Concerning Conservation

I live in a pollution hotspot, or so the green campaigners would have me believe. I can see where they're coming from. The sea around Gibraltar is bustling with commercial shipping, I have a refinery just two kilometres from where I live and the traffic in my home town, Gibraltar, is horrendous. So imagine my surprise when I heard a speech by a conservation expert in Cordoba, Spain, last weekend describing where I live as a hotspot not for pollution, but for conservation.

"People go to Mexico and Alaska to see whales," said Andrés Alcántara, director of institutional relations at the Mediterranean section of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a leading international conservation organisation. "Don't they realise we have them on our doorstep in the Strait of Gibraltar?"

The Strait is a major migratory route for all types of cetaceans. Not only that, but we have resident pods of pilot whales and even orcas. Now that's something special. By chance, a few days after the talk I received an email from Steve Warren, an marine photographer who runs Ocean Optics & Mavericks Diving in London, where he teaches underwater photography.

Steve, a member of the Gibraltar-based 888 Sub Aqua Club, sent me a wonderful picture by Mark Koekemoer of fellow diver Andrew Pugsley swimming over pilot whales while filming a documentary for the Gibraltar Broadcasting Corporation in the Strait of Gibraltar. It's beautiful shot that rammed home the words I heard in Cordoba.

The IUCN is the organisation that tells us when animals are at risk. When we say that some creature or other is endangered, they're the ones who worked it out in the first place. The organisation collates data from governments and conservation groups worldwide and its info is as good as it gets. Alcántara said the IUCN had designated the Strait and neighbouring Alboran Sea as a conservation hotspot because of its important biodiversity. Only 1.2% of the world has this designation, so we're in good company.

There is, however, a BUT in this story, and it's a big one. The conference I was attending was about cooperation between Morocco and Spain, two countries which have worked hard to foster closer links in all sorts of areas ranging from anti-terrorism and law enforcement to immigration. But environmental cooperation is lagging behind.

Alcántara's message was that it's time to address that. Over 100,000 merchant ships sail through the Strait each year and there is frenzied shoreside development on both sides of the Strait, where communities are constantly growing. That means mounting pressure on the environment and the creatures that inhabit it.

There are good intentions, it has to be said. Algeria, Spain and Morocco have started to work, in collaboration with IUCN, for the protection of the Alboran Sea, thus making progress in Mediterranean transnational cooperation in an area with complex geopolitical sensitivities. The IUCN is also a partner in the MED-RAS project, which aims to identify priority habitats and species to be managed and protected in the Mediterranean Sea. This is achieved by defining a science-based standardized methodology to identify and map important ecological and biodiversity areas for establishing a coherent and representative network of Mediterranean Marine Protected Areas.

But more has to be done. Here's how Alcántara summed it up in Cordoba. "In order to conserve a species," he said, "you first have to conserve the environment it lives in."

It sounds obvious, but it doesn't always happen.

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