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

xx Marine Protected Areas for Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises
Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS) has a role to play
in the protection of habitat on the high seas. The world’s nations must come
together with foresight and imagination to create a comprehensive network of
precedent-breaking MPAs on the new frontier of the high seas.
Our inclusion of the widest range of MPAs in this book means neither that
we seek nor that we approve of all types of supposed habitat protection. In
fact, we believe that MPAs in most of the areas covered in this volume have a
long way to go before they can meet the habitat needs of cetaceans and other
marine biota, as well as the needs of the community stakeholders, and be called
an effective contribution toward ecosystem-based management. But we
recognize that many communities, nations and regions have been grappling
with the idea of MPA conservation of one kind or another over the past few
years, with greater or lesser success. And the best thing that we can do now is
to start with what exists, and what has already been proposed, to build upon for
the future.
Every proposed or existing MPA represents a work in progress. Our goal is
to encourage each MPA to continue to improve, to identify critical habitat and
to extend habitat conservation for cetaceans and the entire ecosystem, to learn
from other areas’ mistakes and successes, and to utilize new studies, legal
protections, conventions, policies and directives as they become available.
The accounts of the MPAs in this book are changing even as this book goes
to press. We plan to keep things up to date through the WDCS website
(www.cetaceanhabitat.org) as new developments arise. We invite you to join us
to help devise and refine strategies to help with marine conservation at the local
as well as the international level. What is our ultimate goal? To have a world in
which we can share our space – our marine habitat – with these long-lived,
social mammals, animals of awesome size and complex behaviour, subjects of
historical fascination and persistent mystery, animals that we are only beginning
to understand – the whales, dolphins and porpoises.
Erich Hoyt
North Berwick
Scotland
August 2004