what our agenda is, they can write to us and they can say they feel they have a contribution to make on a particular issue and could they be an invited participant. The Scientific Committee then presents its conclusions and its advice to the Commission. The Commission are the politicians, they are the people who take the decisions, but we provide that advice. In terms of the secretariat's role in that process, the secretariat is relatively small—17 people—many not scientists but administrators. I play a role and we have a computing manager who also plays a role. I chair one group, I am a member of the steering committee. We do original research ourselves, but probably the main role of the secretariat is in co-ordinating and facilitating the scientific work which is done through the Scientific Committee. In addition to that we produce a peer review scientific journal called the Journal of Cetacean Research and Management and I am the editor of that journal. In terms of collating scientific evidence, in the secretariat we do hold a lot of database information on, for example, catch statistics. We have catch statistics going back to the turn of the century. The level of detail has increased as time has gone by, since the signing of the Convention in 1946. This is information which has to be presented to the Scientific Committee, it is part of the Convention that this information is collated. In addition, from a scientific point of view, we have quite strong rules about what acceptable surveys are. That information has to be submitted so that it is available. We collate all of the survey information. We have a role in collating data which is available for use, usually publicly available but in certain circumstances it is only available for use within the Scientific Committee; in most cases it is publicly available. Now you will have to remind me if I have missed something out.

  94. What counts as "scientific evidence"?
  (Mr Donovan) In a sense everything counts as scientific evidence. Essentially our job is to provide advice on conservation and management of whales to the Commission, to the politicians, and we need an enormous amount of information, ranging from abundance estimations, stock identity, biological parameters, in other words, how fast can they reproduce, how do they die, what are the dynamics of the population. We also have to look at questions about the environment so that we know whether the environment is healthy, or we suspect it is healthy, but in simplistic terms—something I shall probably come back to later—in terms of managing commercial whaling, we realise that uncertainty is the key to giving good advice. We must take that explicitly into account. In terms of managing, we said there is no point us developing a way of managing whale stocks if we cannot get the information. In very simple terms, the basic information you need for management is estimates of abundance and estimates of catches, both past catches and projected future catches.
  (Dr Grandy) It may be worth mentioning, because of the experience of being at the seminar in the middle of September, that we do not require all information which comes to the Scientific Committee to have been peer reviewed already, because the peer review process actually goes on within the Scientific Committee. I know that is different from some conventions, so it might be worth mentioning.
  (Mr Donovan) On that, if this is the relevant place to discuss peer review, I would argue that we have a very rigorous peer review system within the Scientific Committee. We have something like 180 scientists or so there—we may come back later to the various views and attitudes to whales and whaling—from all member governments and independent scientists, who all perhaps have different ideas on whaling and whether it should or should not take place. Because of that the review process is extremely rigorous. In addition data must be made available well in advance so that anybody can analyse those data and present new analyses. We have a very strong review process there, followed up by the fact that we also publish all of our reports and we publish a scientific peer review journal. So at very many levels there is a peer review coming into the advice that we can give to the Commission.

  95. I wanted to ask you about the data on abundance where there seem to be enormous variations in estimates of the abundance of various species of whales. Obviously you are presumably dependent on . . . I do not know. It is one of those things where it is very difficult to do a proper scientific analysis of what is out there in the oceans. How can you be sure of your figures? On the whole, it does rather seem as though the estimates vary between those who are in favour and those who are against whaling. If you look at the nations which are in favour of whaling, they seem to bring in the higher levels of estimates of abundance, as opposed to those who are perhaps more doubtful about it. I am sure our Norwegian Professor will assist us on that point.
  (Mr Donovan) From the Scientific Committee's point of view, we have guidelines and requirements for the ways in which acceptable abundance estimates can be presented. It is not really appropriate for me here to go into the theory of how you estimate whale abundance, but I agree that it is difficult. That difficulty is expressed in the confidence intervals around the abundance estimate. If anyone asks me how many Fin whales there are in the North Atlantic, I will not say that there are 19,462—I could but that would be completely misleading. I would give the range and that range, depending on the nature of the survey, could be anything from plus or minus 20 or even 30 per cent. The way we use it in the Scientific Committee is that we do not believe that the best estimate is the correct estimate. I will not go into too much detail, but when we provide advice, the way we do it now explicitly takes uncertainty into account essentially by using computer simulations of populations of whales. What we do is to say this is the abundance estimate, with its confidence interval, what if we have got it wrong? What if the whales are in a different area, what if there is bias in the methodology that we do not know about—if we knew about it we would correct for it. We are very, very careful. We certainly do not use the upper confidence interval and in a way we are even more conservative than using the lower confidence interval. That is the Scientific Committee. What individual people may say about abundance estimates is their business, but to get an abundance estimate accepted by the Scientific Committee is quite a rigorous procedure and we do not pretend that we know the exact number by any means.
  (Professor Wall'e) First I should like to state that I agree completely with what Greg Donovan has just said and everything which has been written in the document you have received from him and Nicky Grandy. I have a few points which I should like to add. Just on this question, I am in agreement with Greg concerning the abundance estimate. I do not see a great difference of opinion. In the Scientific Committee we agreed on those estimates and the range of the confidence intervals. The next step is when quotas and catch limits have to be determined and Greg has already described the process. As far as abundance estimates are concerned, another point is that in some instances we have not finished but the discussion is nevertheless carried from the Scientific Committee into the Commission and out into the public domain. I am thinking for instance of Minke whale abundance around the Antarctic where lots of numbers have been coming out, but the Scientific Committee has not finished that process.
  (Ms Perry) I was going to bring up the same example. I am in agreement with Greg that the Scientific Committee and the people in that committee represent the people in the best position to peer review the kind of data we are looking at. On the other hand it must be remembered that it is part of a political body and when it comes to interpreting the data, there are often disagreements and differences in opinion on how the procedure should go. In terms of the actual estimates, there is general agreement.

