Marine protected areas for whales, dolphins, and porpoises: a world ...

Habitat Protection for Cetaceans around the World 183
In addition, several countries in the region participate in the Helsinki
Convention for the Baltic Sea, as well as ASCOBANS which originally focused
on the Baltic Sea and North Sea, and recently has been extended to most of
western Europe, and ACCOBAMS, which covers the Mediterranean Sea and
Black Sea and Atlantic contiguous countries.
Marine protected areas for cetaceans are only in their infancy in this region.
A number of SACs are being designed to protect resident inshore populations
of bottlenose dolphins: in the Sado River estuary, south of Lisbon; in the
Shannon River estuary in Ireland; in the Moray Firth in Scotland; and in
Cardigan Bay, Wales, among other areas. The question is whether the habitat
protection is substantial enough – in terms of size and quality of critical habitat
protection. In most cases the answer is no. Also, SACs apply to only two
cetacean species: the bottlenose dolphin and the harbor porpoise, and harbor
porpoises only to a limited extent with SACs proposed, to date, in Germany
and Ireland. Marine conservation programmes in Europe urgently need to be
expanded to include other cetaceans and much larger areas, through a
rethinking of the EU Habitats and Species Directive, plus application of the
OSPAR Convention and other regional agreements, as well as through national
programmes. At the time the EU Habitats and Species Directive was being
written in the early 1990s, bottlenose dolphins and harbor porpoises were the
only cetaceans known to live in inshore waters. Since then, the number of
cetacean populations and species being studied in the region has increased
steadily. Cetacean distribution and habitat needs are becoming increasingly well
known and certainly well enough known that species such as short-beaked
common, Atlantic white-sided and Risso’s dolphins, among others, should be
able to have their habitats protected as well.
There is one national cetacean sanctuary, located in the national waters of
Ireland, but to date it has largely been a token designation and requires
additional cetacean protection measures to achieve its potential (see Case Study
7 on p188).
The Northeast Atlantic Marine Region has four large marine ecosystems
that have been identified: North Sea, Celtic-Biscay Shelf, Iberian Coastal and
Faroe Plateau. The region covers the waters of the eastern North Atlantic, but
not including the Norwegian–Greenland Sea or the inland Baltic Sea and
Mediterranean Sea. Politically, it includes the waters of nine countries from
Denmark, the UK and Ireland in the north to Spain and Portugal in the south,
including the two Portuguese oceanic territories of Madeira and the Azores
(see Table 5.1 on p89).
The oceanography of the region is dominated by the Gulf Stream, and its
eastern extension, the North Atlantic Drift, which brings warm water to the
more northerly latitudes of Europe, before returning in a clockwise gyre. As
well, an infusion of even warmer, saltier water pours into the North Atlantic
from the Mediterranean. This warm water flows north and when it encounters
cold Arctic winds in winter, cools rapidly and sinks, forming a large part of the
cold deep waters of the North and South Atlantic. These two large-scale water
movements are responsible for the dynamic nature of the North Atlantic and