Eleven Pacific nations hope that new measures will help to conserve whales in the region's waters.
At a meeting last week in tonga they signed the Whale Declaration.
The threatened and migratory species adviser of the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme, or SPREP, Michael Donoghue, told Sela Jane Aholelei what they hope this will achieve.
This photograph taken on August 4, 2008 shows a humpback whale diving near the island of Vava'u in Tonga.
Photo: DAVID BROOKS / AFP
Transcript
MICHAEL DONOGHUE: It was very appropriate that it was in Tonga because almost 40 years ago now Tonga took a very important step when the King declared an end to subsistence whaling. So when the King took that decision it did signal a really important change and the Tongan minister of fisheries, in fact as a young man, wrote the legislation to prohibit whaling. So for him it was the completion of a journey where he came back much later in his career to a large number of countries in the region talking the conservation of whales and was able to assert Tonga's leadership in that. Because whale watching now is the most important single contributor to the economy of the northern island group of Vava'u in the winter months and is a really important part of Tonga's tourist attractions as it is for many other countries in the region. And it truly was, and is, one of the world's great conservation success stories because, not only, have humpback whales been saved from the very brink of extinction but they're now very important contributor to several economies in the region. But we also looked at a number of the emerging threats to whales - not harpoons for most whale species now - but other threats and we also looked at some of the other important aspects of whales, in particular, the role that whales may play in mitigating climate change.
SELA JANE AHOLELEI: Do Pacific Island governments have the ability to implement it?
MD: We all need support to do this. Technical support, financial support but we all need but we have a commitment and we have a plan and that's the most important thing. We hope that the institutions and organisations that have an interest in marine environment and the marine conservation will come in an support us to make this more than a declaration, but a happening thing.
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