  96. A brief question in relation to the scientific evidence. Do you grade it based on the robustness of the methodology used? Do you have any grading system in your peer review process?
  (Mr Donovan) If we are talking about an abundance estimate, it depends what the point of the abundance estimate is. Essentially we have acceptable and non-acceptable. If it is going to be used for management purposes in any way, it has to be agreed by the Scientific Committee. We have a set of guidelines which people must follow and if those guidelines are not followed then the data are not acceptable. The grading really is "acceptable" or "not acceptable". For other areas where perhaps it is not quite so critical, we will take an abundance estimate, for example it might be presented for an area in Brazil where scientists are working under difficult circumstances, it is not going to be used for management, we take that abundance estimate and we will not give it the IWC seal of approval, but we will give advice to the people who have done the research on how they can improve their estimates, suggest it might be submitted to the journal for publication if it is acceptable. There are two levels.

  97. Does the IWC consider the effect on human population of whaling policy from an economic point of view?
  (Dr Grandy) Yes, we have done.
  (Mr Donovan) Perhaps I could tell you what the Convention says and Lars can give you a better answer as to whether he believes it takes it into account. The Convention does state that we should take into account the interests of—I have forgotten the exact wording but something like—the users of whale products and the whaling industry. When the moratorium was agreed in 1982, which came into effect three years later, a group was set up to look at what was called socio-economic implications. In practice, the way the Commission has worked is that the bottom line is the status of the stocks, not the status of the whaling industry or economic impacts. That is the way it has tended to work, but Lars will give you a better perspective from a whaling country as to whether that has been taken into account or not.
  (Professor Wall'e) It has partly been taken into account. If we look back to the Convention, it talks only of two kinds of whaling: ordinary whaling and scientific research whaling. In the schedule a third category has been established: aboriginal subsistence whaling. Certainly the aboriginal subsistence whaling takes into account the social perspective of the aboriginal people. Currently it is Inuits in Alaska and aboriginal people in Siberia and Greenlanders and some in St Vincent and the Grenadines. There has also been a discussion about whether Red Indians in the State of Washington should be allowed to receive quotas under this aboriginal scheme. The problem of course is that when the moratorium was introduced the Japanese Government and the Japanese coastal whalers perceived that they lived under similar social conditions and thought that these should be taken into account and maybe they should get some quotas. That is a major criticism from the Japanese Government.

  98. Could I ask you what your country's position is on whaling and how you collate and develop scientific evidence to back up your position on whaling? Could this be improved?
  (Professor Wall'e) One of the underlying problems that your Committee is discussing is that the Convention is an example of a convention which was set up to serve one purpose but which some governments today want to serve a different purpose. It is clear to everybody that in 1946 it was established as a resource management convention and Norway insists that it should still be a resource management convention, talking about harvesting. The word "sustainable" was not used in the Convention but the wording certainly says that it should be both conservation and allow the orderly development of the whaling industry and, at least at that time, the orderly development of the whaling industry meant catching whales. Today some say whale watching is also a kind of whaling industry, because you can earn money from it, but that was not the original idea in 1946. So the Norwegian position is that it should still be a resource management convention but with all safeguards against over exploitation. If I go back to 1986, when Norway was forced by the US to stop whaling—we stopped after 1987—a small group of scientists was established, two of them were British, the late Ray Beverton, who was the first chairman of the Natural Environment Research Council and Roy Anderson, who is now a more famous professor, first at Imperial College, then Oxford then back to Imperial College I think. They and two Norwegians gave advice to the Norwegian Government that they saw no decline in the relevant whale stocks, Minke whales in the North-East Atlantic, but that much better scientific evidence would be necessary if Norway were to continue whaling. That is what the Government has tried to do. For eight years I chaired a research programme and after that I was involved in steering Norwegian research and our two main contributions have been: one, to develop new methods to count whales. Greg can perhaps tell you a little more about that, but there is an improvement of an old method. The other is perhaps the work we have done in killing the whales expeditiously. That may be outside the field of the interest of this Committee, but it is important for us.

  99. Might I turn to Greg, as you referred to him, and the others, to ask about the organisations' position on whaling and your interpretation?
  (Mr Donovan) Working for the secretariat, I do not have a country.