Western Gray Whale Advisory Panel (WGWAP) Archive

IUCN’s Western Gray Whale Panels, 2004-2022

The gray whales (Eschrichtius robustus) that summer in the western North Pacific, mainly off northeastern Sakhalin Island and the southeastern coast of Kamchatka, Russia are regarded as a separate subpopulation. In 2016, the number of reproductive females was estimated to be only between 51 and 72. The subpopulation was assessed on the IUCN Red List as Critically Endangered in 2000 and 2008, then downlisted to Endangered in 2018 (Cooke et al., 2018).

In September 2004, IUCN convened an independent scientific review panel with a mandate to (i) assess potential threats to western gray whales (specifically, the whales that use feeding areas off Sakhalin Island) from an offshore oil and gas development project called Sakhalin-II Phase 2 and (ii) evaluate and advise on mitigation measures proposed by the project operator, Sakhalin Energy Investment Company (SEIC). Thus began a 17-year oversight program involving a series of IUCN-convened panels that included cetacean biologists, benthic ecologists, bioacousticians, geneticists, marine engineers, oil spill specialists, statisticians and veterinarians from the Russian Federation, Canada, Germany, Sweden, Ireland, the United Kingdom and the United States. In October 2005, IUCN and SEIC agreed to establish a Western Gray Whale Advisory Panel (WGWAP), which met for the first time in November the following year.

Normally, the full panel would meet twice each year to review industry-sponsored and independent research and to evaluate the monitoring and mitigation programs implemented by SEIC and other companies. In addition, the panel established technical task forces to consider particular topics in depth, especially the impacts of noise-generating activities such as seismic surveys, pile driving and offshore construction. Other WGWAP task forces addressed photo-identification methods, oil spill prevention and response, cumulative effects, new technologies and environmental monitoring. Population analyses based on long-term field data collected by an independent team of scientists were carried out annually on the panel’s behalf by Justin Cooke, a longtime Cetacean Specialist Group (CSG) member.

Besides panel meeting reports, task force reports and several peer-reviewed publications, the gray whale panels issued open letters to Russian government agencies, statements of concern to stakeholders and more than 600 formal recommendations directed primarily at offshore oil and gas companies but also at regulatory authorities in Russia.

The final meeting of the WGWAP took place in Gland, Switzerland in November 2021. Although the report of that meeting was finalized in January 2022, it was never released and posted online. In fact, immediately following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the entire body of work by the gray whale panels and task forces since 2004 was removed from the IUCN website and is no longer publicly available there.

A large portion of the most important materials generated by the WGWAP is posted and archived here, and we hope that more can be added in time¹. Meanwhile, attention is drawn particularly to the WGWAP Final Statement that was submitted to the International Whaling Commission’s Scientific Committee in April 2022.

¹The CSG is deeply indebted to DJ Shubert of the Animal Welfare Institute for enabling a large proportion of the IUCN panel-related material to be recovered and shared.